Art Therapy

Today’s session has been focused on art therapy and how you can use art to emotionally engaged, communicate and as a form of therapy especially with children and adolescents. We have done a simple exercise that, Avril, our lecturer, uses herself with her clients. We drew a sun, a moon, a tree and something we liked. The image of all our drawings is below. We then discussed how different they all were and how are minds see things in different lights.

 

 

 

The profession started in the 1940's and has developed since then mainly working with children who have suffered from trauma, psychological problems or disabilities. The reason art therapy is recommended for children is because sometimes undergoing verbal therapy can re-traumatise children and further the damage. Children respond so well to art therapy because they sometimes don’t understand or know how to verbally address problems making it easier to draw their feelings.

A child or adolescent doesn’t always express their feeling straight away so a number of sessions would be required. For instance, Avril, told us about an situation she came across when she was having an art therapy session with a group of young offenders. She ask the group to draw something they didn’t like and he drew a fish, he then told her he didn’t like fish in general which to anyone is an interesting statement. After another session he told Avril that he didn’t like fish because his Dad always used to go fishing and not take him.

 

 

 

 

 

These sessions helped that boy address what he didn’t like, he may never have addressed this verbally and this is what I find interesting with Art therapy. After this lecture I feelI really want to look into doing art therapy as a profession and looking into it with more depth.