About Amanda Helton | Writer, Therapist & Educator

Writer · Therapist · Educator · Public Scholar

I'm Amanda Helton, a writer, Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, sex educator, and public scholar interested in the spaces where story, identity, culture, and relational life intersect.

All Essay Archive

My work has never followed a particularly straight line. Before becoming a therapist, I worked across art history, museums, arts education, digital strategy, and accessibility. I later trained as a sex educator and entered the counseling field. These experiences may look like separate chapters on paper, but they continue to inform one another.

Across these disciplines, I keep returning to the same questions:

Who gets to tell the story?

Who gets believed?

What makes one interpretation seem natural and another deviant?

What happens when the story we've inherited no longer explains our lives?

These questions are at the heart of Between Stories, my interdisciplinary publication exploring mental health, sexuality, identity, technology, culture, institutions, and the systems of power that shape our lives.

A Nonlinear Path

My academic background includes graduate study in art history and clinical mental health counseling, alongside interdisciplinary interests in sociology, cultural studies, and the social construction of knowledge. My professional experience spans museum and arts education, digital strategy, accessibility, sex education, and psychotherapy.

Each field has given me a different way to examine how people and societies make meaning.

Art history taught me to look closely at images, symbols, archives, and the cultural conditions through which meaning is produced. Museum work sharpened my attention to representation, institutional authority, and whose histories become part of the public record. Digital strategy and accessibility drew my attention to technology, systems, design, and the ways supposedly neutral structures can include some people while excluding others.

Sex education brought questions of sexuality, embodiment, consent, shame, desire, and social norms into the foreground. Psychotherapy offered many other perspectives on how people understand themselves within relationships, personal histories, and systems larger than themselves.

I don't see these as disconnected areas of expertise. They offer different vantage points on the same larger question: How do people come to understand themselves, and what becomes possible when the stories shaping that understanding change?

My Clinical Work

I am an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist in California, offering online therapy grounded in Relational-Cultural Therapy, Feminist Therapy, and Liberation Psychology.

My clinical perspective is informed by commitments to LGBTQIA2+ communities, neurodiversity-affirming practice, trauma-informed care, and non-pathologizing approaches to human difference. I am interested in how personal experiences take shape within relationships, cultural expectations, and broader social systems.

What we experience as an individual problem often has a history. The language available to us for understanding ourselves is shaped by culture. And the stories we tell about who we are are often negotiated within relationships and institutions that have their own ideas about who we are supposed to be.

Clinical work has therefore influenced not only how I practice, but also how I think about mental health, identity, power, and the narratives through which people make sense of their lives.

Between Stories, however, is not a therapy practice website or a substitute for mental health care. It is where I follow these questions beyond the therapy room, into the histories, cultural narratives, institutions, and collective experiences that shape how we understand ourselves and one another.

I am also an EDSE Certified Sex Educator, with a longstanding interest in sexuality education and its intersections with culture, identity, and power.

My work in sex education has shaped my interest in how societies teach us what bodies, relationships, desires, identities, and forms of intimacy are supposed to look like—and what happens to people whose experiences fall outside those scripts.

I'm particularly interested in the stories we inherit about desire, gender, relationships, shame, consent, and legitimacy. These narratives can influence how we understand ourselves, how we relate to other people, and what we believe we're allowed to want.

Questioning those narratives can create room for more expansive understandings of sexuality, intimacy, identity, and relational life.

About Between Stories

Between Stories is a space for examining the stories we inherit, the systems that sustain them, and what becomes possible when those stories begin to change.

The stories we tell about ourselves are never entirely our own. They are shaped by families, communities, institutions, diagnoses, histories, technologies, cultural expectations, and systems of power. Some help us make meaning and find connection. Others constrain what we can imagine about ourselves and one another.

I'm interested in what happens in the space between those stories: when an inherited explanation no longer fits; when an institution's account of an event conflicts with the experiences of the people who lived it; when a diagnosis becomes either a useful framework or a limiting identity; or when cultural narratives about sexuality, gender, work, mental health, and relationships begin to come apart.

Between Stories explores these moments of tension, uncertainty, and possibility through interdisciplinary essays, cultural criticism, historical inquiry, and reflections on the relationship between individual experience and collective life.

What I Write About

The subjects vary, but the questions tend to return.

Mental health and psychotherapy: The histories, assumptions, and cultural frameworks embedded in how we understand distress, diagnosis, treatment, and care.
Neurodiversity, disability, and identity: The narratives that shape our understanding of human difference, normality, belonging, and the conditions in which people can thrive.
Technology and society: How emerging technologies reshape our ideas about relationships, intimacy, expertise, labor, and what it means to care.
Sexuality, gender, and relationships: The social narratives that shape what we understand as normal, desirable, healthy, or possible.
Labor, institutions, and power: How organizations respond to dissent, how responsibility gets distributed, whose knowledge is recognized, and what happens when institutions protect themselves rather than learn.
Art, history, culture, and representation: The images, archives, public narratives, and historical frameworks through which societies decide what is remembered, what is forgotten, and whose stories become legible.

These subjects overlap. That overlap is part of the point.

A question about mental health may also be a question about disability, labor, technology, or culture. A question about sexuality may also be a question about history and power. A question about an institution may ultimately be a question about relationships, recognition, and whose account of reality gets to prevail.

I'm interested in writing that can move between theory and lived experience, clinical insight and cultural critique, individual experience and collective history without collapsing one into the other.

Why Between Stories?

There is a particular kind of uncertainty that exists between one story and another.

The old explanation may no longer make sense, but the new one has not yet taken shape. A familiar identity may begin to feel too small. A relationship may require a different language. An institution may reveal itself to be something other than what it claimed to be.

That space can be uncomfortable. It can also be generative.

For me, between stories names the possibility of questioning what has been presented as inevitable and making room for something more complex, more honest, or more liberatory.

This is not a space devoted to tidy answers. It is a space for inquiry: following connections, examining assumptions, and staying with questions long enough to discover where they lead.

Sometimes the work is finding a name for something we haven't known how to describe. Sometimes it is discovering that the old name was never adequate in the first place.

A Relational and Critical Lens

I approach these questions from a background in psychotherapy, sex education, art history, museum practice, accessibility, and digital strategy, alongside an interest in sociology and cultural analysis.

I believe context matters. Individual experiences do not exist independently of relationships, material circumstances, culture, history, or the institutions people encounter. Likewise, institutions are not abstract structures. They are created and maintained through human relationships, decisions, narratives, and assumptions about whose experiences matter.

I am interested in writing that holds both levels in view: the intimate and the structural, the personal and the political, the stories people tell about their lives and the systems that shape which stories become possible.

Where I Stand

Between Stories is grounded in commitments to justice, healing, and collective liberation.

I write from within a particular political and historical moment, and I don't believe meaningful inquiry requires pretending to stand outside of it. Transparency about our positions is part of intellectual and relational integrity.

I stand in solidarity with Palestine and with people oppressed by Empire globally.

That commitment is inseparable from the questions explored here: whose stories are believed, whose suffering is recognized, whose knowledge is treated as legitimate, and whose humanity is made conditional.

The stories we inherit are not neutral. Neither are the systems that maintain them.

Between Stories is an invitation to look more closely at both.

Continue Exploring

If you're interested in the intersections of mental health, sexuality, neurodiversity, identity, culture, technology, and social power, I invite you to explore the essays and reflections published on Between Stories.

The goal isn't to replace one unquestioned story with another. It's to make room for more thoughtful questions, more complex understandings, and possibilities that the stories we've inherited may have made difficult to imagine.

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