2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Art therapy is a wonderful way of switching, psychological relief, and receiving positive creative energy into your life. Art therapy is good both individually and in groups
Art therapy allows you to release accumulated emotions without unnecessary shocks in the most environmentally beneficial way
- I have completely ceased to enjoy life. I do not like New Year's holidays. Solid expenses and no pleasure,”sighs the young, dark-haired client. For me she is young, she is only 32, and already in her eyes she is tired. The wrinkles around the lips betray sadness and sorrow.
- Why do you think about expenses? After spending money on gifts for relatives, you give them a holiday. They are pleased - you are pleased. Is not it?
- On the one hand, it seems so, but it does not bring joy.
- What do you feel looking at the New Year's bustle?
- I'm thinking about why all this is needed. If the holiday is over, but the gray life remains. There are not enough words to express it all.
“Then no words are needed, just draw what you feel,” I suggest.
- Yes, I do not know how to draw.
- We don't have an art school here. We do not draw pictures here, but draw states, sensations, emotions. You see, in these drawings there is not even a hint of anything that looks like objects or people. It's pretty simple …
She hesitantly takes a pen with black paste and, closing her eyes, draws lines left and right, up and down, some kind of ornate lines. A small square, similar to woven from lines, turned out to be somewhere below, small in accordance with the album sheet.
- I thought that I would not succeed. It seemed to me that I had already painted the entire sheet.
Then, with an unsure hand with colored pencils, my client begins to color in the drawing. Cells of black, gray, red, brown color soon fill a small square in the middle of a huge white landscape field. The combination of colors is "heavy", dark. These colors alone can suggest what emotions the young woman sitting in front of me is experiencing at the moment.
She draws and on her face so many emotions pass, then frowns, then smiles modestly, then throws a pencil with assurances that "that's enough."
- I felt better, and I was very tired - after a while the client says.
Art therapy sessions - spontaneous and unpredictable, you never know how a client will react to an offer to draw. Some clients readily take pencils in their hands, others will argue for a long time and ardently that they do not know how to draw, that this is a matter for children, that they are not small. They are solid adults and they would be better off with the tests they gave or just asked a bunch of questions while they were lying on the couch. “Well, you should know about Freud, right? Why are you making me draw here?"
Some people are afraid of art therapy, because a person, unwittingly, can tell much more about himself in a drawing than in words. If the flow of words can be somehow controlled, then the drawing is a spontaneous process, and is not given to correction. Drawing a person, he opens, his controlling left logical hemisphere in this pile of cells of a fractal drawing does not see any logic, does not see anything that could be "hooked", and therefore the right hemisphere is happy to "come off" pouring everything that is on the paper inside.
It is this removal of some control that makes art therapy such an effective technique for dealing with the difficulties of clients and that is why it allows us to touch not only what we are aware of, but also to our unconscious, which reliably keeps many secrets, riddles and unresolved inner conflicts.
Art therapy (or art therapy) - for the first time this term was introduced in 1938 by the English artist Adrian Hill, who was treated in a military hospital after being wounded. He noticed how creativity helps to distract from suffering, later, he developed his theory to a completely equivalent method, working with patients with tuberculosis.
A person is quite capable, using such resources of his body, which he himself does not even suspect, to self-help. No wonder art therapy has found its application as an important auxiliary tool in the treatment of both mental and somatic diseases.
The uniqueness of this method is that it is both diagnostic and corrective. That is, art therapy allows you to “see” where the cause of difficulties can be hidden and it starts to help right away just from the fact that you are doing it. She herself has a powerful healing mechanism.
The range of application of art-patience is very wide and best of all has taken root outside of medical institutions. In psychological practice, in my opinion, it is the most valuable in that it allows a person to study one or more different methods of art therapy once and use it again and again, so to speak, at home, together with his children and relatives.
In medicine, he is good at working with neuroses, for the treatment of somatic diseases (children, adults, up to cancer).
Art therapy is a wonderful way to switch, psychologically unload, and receive positive creative energy into your life.
The art therapy method is good both individually and in groups.
It is a great help when it comes to people who want to explore their inner world, reveal their creative potential, and choose their type of activity. He is good for those who want to understand why they are so unlucky, where his difficulties in communicating with people come from. He is useful for the extremely humble and laconic. It helps to open up to people who are accustomed to always "keeping themselves in hand", to control their thoughts and words, because constant control is impossible and very even harmful to the psyche. Art therapy allows you to release accumulated emotions without unnecessary shocks in the most environmentally beneficial way.
The fact is that large and effective psychological work most often takes place with the help of art therapy non-verbally (without words). Words cannot, and should not, convey the full range of a person's emotions. The inner world of a person communicates with the world in a completely different way, through drawings, colors, smells, pleasant-unpleasant, good-bad, joyful-sad.
The most important information about a person's condition lies in his drawings, plasticine or clay figurines. The latter are still largely inferior to drawing.
The interpretation of the drawing is of great importance. It is not so much the quality of execution that is very important, but the location, the thickness of the lines, the choice of color, the choice of the plot, etc. Both the specialist and the client himself can interpret the drawing, because he knows better what exactly this or that given image, color, plot of the drawing means for him, he himself knows what feelings he had during his work.
During the session, the emotional background of a person changes in rather wide ranges: from joy to sadness, from admiration to hatred. It happens that in the first drawings strong emotions of anger, fear, guilt were shown, and in the subsequent ones, the tension goes away and the tones become pastel, soft, less intense, etc.
The habit of living according to the assessments of others is instilled in us at school. There we were assessed on a five-point system for the ability to read, count, draw. This value judgment stays with us for life, we continue to value ourselves and others. Assessment: “I don’t want to draw because I don’t know how” is very harmful for art therapy.
A person is afraid of his imperfection, and in art therapy, I declare to you as a former teacher of drawing, the ability to know how to draw certain objects, the correct combination of certain colors simply interferes. This knowledge does not allow the artistically gifted person to fully reveal himself. For such people, I created a slightly different method of art therapy, but more on that later.
For all those who do not know how to draw, art therapy is an opportunity to make the most of the methods of art therapy, it is in the “inability”, in the “non-mastery” of the technique of drawing or painting that is the main highlight. The perfection of the lines and the combination of colors are just not important here, everything is possible here, freely and easily surrender to the magic of color and lines.
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