Art Therapy
What is art therapy?
Art therapy is the therapeutic use of art making within a professional relationship between client and therapist. The art making process, and discussion and reflection on the completed art creation are both therapeutic. Approaching conflicts, traumas, and stressors through metaphors created in art making works very deeply in the healing process. Often art expressions are more adequate to express and contain emotions and meaning, than words. Problem-solving, relationship skills, self-reflection, empathy, and perspective-taking abilities can be increased through art therapy. Art therapy is powerful in effecting change, encouraging growth, and developing and supporting a sense of self and relationships.

Benefits of art therapy:

• Making art is an enjoyable natural form of expression for children and an important tool used before writing or extensive cognitive and language skills.
• Art creations can bypass censors and developmental limitations, reaching a child’s internal experience.
• The art process relaxes, reduces tension, and releases anxiety.
• Trauma is often stored in images making art therapy a useful tool to access and facilitate communication about trauma where there is a reluctance or difficulty with that expression.
• Artistic communication is more objective, detached, and less threatening, making it easier to externalize ideas, thoughts, and feelings comfortably so clients can explore the essence of their experiences and pain, gaining insight for themselves in the process.
• Art therapy helps a person integrate the right and left hemispheres of the brain as one uses the right side for image making and then the left side when verbally discussing what was made, helping in control of impulses and self-regulation of emotions.
• Art expressions more clearly duplicate the multiple layers of real-life experience happening simultaneously as opposed to language expression which follows linear rules, “This happens and then that happens.”
• Through art making a person is freer to discharge and/or channel aggression, anger, and other strong emotions in ways that are healing and safe.
• The art creation becomes an unchanging, less distorted picture of one’s experience or the therapy session and can be reviewed over time.

Children appropriate for art therapy:

• Since most children are familiar and comfortable with expressing themselves artistically, art therapy is appropriate when working therapeutically with a variety of children of various ages, difficulties, and diagnoses.
• Art therapy does not require any special talent in artistic expression.
• Art therapy can accommodate to a child’s developmental level and thus non-verbal children, hyperactive and impulsive children, and developmentally delayed or handicapped children can benefit from art therapy.
• Guarded and intellectual children can become less resistant using art.
• Children who are suffering loss can be assisted to appropriately mourn and then integrate those losses through art making.
• Through art therapy, depressed and/or withdrawn children can be helped to feel better through an increase in physical energy, assisting them in becoming more revealing, receptive, and open to help.

Art therapy in a family therapy context can assist all members in their ability to communicate with one another helping to strengthen and heal the family system. Shared pleasure in the joint experience can be reparative, helping to build family cohesion, trust, and attachment.