Art therapy, sometimes called expressive art or art psychology, is facilitated by the art therapist applying art media.
The creative process helps to explore their feelings, resolve emotional conflicts, and further self-awareness.
It comes with stress and obsession, increases social skills, improves reality orientation, decreases anxiety, and improves overall well-being.
What is Art Therapy
Art therapy aims to get better or reinstate a client’s mental health.
Art therapy requires information on visual art, the creative process, human development, psychology, and design theories and methods.
It serves as the focus and medium of communication.
Almost any medium can serve as a medium for art therapy, including painting, drawing/sketching, sculpting, and clay modeling.
Today art therapy is widely practiced in various settings, including hospitals, psychiatric and rehabilitation facilities, and wellness centers.
Including forensic institutions, schools, emergency centers, senior communities, private practice, and other clinical and community settings.
During individual and group sessions, art therapists elicit their clients’ inherent capacity for art-making to boost their physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
Research supports the use of art therapy within a professional relationship for the therapeutic benefits gained through;
artistic self-expression and reflection for individuals who experience illness, trauma, mental health troubles, and those searching for personal development.
Art Flavia Julius, Brazilian Expert Artist
Why Use Art Therapy
Helpful treatment for people experiencing developmental, medical, educational, and social or psychological impairment.
Where an individual has also survived trauma resulting from combat, abuse, and natural disaster; persons with adverse physical health conditions such as;
cancer, traumatic brain injury, and other health disability; and persons with autism, dementia, depression, and other disorders.
Additionally, art therapy helps people resolve conflicts, develop interpersonal skills, manage challenging behaviors, and decrease depressing stress.
Also, it can increase your personal growth and help with self-development.
The benefits of art therapy in these types of conditions can help with people who are reserved or shy or who, for some reason or another, have a hard time functioning within social situations.
Overall, the benefits of art therapy, similar to colour therapy can be quite wide.
It can improve lives by helping people improve their mental, emotional, and physical states.
Therefore, it increases the quality of life for many people and is worth considering.
Hence, art therapy can aid you in some way or another to enjoy the life-affirming pleasures of art making.
Benefits of Art Therapy
The many benefits that the use of this healing modality can experience are:
- Allowing unspoken words to speak
- Encourages to build trust in a safe environment and be understood
- Also, it help increase their self-esteem and self-respect
- Assists in gaining a new, more objective perspective on their challenges
- Allows you to start experimenting with change that you can later apply
- Provides a secure outlet for feelings such as fear, guilt, ache, rage, and anger
- Encourages clients to make constructive choices and to gain hope for the future
- Tap into internal power and use existing strengths to build more skills that can facilitate their managing complex emotions and circumstances in other areas of life.
Stormy Cloud by Julie J.Gallery
Art therapy can help children and teens process the following:
- Experiences of sorrow, loss, or separation
- Trauma and developmental stress
- Life transitions
- Injury/ accidents
- Birth of a sibling
- Parental separation/ divorce
- Hyperactivity
- Disabilities physical, learning, or invisible
- Emotional issues (fear, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, anger, etc.
- Behavioral issues (aggression, withdrawal, impassivity, tantrums, etc.
It could simply be the act of executing artistic expression on your own or with others, or it’s in search of professional help from a qualified art therapist.
Either way, the benefits of art therapy make it worth exploring as a mechanism for healing.
Also, for more ways to beat depression, you simply pick up a paint brush and express those suppressed energies!
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