What I love about psychotherapy and art

I love the synergy between therapy and art. Therapy itself is like a creative process – we start with an empty page: two people meet across an empty room.  The first tentative mark is made, the first words are spoken.  More is added, lines, colour, the image starts to take shape, maybe we don’t know what it is, maybe we will never know, it will remain abstract but the feeling of it is alive. 

Your narrative emerges, I get to see how feelings, defences, reactions show up right to the level of your inbreath, or the picking away of the quick on your index finger.  These signs are all information, like lines in the picture. The page responds to the artist’s mark, in the same way two bodies speak, we sense the marks of our words and our presence. Like two drummers we learn to respond one to the other.  As I listen to the drum beats, I let the information pass through, threads are pulled through my years of study – different psychological models, I test them out in my thoughts, never landing too surely as each person is so entirely different.  Mental health diagnosis may be guidelines to symptoms experienced but they should never be seen as a definition of the person, the person remains unique.  Whilst something like psychosis, or anxiety, or depression, or any so called ‘disorder’ has characteristics no one person’s experience is the same as another’s and each person has a unique experience of life and an aura all of their own.  Your aura fills the space, I look at you and wonder, what happened to you?

What do I notice in terms of recovery or healing?  Healing might suggest you were there to be fixed, or restored, I haven’t observed anything that simple.  The people I have worked with may begin to sense ‘it feels a bit lighter’, or they start to see a glimmer of hope, or the picture they brought is reframed and suddenly they notice it looks different.  Maybe the old story has a new way of being told; now there are chapters that haven’t even been written and you realise that you are the author, no longer just a character.  And so, another way of being in the world is possible.