[MUSIC] Good morning, Jade, thanks for coming and speaking with us today. Can you tell us some of the benefits of art therapy for your clients who have mental health issues? >> Absolutely, so some of the benefits that I observe in my practice with clients with mental health issues, a few, firstly, art making can be very relaxing, very containing, very calming. And that helps people enter into the therapeutic process. Secondly, it helps build people's confidence about their art making at home and as a self care tool. And thirdly, the art making itself is a form of visual communication that helps people speak about things that can be quite difficult for them to verbalize in therapy. And in that way, it can be a great material for us to use in the therapeutic process. >> What are some of the techniques and processes that you use in art therapy? >> We use a lot of different techniques and a lot of different art materials. And what we tend to do is design a process specifically around a particular individual client or a particular group, depending on their needs and the issues we'd like to explore. So different materials work with different people more effectively or less effectively. And different processes are designed to really use metaphor as a way to look at their situation and their issue. So just to give some examples, some of the processes I love to use when I do group work, I do a lot of group work with art therapy, we often begin with mandalas. Mandalas, at their most simple form, although there's a rich history of using them in different spiritual and religious practices. Their most simple, it's really an image within a circle that has symbolism and symbolic shapes, textures, colors that have deeper meaning. So I like to use mandalas as a way of grounding and holding clients when they first arrive, just to explore their current situation. In that sense, it's open to their interpretation, and they can express themselves freely within that safe container of the mandala. When clients come, what I find is that they're often kind of estranged from creativity or their own art making. Sometimes they've had a negative experience of art making in childhood, or someone's told them they're not artistic. They can actually be very scared of the blank page. So I like to use different materials over the weeks I work with them and help build up their confidence. We build up the complexity and the complexity of the materials as their confidence builds. So to begin with, I might use collage because it's very quick and very simple, and you really don't need any technical skills to do it. Most people don't feel daunted at the idea of cutting and pasting, it's kind of child-like, and people can dive right in. Then as the weeks progress, we introduce pencils, we introduce oil pastels, drawing, we might use acrylic poster paints. We might use water colors, we also do sculptural work. We start to work with textiles and multimedia. >> How do you integrate the psychotherapy into the process of art making or vice-versa? >> Art therapy is informed a lot by many different threads of psychology and psychotherapy and especially the kind of humanistic client centered counseling and psychology. So a big part of our work as art therapists is to be empathetic and to listen attentively. And what we tend to do is use the artwork itself as almost like a third person in the room. A transitional object that we can speak about really takes the pressure off of the clients speaking about themselves in their own experience, to start looking at the artwork as a mirror and exploring it for symbols. And so that's one of the ways we use the artwork in the process. So one of the things that comes up a lot in art therapy is bringing an awareness of the inner critic. So that voice inside our own head that often tells us that we're no good, that we don't know what we're doing, that our art making is stupid. Even in groups, I've had every single person in the room tell me that their piece is awful, and everyone else says it's fabulous. Which when I explain that to them, we see the kind of almost humor in that. That we all think we're uniquely somehow not good enough. So, in art therapy, we really bring gentle focus to our inner voices and the voice of the inner critic. And as people build confidence in their art making, they also build their skill in noticing that critical inner voice. And that's an asset they take beyond the art therapy workshop or session. [MUSIC]
