Art Therapy
What Is Art Therapy?
Art Therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses creative techniques such as drawing, painting, collage, or sculpting to help clients express themselves. Art therapists work alongside each client to determine what best serve the client’s therapeutic goals. In sessions, clients are invited to use a wide variety of art materials and visual mediums for self-expression. By making the invisible (emotions, thoughts, actions, memories) visible, we can make room for feelings and gain new perspectives and insights about our lives. The artwork can be used as a container for memories and stories/narratives that may reveal messages and beliefs from the unconscious mind. With the guidance of an art therapist, clients can explore and interpret the psychological and emotional undertones in their art. The nonverbal messages, symbols, colours, and metaphors often found in these art forms, can give us more information to work with, allowing us to better understand our feelings and behaviors, which can allow us to further explore and resolve deeper problems.
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Not at all! You don’t need to have any experience or artistic talent in order to benefit from art therapy. The only thing you need is the willingness to explore your creative side. The focus on art therapy is the process of creating, not the product.
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No! We invite clients from all ages to get in touch with their creative side. Creativity is within us all.
Remember scribbling and drawing pictures on the floor when we were children? Many of us stopped along the way due to fear of judgment or feel the lost of permission to have fun and play. Here we can regain that part of ourselves.
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Art therapy is facilitated by an art therapist, takes place in a safe and confidential space, and involves a therapeutic relationship. The main goal of art therapy is self-expression instead of learning to make art in a certain way. There is no right or wrong way to make art in our sessions.
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We don’t have to if you don’t want to. As a trained psychotherapist, I am here to support you in a variety of ways. This can look very different person to person and session to session depending on your needs and how you feel each time. However, art is magical and can help take us out of the “thinking” realm (often what we are using when we talk) and bring us back into the “feeling” realm by using our body.
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Research shows that when we experience trauma, the part of the brain that is responsible for speech and language shuts down. This makes it difficult to put words to traumatic experiences. Creative expression promotes holistic wellbeing and reminds us of our inherent power. Art therapy gives us an opportunity to use symbols, metaphors, and visual imagery; which bypasses the language centre of the brain. Once we process through visuals, it opens the gateway for verbal processing.