Art Therapy
Using creativity as a tool to explore and map our inner worlds
Art therapy with creative cartographers who are adults
Working creatively in art therapy is like being a creative cartographer. Whilst traditionally cartographers map the outer world, creative cartographers map inner worlds. To do this, they listen inwardly, to create something that comes from within. What they create can be thought of as a map: a representation of an inner place.
We all have rich and diverse inner terrain that merits our awareness and presence. This makes creative cartography important and exciting work. However, the work can also feel daunting. Reassuringly, all we need to do is take one step at a time, learning to listen to ourselves and finding our own sense of direction along the way.
So, how do we start? In an art therapy session, we start where you are. Our lives are rich with sensations, feelings, metaphors and imagery. With an open invitation to create anything you want to from the materials in my art studio, all these aspects of our experiences can find their way into your creative work and become doorways to places you want to explore.
You might choose to create with clay, collage materials, natural materials, found-objects, fibres, fabrics or painting and drawing materials. I will help you choose the materials you are drawn to and create something from you. Art therapy is different from art making in other settings. In art therapy, we orientate inwardly, to our own unique creativity, rather than focusing on external ideas (such as someone else’s idea of artistic skill for example).
As you work creatively to explore your world, I will travel alongside you, moved by my belief in you. Along the way, I hope to help you reach previously uncharted places. As a participant in creative therapies, I have persoanlly experienced safe therapeutic relationships that have enabled me to be more open and curious about myself. I have put this more open and curious place on my map, and I offer the feeling of this place back to you, as you explore.
As we travel, we will look for new places that hold the potential for you to make more deliberate and meaningful decisions. These places of space are important for us to all find, places where we stand in our own balance, places where we decide how to step next. Over time, as you creatively chart more and more inner places, you will start to build up the makings of our own atlas. With your maps in hand (atlas in the making), you may start to travel in life with increasing ease and sense of direction.
Art therapy with creative cartographers who are children and adolescents
While we all have the capacity to become creative cartographers, young people do this naturally. For young people, creativity and creative play are natural ways to explore and learn about themselves and the world they live in. Whist talk therapies can feel strange to many young people, creative approaches can feel comfortable and safe.
I work with children from 8 years of age through to adolescence using a ‘child-centered’ and ‘non-directive’ approach. This means the young person steers the therapeutic process.
With an attentive and caring attitude, I create the conditions for young people to express themselves. With calm presence, I make space for their expressions, creating the opportunity for the processes they are engaged in to move and change.
Inherently, children and young people use creativity as a tool to express themselves, process their experiences, heal from traumatic experiences, learn and make meaning. In art therapy, I create the conditions for young people to utilise this natural process.