Art and well-being have a long history that spans countless important shifts in culture and thinking through expression. As the World Health Organization (WHO) notes in “Arts and Health,” artistic expression has grown with human cultural development. Art in its many forms has played an integral part in how people teach, learn, communicate, and heal. Through art, you learn to make sense of the triumphs and tragedies of existence to best navigate the world. Therefore, exploring creativity for healing through art therapy can be invaluable to healing the pains of trauma.
At The Guest House, we know unaddressed trauma can contribute to self-defeating or self-destructive choices like substance use disorder (SUD) and or other mental health disorders. Self-defeating behaviors and thinking patterns highlight the erosion or lack of healthy coping skills for resilience. When you are overwhelmed by trauma, it becomes difficult to tap into the healing power of self-awareness and self-understanding.
Connection is lost in the distress of trauma as your ability to overcome trauma with adaptive coping is impaired. Thus, art therapy as a tool of expression can provide the creativity for healing necessary to reconnect with yourself. With the support of creativity for healing, you can rediscover yourself and build resilience to thrive in recovery.
Treatment options like art therapy give you access to a variety of healing tools. With holistic treatment, you can find countless ways to explore and express your sense of self. However, you may question what is art therapy. What elements are a part of art therapy? How can art therapy or engaging in art help you recover from trauma? Creativity for healing is not solely based on the making of art. Rather creativity for healing is born from what that process pulls out of you. Expanding your awareness of art therapy can give you insight into the power of creativity for healing.
What Is Art Therapy?
Much like art itself, art therapy has a few definitions that define creativity for healing. According to Frontiers in Psychology, art therapy is a therapeutic modality for self-expression and healing. Moreover, art therapy is a therapy in which art mediums are used as a means of expression and communication. Further, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), defines art therapy as the making of art and your response to art. Through art therapy, you can improve your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Art therapy as a technique for well-being across multiple domains is rooted in the idea of creative expression.
In art therapy, expression is a source of creativity and strength to explore the innermost parts of the self. Thus, creativity for healing can be found in the communication and self-expression of art therapy. Further, art therapy is often used in conjunction with psychotherapy to best support creativity for healing. However, what forms of expression are considered art or a part of art therapy?
Through various media, art therapy provides a space where the creative process – the act of making and self-understanding – is found. Looking at the variety of artistic activities in art therapy can help showcase the specific ways in which creativity for healing can be found in expressive modalities like art therapy.
Types of Artistic Activities for Recovery
There is a wide variety of media and materials that can be utilized in art therapy to support creativity for healing. Moreover, many artistic activities in art therapy often overlap with other expressive therapies like music therapy. Art is a diverse field that can range from music and dance to drama and painting to communicate and express difficult-to-reach or articulate thoughts and feelings. Listed below are some of the many artistic activities you can engage in for expression and creativity for healing:
- Drawing
- Painting and or finger painting
- Doodling
- Scribbling
- Coloring
- Making a collage
- Crocheting
- Knitting
- Sewing
- Embroidery
- Weaving
- Sculpting
- Pottery
- Working with molding clay
- Mask making
- Making jewelry and beading
- Photography
- Dancing
- Making music
- Playing an instrument
- Writing music
- Playing songs
- Composing music
- Writing
- Storytelling
- Wood, copper, or metalwork
The many different ways you can engage in art therapy showcase art as an expansive and creative force to address your individual experiences and needs. With more insight into the types of art activities you can utilize for creativity for healing, you can learn how those activities can be used in art therapy to support your physical and psychological well-being.
Using Creativity for Healing Physically and Mentally
As stated in an article from Cureus, art therapy is most commonly used to treat mental illnesses and improve mental well-being and interpersonal relationships. Art therapy is a recovery-oriented and person-centered approach to care that focuses on the whole of the parts in mind, body, and spirit. Thus, the creativity for healing found in artistic activities supports your emotional, spiritual, and social needs for healthy coping with mental health disorders. Specifically, art therapy allows you to gain or deepen your self-expression and self-awareness to improve self-understanding, communication, and interactions. Yet, what are the mechanisms of self-expression in art therapy that allow you to learn, grow, and foster personal development?
