Art Therapy
Art therapy is a way of using the creative process (a fancy way of saying ‘making stuff’) to support greater self-understanding and wellbeing.
It’s a great way to gain new and often unexpected insight, experience the power of imagination as a healing tool, explore emotions in new ways, cope with stress, support self esteem and develop new coping skills… and it’s pretty fun.
And (this is important) you don’t need to see yourself as creative, or know how to draw to gain a lot of benefit from it! You have full permission (and encouragement) to make images that aren’t ‘pretty’ - often our internal struggles are not pretty! And that is so okay and welcome.
The point of art therapy isn’t to create a masterpiece that will hang in the National Gallery, it’s to express externally some of what you’re feeling inside, so it’s visible in front of you and you can interact with it in new ways.
Art therapy can be done over Zoom or in person (if you choose Zoom I’ll give you a list of things that would be useful to have with you to play with, and it’s possible I can send you a care package of delights to play with), and these sessions tend to be a little longer so we have more time to get the most from the creative processes we’ll explore.
Some of the things we might explore include:
Painting & drawing
Collage
Doodling
Making mandalas
Colouring in
Working with clay
Making 3D objects
Creating masks
Finger painting
Guided visualisation
Storytelling
Ritual
Exploring different art materials
Working with symbols
Working with dreams
And many more! The sky’s the limit.
For more info on art therapy, you might like to check out these blog posts:
We are made of stories. Who we think we are, our histories that have led us to come to know ourselves. The values that we live by. It's all stories.
I'm creative. I'm a victim of this circumstance or that one. I'm someone who hates the cold.
Because I hold these stories about myself, they influence my actions in various ways.
Because I tell the story of hating the cold, I live in the tropics and refuse to go south in the winter.
What if I tried on the story of being an Antarctic explorer? Perhaps I'd buy some warmer clothes and go south for the winter, treat it like an expedition into the unknown… it'd be a very different experience of life from my current one.