What is Arts Psychotherapy?
Arts Psychotherapy is a type of counseling which integrates creativity and the expressive arts in a safe, non-judgemental and playful therapeutic space to facilitate personal growth and healing. In arts therapy you are invited to express through visual arts, embodied movement, sound making, creative writing and the dramatic arts as a means to process experiences and encounter yourself in new ways. The arts helps to foster release, self-understanding, insight, integration and creativity as a response to trauma, relationship difficulties, grief, anxiety, transitions and other mental health concerns. In contrast to talk therapy, the integration of arts therapy’s many forms of communication can help to facilitate the dialogue between our many parts, including our embodied and emotional memory and insights.
The Benefits of Arts Therapy
Arts therapy offers the opportunity to encounter and express yourself in new ways which are able to challenge, re-establish and integrate new patterns and narratives of relating to yourself and the world around you. The use of the creative arts expands the set of resources and ways of being that are available to you, drawing upon different parts and aspects of your self which you may not access during your daily thinking and patterns of behaviour. This can provide an interruption and broaden your perspective to the ways in which you approach and think about life which no longer serve you in the present. Arts therapy offers a non-judgemental and contained space in which to play, explore and experiment with how you communicate, relate and express yourself, which can help facilitate growth in understanding, process difficulties with new perspectives, and integrate connections within yourself which may have been damaged or severed.
What is an integrative approach?
An integrative arts therapy approach draws upon both diverse psychotherapeutic theories and modalities, as well as bring a myriad of artistic and creative mediums together in order to explore the depth and breadth of the self and your context. Where as some therapists might focus on a particular framework or theory model, an integrative therapist combines and weaves many forms of theory and expressive forms together in order to create tailored, unique and dynamic therapy for their clients needs.
I have diverse experience working with different creative mediums and expressions which can be brought into therapy as ways to challenge, play with and explore potential new ways of expressing yourself, your feelings and developing self-awareness and understanding. Some of the modalities which might be brought into therapy, among others, include:
-
Visual arts
-
Sculpture & Construction
-
Dance & movement
-
Creative writing & poetry
-
Nature art
-
Voice & Sound
My personal therapeutic style incorporates a person-centred and collaborative approach with an eclectic range of psychotherapy theories and modalities in order to adapt to and explore the different aspects and parts of yourself and your life. Some of these theories include:
-
Trauma-informed therapy
-
Phenomenology (here and now)
-
Internal-family systems
-
Existential
-
Jungian
-
Gestalt