Language is a powerful tool for communication and understanding in each other. However, sometimes spoken language can fall short when you experience stress and or mental health difficulties. In particular, the challenges of mental health symptoms can leave you feeling overwhelmed. Moreover, mental health disorders and distress can impair your ability to understand your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Therefore, creativity for healing can be found in therapeutic tools like art therapy that do not necessarily require language to foster connection and understanding.
Through the kinaesthetic, sensory, perceptual, and symbolic communication of artistic expression, your receptive and expressive communication modes are motivated to function. Furthermore, the Frontiers in Psychology article also noted that art therapy believes in unspoken things. The belief in unspoken things in artistic expression speaks to the creative process of inner pictures. Through artistic expression, you are able to tab into your inner world to uncover and verbalize those buried or painful emotions and thoughts. While the verbalization of your inner world can feel too painful to express, art therapy gives you a way a safe and indirect way to connect with yourself and others through artistic expression.
With the belief in unspoken things and the inner world in mind, you can see how creativity for healing can be valuable to mental well-being. Listed below are some of the mental health disorders and other conditions that can be supported by art therapy in combination with other primary therapeutic tools like talk therapy:
- Depression
- Art techniques are used to help you connect with your feelings
- Provides space to vent negative emotions
- Improves mood
- Decreases depressive symptoms
- Improves social functioning and social adaptability
- Promotes a higher quality of life
- Anxiety disorders
- Supports improved emotional regulation through better emotion acceptance and goal-oriented actions
- Helps you express anxiety and fear
- Decreases anxiety symptoms
- Improves social functioning
- Increases ability to adapt socially
- Improves quality of life
- Schizophrenia
- Supports greater emotional awareness through an understanding of your creative process and the images you create
- Helps reduce psychotic symptoms
- Increases self-esteem
- Improves social functioning
- Enhances compliance with medication management
- Improves self-cognition
- Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
- Support expression, communication, and connection without verbal interaction
- Better able to express inner images through art activities like drawing and painting to enhance imagination and abstract thinking
- Can be valuable for personal development, growth, and communication skills
- Improves social interactions, adaptive behaviors, and emotions
- Painting can help express and vent negative emotions
- Supports positive emotional experiences and promotes self-consciousness
- Dementia
- Enhances self-esteem and sense of accomplishment by reinforcing emotions of self-worth or competence
- Alzheimer’s Disease
- Reduces anxiety and depressive symptoms
- Improves mood
- Can help reduce chronic pain
- Improves quality of life
- Cancer-related challenges
- Enhance vitality
- Improves ability to cope with pain
- Encourages participation in social activities
- Supports a significant reduction in depression, anxiety, and stress
- Physical health challenges
- Supports pain management
- Reduces pain levels
- Improves ability to cope with pain
- Can decrease the impact of depression, anxiety, and other mental health symptoms
- SUD
- Provides an outlet to explore and express unhealthy thinking and behavior patterns that contribute to maladaptive coping in addiction
- Supports your ability to unlock the root causes of self-defeating behaviors through greater self-awareness and self-understanding
- Decreases stress
- Improves mood
- Decreases mental health symptoms like depression
- PTSD and other trauma-related conditions or symptoms
- Helps reduce stress
- Decreases feelings of shame
- Supports the reduction of depression and anxiety symptoms
- Increases self-esteem
- Fosters greater self-awareness
- Helps you unlock and process stuck distress from trauma
Looking at the disorders and conditions in which art therapy is utilized highlights the value of creativity for healing through strengthened emotional expression, self-esteem, and self-awareness. Moreover, art therapy’s ability to engage greater connection with the self is invaluable to addressing known and unknown trauma to dismantle its hold on you and your life. Thus, understanding the benefits of creativity for healing with art therapy can support your healing and long-term recovery.
Benefits of Creativity for Healing Trauma
Trauma is a complex experience or set of experiences that impacts everyone in different ways. Perceptions of trauma imagine it as the most horrific events that can happen to a person like sexual assault, torture, and war. However, trauma can happen to anyone at any time and place across their lifespan. Whether you experienced trauma in childhood as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) or in adulthood, trauma does not discriminate.
