Art Therapy
ART THERAPY: WHERE CREATIVITY MEETS HEALING
What is Art Therapy?
At its core, art therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses the creative process to help individuals express and explore their feelings, resolve internal conflicts, and develop self-awareness.
It’s a way of communicating without relying solely on words, using visual and tactile means to convey the complexities of your inner life. In the hands of a licensed art therapist, art becomes a bridge to healing, providing a safe space to explore emotions and experiences that may be too difficult or painful to articulate verbally.
Art Therapy has the ability to incorporate healing processes that might involve creating and dismantling, layering and peeling, attaching and detaching, covering and uncovering, wrapping and unwrapping, smoothing and scratching, constructing and deconstructing, containing and releasing, or protecting and revealing.
One can engage with the art materials with the intention of exploring and playing or with the intention to create an image or form representative of an internal feeling, experience or symbol that expresses an important internal message.
Art + Therapy
To understand the nature of art therapy, it may be helpful to evaluate our own understandings of ‘art’ and ‘therapy’ separately and together.
In a basic way, one can define ‘art’ as involving the culmination of one’s imagination and the creative process to call into existence that which did not exist before. It is important to recognize that art can take various forms, such as that of abstracted shapes, colors and lines on a canvas, a sculpture made out of found objects and discarded items, or a drawing of a recognizable object that becomes a metaphor for various thoughts or emotions.
One might understand ‘therapy’ as a potentially healing and dynamic process that involves a supportive, trusting, non-judgmental and attentive relationship between the client and the therapist, which is based on agreed upon goals . The therapeutic process is meant to improve one’s overall functioning and sense of well-being.
When we combine these terms together, art & therapy, we encounter a therapeutic space which allows for both verbal and non-verbal forms of self-expression to be honored and valued as essential to healing and self-awareness.
