This is a beautiful video about my supervisor Peta Schur’s work in Expressive Arts Therapy
Drawing by R. age 8. Seymour Elementary
with refugee children in the Surrey school district. It highlights the potential for art in working with and healing trauma.
By far the most useful therapy technique I have come across is the Two-Selves (also called the two-chair) technique.
Time and again in therapy I have observed how a person intends to change a behaviour that no longer serves them, only to find that another part of themselves has a totally different idea and refuses to go along with the changes – it refuses to be controlled, disciplined, or to cooperate with what the person believes they want.
I got a beautiful press release for my book!
Expressive Arts Therapy: Compelling New Book of Essays Inspires Readers to Express Uniqueness & Find Healing through Art.
Last week, as part of the East Vancouver Culture Crawl, I was invited to give a talk about Outsider Art.
The place that invited me to do this talk is The Kettle Society, an organization that has the mandate to serve people with a mental health diagnosis. When I was an Expressive Arts therapy student, did one of my practicums at The Kettle, and I loved it.
I have always been an artist. When I was 4 years old my father bought me a “finger painting” set, and, for about a year, me and my brother painted every night.
This experience of painting so freely became my inspiration for going to art school, and for about 20 years I was an abstract painter.
I have been away for most of the summer, and while being in Mexico for an extended period is nothing new, getting married while in Mexico was definitely new.
Nobody thought I would get married one day. Not even me! I actively and vocally disagreed with the concept of marriage, and everyone knew how I felt.
So, when I decided to “marry” my boyfriend, I knew that something had to be different.
I have read many interesting books by the author and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, and one of my favorites is a book I got as a graduation present from a friend who is also an art therapist: “The Gift of Therapy, an open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients”.
This is a follow up from last week’s post, “talking to the image”.
After the image of the lotus had spoken, the blue circles in the image talked. The circles revealed themselves as pain.
In Expressive Arts therapy, it’s a common practice to talk to the images we create and it’s also a practice to listen to the images talk through us. The images, having been created in the intuitive right-brain, seem to express a point of view that often surprises the intellectual left brain.
Following on from my last post on the “princess” archetype…
The Gestalt idea that all dream characters are parts of the dreamer and could be analyzed as such correlates well with the Jungian idea of the ancient archetypes and deeper personality integration.