Description
This session is the first in our series on expressive therapies. It is an overview of expressive arts and their purpose for psychotherapy and counseling. The series is meant to present therapy options for clients who need approaches beyond talk therapy; approaches that carefully build trust, safety, and a positive alliance. Dr. Preston-Dillon explains why it is difficult for clients to speak about trauma and how expressive therapies help clients represent experience they are not yet able to speak about. Through expressive therapies, clients access parts of memory and manage coping defenses to express grief and begin to heal trauma.
Just as rigorous, disciplined practices in physics and archeology require innovative thinking, immersion in the field, and pliable methods, so too with psychotherapy and counseling. Just as an archaeologist must piece together fragments to understand a lost culture, a therapist uses creative methods to help a client reconstruct and make sense of fragmented emotional experiences. As physicists seek to understand deep mysteries of the universe, a client’s immersion in expressive therapy helps both client and clinician understand the depths of the client’s experience.
The therapist must be able to think beyond the limitations of recipe-like methods to conceptualize complex human problems. They must be flexible and well-informed to innovate therapeutic responses appropriate to the client’s grief and trauma. This series emphasizes the therapist’s attitude towards creativity, comfort with flexibility and spontaneity, practice with imagination, reflection on their own immersion in expressive process, and skills with attentive heightened presence.
During the series we will present a variety of expressive therapies, examples of approaches used with children, adolescents, and adults, and essential therapist competencies. An emphasis is on the importance of a therapist’s personal experience and practice with creative therapies prior to use with clients.