According to “How to Manage Trauma” from the National Council for Behavioral Health, 223.4 million (70%) adults in the U.S. have experienced some traumatic event at least once in their lives. Everyone will and has experienced trauma, from car accidents and the loss of a loved one to emotional and physical abuse. How you experience and respond to trauma is unique to you. Many people will experience trauma and recover without ever developing a trauma-related disorder like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Yet, as the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) states, 6% of the U.S. population will have PTSD at some point in their lives. However, finding resilience in trauma does not come naturally to everyone. A variety of protective factors and risk factors in your life can contribute to your ability to recover from trauma. When you lack the necessary protective factors to support resilience to heal from trauma, you become vulnerable to developing trauma-related disorders. While many people recover from trauma, millions of people still experience the devastating harm of trauma and trauma-related disorders.
The VA notes that in 2020, 13 million U.S. adults had PTSD. Thus, creativity for healing with art therapy can be a vital therapeutic tool uncovering and dismantling the traumatic roots in your life. The process of creativity and self-expression in art therapy can be a deeply positive and empowering experience in recovery. It can be difficult to get to the root of self-defeating behaviors when trauma grabs hold. However, with art therapy, you can find the space needed to tap into the roots of your distress.
Through art therapy, you can explore those difficult-to-talk-about experiences and emotions indirectly through art. When you can engage in self-expression through art, you bypass those barriers to communication, connection, self-awareness, and self-understanding trauma builds. Rather than engaging in the avoidance behaviors trauma thrives on, you can find relief in the exploration of self outside of trauma. You are then reminded that you are not your trauma; it is a part of you but does not define you. As noted in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, traumatic memories are often stored nonverbally.
Thus, art therapy offers the externalization and emotional distance needed to address unresolved trauma. Through art therapy, you can find a safe way to address trauma stuck in the mind and body. The capacity for art therapy to provide insight, safety, nonverbal expression, and visual expression exemplifies it as a treatment tool. Whether you have experienced physical or emotional trauma, art therapy can help you heal.
Art therapy can give you the creativity for healing you need in all the domains of your life. Every individual has unique experiences and needs to heal. With holistic support, those individual experiences and needs are addressed. Working as a holistic tool, art therapy can offer a wealth of opportunities to thrive beyond trauma. Once you are opened or reopened to knowing and understanding yourself, resilience can be built, and a healthier you can be reborn.
Empowering Creativity for Healing Trauma at The Guest House
At The Guest House, we know understanding the core of your self-defeating thoughts and behavior is vital to making true progress in recovery. Focusing only on addiction or alleviating the physical symptoms of PTSD only provides a narrow window for healing. Rather, long-term recovery is born from healing the whole of your parts. Healing the whole of your parts means having access to a treatment program that considers every aspect of you. Through a holistic approach to care, you are given the space, safety, and support to heal as a whole person.
Creativity for healing with art therapy thus transcends individual trauma to heal you and your whole community. Art therapy enriches the physical and psychological well-being of individuals, families, and communities through the age-old process of art making. With the building of resilience, communication, and self-understanding through self-expression, you can thrive in every part of life.
We know that trauma can lead to thoughts and feelings that are difficult to express and overcome. Therefore, we are committed to providing a wide range of therapeutic modalities and a trauma-specific approach to care. You deserve access to support and tools to express yourself and build healthy coping mechanisms. Through art therapy, you can share thoughts and experiences that may have otherwise been difficult to say or process. Moreover, with more self-awareness, you can carry the things you have learned into your life beyond treatment for long-term healing.
It can feel difficult to recognize and understand the root causes of your self-defeating behaviors. However, through the artistic self-expression found in art therapy, you can connect with the unconscious parts of yourself to unlock self-awareness and self-understanding to heal. Moreover, a wide range of media and materials gives you the space to experiment and explore forms that speak to you, your experiences, and your needs to dismantle self-defeating behaviors. Thus, creativity for healing in art therapy is made possible by the making of art to rejoin the fractured mind, body, and spirit. At The Guest House, we are committed to providing therapeutic modalities to help you build tools for long-term healing. Call us at (855) 483-7800 to learn more.