Expressive Arts Therapy
What is it?
Expressive arts therapy is an integrative therapeutic approach that uses various forms of creative expression—such as visual arts, writing, music, movement, and drama—to help you explore your feelings, thoughts, and experiences. By shifting between artistic modalities, you allow yourself to go deeper into your creative subconscious process, revealing new layers of emotions, perspectives, and understanding.
Your innate creativity, imagination, and sense of play are incredibly powerful resources. The expressive arts therapy approach emphasizes your strengths, abilities, and resilience rather than focusing solely on problems or deficits. By encouraging you to connect with the resources that already exist within you, expressive arts therapy fosters a sense of empowerment and is a very effective tool for self-discovery, healing, growth, transformation, and so much more.
Who is it for?
Expressive Arts Therapy is for anyone looking to explore their emotions and experiences through creative expression:
Individuals seeking personal growth, self-discovery, or emotional healing
Groups, Teams & Communities looking to foster connection and communication
Children & Youth who may struggle to articulate their feelings verbally
Adults & Seniors facing life transitions, grief, trauma, or stress and/or seeking an alternative or complement to conventional talk therapy
Therapy Professionals wanting to learn creative techniques to incorporate into their practice
Expressive arts therapy is suitable for people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. No artistic experience is necessary.
How does it work?
As your expressive arts therapist, my role first and foremost is to provide a safe, supportive and non-judgemental environment where you feel comfortable exploring and expressing your creativity and emotions.
While each session is unique and does not prescribe to a rigid structure, a typical session generally starts with a brief check-in. This is an opportunity for you to settle into our space and share whatever you feel called to bring into the session. Maybe you want to explore a particular issue that feels particularly alive for you right now, or a problem that you have been working on for a while. Maybe you want to gain some clarity on a certain issue, or feel less anxious about a situation. Maybe your intention is simply to be present and open. Whatever you bring into a session is exactly what is meant to be there.
I will then offer an invitation to move into an arts-based experience, or you might naturally gravitate towards a method or material yourself. I will be alongside you the whole time and offer invitations to shift creative modalities, when it feels appropriate, to help deepen your process. We can never predict how a session will go. But generally we try to stay present, stay engaged in the arts, and give space for something to emerge that might be totally unexpected.
The end of the session is typically for reflection and discussion. This is an opportunity for you to reflect on your process and what has been created, share any insights you might have, and begin integrating the experience into your life. The focus is on the creative process rather than the end product. This is also an important time for you to ground from your experience before heading back out into the outside world.
Creative Subconscious Process
Expressive Arts Therapy engages the creative subconscious process, rather than the mind-based analytical thought and problem-solving techniques that tend to be the default mode of operating in today’s world.
Our society has certainly come a long way thanks to the human mind’s capacity for logical reasoning, rationalizing, evaluation, verbal articulation, and goal-orientation. But the flipside is that, all too often, many of us get stuck in our heads from overthinking, overanalyzing, or judgement. This can lead to analysis-paralysis, a state of overwhelm that hinders your capacity for decision-making. When you are in these kinds of mental states, you may feel stress, anxiety, or depression. You may feel stuck in your story, patterns or trauma, and struggle to see a way out. You may disconnect and not engage fully in life.
Engaging with the arts gives the mind an opportunity to take the backseat, and invites the creative subconscious to take the lead. When you are fully immersed in a creative process, your mind quiets and your attention is brought into the present moment. You are better able to access your subconscious when you are in a state of flow and mindfulness. From there, you can tap into deeper feelings and insights that may have been inaccessible through conventional analytical thinking. You are free to naturally and intuitively express emotions that may have been difficult to express verbally. New perspectives and understandings are allowed to surface, helping to break repetitive thought cycles, patterns and blockages. You can release what needs to be expressed, however it wants to be expressed, without rules or judgement. From this place, profound realizations and shifts can happen.
Expressive arts therapy is a powerful tool for personal growth, self-discovery, working through blockages, healing from trauma, and so much more. It can be very effective on its own. It can also be great alongside other forms of therapy like clinical counselling, parts work, somatic experiencing, etc.
Play
We are all born creative, playful beings. When we play, we activate our imagination; when we imagine, we open up a world of possibilities; from there, beautiful surprises can emerge. However, cultural and societal norms tend to view play as something reserved for children, stifling free-spirited playfulness as we grow out of childhood and into adulthood. When we become disconnected from our sense of play, we not only lose that sense of wonderment we all had as children; we also deprive ourselves of a powerful resource for joy, stress management, and problem-solving that exists naturally within all of us.
When working with the expressive arts, you allow yourself to reconnect with your playfulness and all its benefits, regardless of age.
There are no rules to follow.
There are no expectations.
There is no end goal.
There is no pressure to create a masterpiece.
There is no judgement.
No prior art-making experience is required.
All that is required is a willingness to explore and express your own creativity!
Want to know more?
Contact me to schedule a free 20 minute discovery call.
