Expressive Arts Therapy is founded on the premise that everyone is capable of making meaningful art and that the process and/or product is always helpful to the client. Therefore, we embody a low skill, high sensitivity approach. We are not technique oriented, but rather gear all our groups and sessions so that any person, regardless of their artistic talent or previous experience, can enter into the process. We guide the client into their senses and their sensitivity to create work. We look together observantly at what has been created without critique or judgment. There can often be educational or instructional components to the art making that are naturally imbedded within the groups.
We also hold that the client is the expert of their art and therefore will let meaning emerge through a reflective process that assists the client in discovering their own resources. We call this Aesthetic Analysis, which gives careful attention to what is actually there on the page, in the dance or song and allows for the whole experience to touch them. We do not codify images, colors, movements to any external meaning other than the client’s own experience.
We work in the arts modalities such as: music, theatre, writing, visual arts, storytelling, nature, dance/movement and will often incorporate more than one modality into a session. Intermodal refers to our ability to shift into different art making modalities to bring more of the senses into play, to receive more information about an image, and or to facilitate where the images are leading the client. The therapist is knowledgeable in the language of all these art forms and how they interrelate.
We are grounded in theories from philosophy, sociology, education, ecopsycology, and anthropology as well as psychology that acknowledge arts is the medicine. In expressive arts we practice that the making and finding what arrives with reflection is a healing act.
Creating art with sensitive awareness is a similar process as creating our lives. Both life and art require improvisational skills, resilience, awareness of beauty and the necessary hands on experience of shaping from materials at hand.