Drawing As A Form Of Knowing Oneself Through The Body

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-12 20:57

The body is the vessel in which the soul lives,

so let external problems remain outside.

Provide Purity of Thought

- a crystal clear container for the soul.

If it hurts, draw:

Spastic pains - spirals;

Aching pains - strokes;

Pulling pains - cones and pyramids;

· Sharp pains - circles.

When pain appears, create a question drawing " Why does it hurt? ". After all, if we have created a disease for ourselves, then we also have the opportunity to find the necessary medicine.

I will give several examples of the work of an art therapist psychologist with bodily manifestations of mental states, their transformation in drawing techniques.

Quite often, different types of mental stress are manifested through bodily response, which makes it possible for a person to be filled and feel his psychological components in a form that is convenient and familiar to him.

It is much more convenient to feel your processes in a bodily form than to work through them through emotions, understanding, awareness, reacting in new forms of reality. This is how psychosomatic states of different etiology become part of the composition in the consulting practice of specialists in psychological support.

Let's try to comprehensively approach the process of relieving stress through forms of creative self-expression as the main means of psychoprophylaxis of somatic response

1. Search for the causes of stress

Provide the client with all possible means of creative self-expression and invite him to create a menu of factors that cause psychosomatic stress. Let these phenomena crystallize in the form of art products through abstract and, perhaps, insufficiently conscious images. Divide them into simple and complex, understandable and incomprehensible, familiar and new, friends and foes. In the process of analysis, let the client independently determine the level of significance or insignificance in order to include the response of his body to them.

2. The choice of the main destroyer

Try to identify with the client what is causing the psychosomatic state. This can be done quite simply through a series of drawings on the theme "Everything in my body that is related to the state." Simple spontaneous drawings provide visual aids that inform about the embeddedness of the problem in the body. Using the associative method, find what connects the drawing and bodily manifestations. Using the analysis of associations, form a logical model of personal understanding of the connection between the body and the processes of living the problem.

3. Search for a way out of the maze

The next important task required for successful accompaniment is finding ways to relieve bodily tension through the means of creative self-healing. So, first, invite the client to play with color, which will help remove the tension associated with the situation or problem from the maze of corporeality. Let, in the process of interacting with color, the client captures and pronounces all the thoughts and feelings that come to mind. Further actions are a search for mechanisms:

- what can I do;

- what I can feel;

- what I can accept, realize, etc.

These will be new opportunities.

4. On the way

The continuation of the work is the motivational preparation of the client and the focus on the desire to change something in the bodily state, the awareness of the need to get rid of or minimize psychosomatic manifestations. So the drawing-motive for changes will be a good visual form of the inner picture, which will clearly show the client the level of his readiness for healing.