About Art Therapy…”A picture is worth a thousand words”
Art therapy is based on the belief that the creative process involved in the making of art is healing and life enhancing. Through creating art and talking about art and the process of art making with an Art Therapist, one can increase awareness of self, cope with symptoms, stress and traumatic experiences, enhance cognitive abilities, and enjoy the life-affirming pleasures of artistic creativity.
Art Therapists are professionals trained in both art and therapy and hold a Masters Degree in Art Therapy. Art Therapists work with children, adolescents, and adults and provide services to individuals, couples, family groups and communities
Benefits of Art Therapy
- Serves as a container to hold and organize feelings and experiences
- Gives symbolic shape to chaotic feelings and experiences
- Provides distance to safely express feelings and experiences
- Offers opportunity to “work through” and “re-work” feelings and experiences
- Encourages positive risk taking
- Gives symbolic shape to unconscious life and emotional defenses
- Serves as a permanent and tangible record of life experiences
- Provides the opportunity to be seen and heard
- Integrates internal and external experiences
- Encourages creative physical action to express emotional content
- Serves as a springboard for verbal communication
- Provides the opportunity to become quiet and grounded
- Offers the opportunity for creative problem solving
- Encourages cooperation with a group setting, decreasing isolation
- Encourages frustration tolerance
- Provides the opportunity for ritual and memorial
- Increases: Self Esteem, Self Worth, Self Reflection, Perspective, Mastery and Control, Decision Making Skills, Impulse Control, Integration, Insight, Sense of Identity, Sense of Balance and Sense of Wholeness.
The American Art Therapy Association: www.arttherapy.org
Jennifer Mauro, MPS, ATR-BC for Rita Project – 2004
Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved: Sharon Strouse