valuable tool in dealing with some of the behavioural problems that have engulfed today's society.

Individual or group counselling has enjoyed a high success rate in dealing with such problems as drugs, alcohol, or shattered relationships and broken marriages.

The psychotherapist pinpoints the succession of events or personality disorders which are the root cause of these problems and, through intensive counselling sessions, many people have been brought back to lead healthy and productive lives.

But what about those people who do not turn to booze or the transitory `lift' of cocaine, in order to stifle the frustrations of daily life? Those people who lead outwardly conventional lives in the much-quoted state of "quiet desperation?'' The financier who secretly admits he would have been much happier as a landscape gardener, the construction worker who would like to exchange the building scaffold for the thrills of the circus trapeze, the secretary who knows that she is quite a bit brighter than most of the bosses she has ever worked for, or the nurse who, deep down, wishes she had never heard the word `hospital' and had gone off to drama school instead.

Pipe dreams? Not necessarily.

There is a growing awareness in psychiatric circles that many personal problems are rooted in the fact that, as we grow up, we are disconnected from our true natures. We succumb to pressures all around us that encourage conformity, we lose our sense of discovery and begin, very young, to become `people pleasers'. The results, for some people, can be devastating.

Clinical psychotherapist Ms. Dee Martin, who has just arrived in Bermuda from New York, was the founder and developer of Inner Healing Through the Arts. As a singer and the daughter of Metropolitan Opera's leading dramatic soprano, Delia Rigal, Ms. Martin has based her work on the realisation that the arts can be used as a tool to awaken the creativity that she believes is dormant in everyone.

"We need to re-acquaint ourselves with the child within, the child who had no inhibitions about expressing his feelings. We need to get back to the way we were before we were wounded, often unwittingly, by negative messages from the people around us who sapped our self-confidence,'' she explains.

Ms. Martin, who is bilingual in Spanish, and initially came to Bermuda to sing at the Inverurie Hotel and to teach voice for the Louise Jackson School of Performing Arts, was born in Argentina but lived in New York from the age of five.

As a clinical psychotherapist who has just joined the staff of Ashton Associates, Ms. Martin is launching a new weekend workshop that will use a creativity encounter programme to help re-awaken creative energy. She is quick to reassure shyer members of the public that no-one will be expected to "perform'' at the sessions.

"The arts are just one of the ways of awakening our senses, so if we move our bodies or do simple voice exercises we can open up energy centres in the body.

We have to find that tiny piece of ourselves that's been hidden. The main focus of my work is to help people to re-connect to their real nature -- the inner child that lives on inside all of us -- so the creativity encounter weekend is followed up by a course that also consists of lectures and visualisations.'' The discontent and pain that can arise from a continual denial of self, the person who never realised his dream or worse still, suppressed it, is the person who, in many cases, she says, will go on to experience discontent and pain in their future lives.

Ms. Martin also believes that however high our standard of living might be, many of us are surviving on a `cup that's half empty', focusing mainly on what is missing, or not working, and waiting for all the right answers to appear in the words and deeds of others. Most of us, she says, look to grand-sounding titles, awards and material wealth as the trappings of success -- forgetting that they are just trappings and that social success does not guarantee inner serenity.

Ms. Martin's programme is primarily designed to encourage people to change the negative patterns in their lives. "If we are in a conflicting relationship or in a job we hate, this will eventually deaden us, because you are not receiving any nourishment. If we go on living like that, we're no use to ourselves and not much use to society. This programme will assist people in confronting the fears and limiting self-concepts that hold so many of us back, or make us so miserable with our sense of failure that we turn to the drugs that will soothe and deaden the pain.'' Perhaps Dee Martin herself is a living testimony that it is possible to live life to its fullest, in that she used her natural talent as a singer, then as a teacher and eventually applied that combined knowledge to transform and develop her gifts as a psychotherapist.

As she puts it: "I want everyone to re-ignite that spirit and say `I can!' I like to think of this programme as `coaching for life'.'' The first weekend seminar will take place on Saturday and Sunday, October 3 and 4.

DEE MARTIN -- Wants to re-ignite the spirit in people.