How therapeutic arts can support your mental health and wellbeing
What is art therapy and how does it actually work? Let’s start by busting some myths…
Myth 1: You need to be an artist or at least good at art.
FALSE. It doesn’t matter what your art looks like, and you don’t need to be a skilled painter or be able to draw. What matters is the process of creative exploration, and how your art makes you feel. Everyone is creative and can express themselves creatively.
Myth 2: My adult coloring book is art therapy
FALSE. Your coloring book might be relaxing and is a great way to self-soothe, but it’s not art therapy. Art therapy is the therapeutic use of creating art with a clinically trained therapist.
Myth 3: It’s just arts and crafts.
FALSE. We’re not art teachers. Art Therapists are clinicians who are trained to a masters level. Our work is rooted in psychoanalysis, humanistic therapies, and neuroscience. We integrate key models such as a theory of mind, theory of change, theory of child development and theory of mental health and ill-health.
What does it mean to be human?
To understand what art therapy is and how it works, we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to be human? (invitation to pause and ponder this question before you continue reading)
We are deeply feeling and social beings.
We need to feel loved, seen, heard, understood.
We need to feel like we are connected and belong to each other.
We need to feel to heal.
There are many reasons why people experience mental health challenges. Some reasons are related to childhood events, or traumatic experiences, yet for the majority of us, we struggle with managing our day-to-day mental health and wellbeing because we haven’t been taught how to separate our thinking mind from our emotions, nor have we been taught how to truly feel and understand our emotions. Some of us are able to name an emotion - I feel sad, or angry, or happy, yet our language is often limited and these words don’t convey the depth of an experience.
Why are the arts so powerful?
The arts (image-making, sculptures, music, movement, poetry, sandtrays and puppets) are such powerful mediums, because art is a wordless story. You can tell someone you feel a bit lost, yet an image of you alone, barely keeping your head above water in an icy, grey and cold sea literally paints an emotionally moving picture of how you’re experiencing life. The arts show us a deeper truth of your reality and inner world (thoughts and feelings), and help you to safely feel, communicate, process and regulate the six core emotions of fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise and joy. These emotions are forms of energy that live inside your body, and reveal themselves as unconscious beliefs that influence how you engage with the world.
In the simplest way possible, the arts help you to understand yourself; what you think about yourself, others and the world, how you feel, how this impacts how you behave, how you relate to other people and whether these thoughts, feelings and behaviours are healthy or unhealthy. The more awareness you have about yourself, your lived experiences, why you are who you are and how you show up in life, the more you’re able to make healthy changes in your ways of being, thinking, feeling, doing, and being-with others, that support you to thrive and live your potential.
The actual process of making art activates your right-brain, which governs creativity. This stimulates your imagination and creates new perspectives, possibilities and ways of looking at your life, as opposed to habitual ways of engaging with the world.
What are the benefits of therapeutic arts?
Strengthens your emotional intelligence and ability to communicate your inner thoughts and feelings
Supports the development of neural pathways in your brain that enable you to feel calm, focus, learn and process information
Improves your psychological stability and quality of life
Reduces cognitive avoidance where you become less aware of what you are thinking and doing when experiencing psychological and emotional distress
Increases your awareness of underlying issues that have been hidden, and patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving
Improves your intuition and trust in your own body (how you are feeling and what it means)
Increases your self-esteem, self-acceptance and ability to self-actualise
Activates your creativity, imagination and sense of possibility
Improves critical thinking, problem solving and innovation
Are you feeling curious to explore your emotions through the arts?
Here’s a simple exercise you can do in less than an hour to express your core emotions. All you need is a pen and paper.
Divide your paper into 8 equal rectangles
Add the following headings to each rectangle: anger, joy, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, a familiar feeling and how I’d like to feel
Spend 5 minutes exploring what each of these emotions look like using lines, curves, squiggles, shapes and shading. Try to create in an abstract way rather than drawing a picture of something that makes you feel angry or joyful.
In the last two rectangles, express a state of mind that feels familiar, e.g. anxious or overwhelmed, and express how you’d like to feel instead.
Spend a few moments reflecting on your images, perhaps noticing the differences and similarities between them, and ask yourself what is the one thing you could do today to support you to feel like the last rectangle you created?