What is art therapy?
living well
LiAnn is an art therapist and counsellor At Living Well. She has 14 years’ experience and has lived in many countries.
What is Art Therapy?
Have you ever wondered what art therapy is or how it can be used? It's a question I get asked almost every time someone finds out that I trained to be an art therapist! Here's a brief explanation:
“The focus is not on making beautiful art”
In a nutshell, art therapy incorporates art making or guided drawing into the therapy room. However, the focus is not on making beautiful art - in fact it can be really messy and look like nothing at all! Rather, the focus is on developing a deeper experiential awareness of one's own sensory perceptions by being present in the moment. Using the art making process therapeutically can communicate and express externally what's going on internally in a way that feels safe while at the same time creating new, positive experiences & neural pathways in the brain.
“Art therapy is one of the more effective trauma treatment methods (Dr. B. Van Der Kolk), helping the nervous system soothe, calm and regulate.”
As a ‘bottom-up’ approach, art therapy is one of the more effective trauma treatment methods (Dr. B. Van Der Kolk), helping the nervous system soothe, calm and regulate. In addition, art therapy and the expressive arts more easily supports and restores healthy attachment through the areas of synchrony, attunement, grounding and engagement (Dr. C. Malchiodi).
In an art therapy session, you can expect a mixture of bottom-up (using movements and the senses) and top-down approaches (using thoughts, symbols and metaphors). This connects and integrates thinking and feeling and is especially important at the end of each session to help clients make meaning and gain insights of new perspectives that may come from their initial movements, marks and impulses.