Introverts are doing ok with the corona virus quarantine. That is unless their family won’t leave them alone; insisting they play Scrabble or spend “quality time.” They’ve been preparing for this their whole lives! Extroverts however, are experiencing a different kind of quarantine…isolated, lonely, depressed and even existential. Most of my extroverted clients have been drawing things like cages, prisons and the ball-n-chain to express their sense of being trapped by quarantine. The introverts … [Read more...] about Quarantine
pilgrims
Collaborative Sand Mandala
Sand Mandala Blueprint More and more I see art as the by-product of an experience. The experience happens in both process and product during art making and in art therapy. Nothing illustrates this quite as well as the collaborative sand mandala. I got the idea from the Tibetan monks who spend their lives memorizing grain by grain and color by color these beautiful, symbol-laden traditional designs, or yantras. They then painstakingly create the image in colored sand with a special … [Read more...] about Collaborative Sand Mandala
The Way I See It
The Bridge oil pastel on folded, colored paper by "K" “K” completed this three-part assignment called “The Bridge” as part of an inventory and visualization project at Friday morning art therapy group. On a piece of paper folded into three sections she drew “where you are right now” (left side of page), “where you want to be a year from now” (right hand side of the page) and finally “the bridge” (center) how you plan to get from here to there. Her response drawing is an articulate picture … [Read more...] about The Way I See It
The Difference Between Teaching Art and Doing Art Therapy
Before my second career as an art therapist I made most of my living in art education doing residencies all over Chattanooga and North Georgia. I worked as a teaching artist for 25+ years gathering experience with a huge range of media, a deep understanding of developmental stages and lots of personal growth through things like the 12 Steps, Jungian theory, codependency treatment and a daily practice. I felt my career evolving from art teacher to art Teacher. The process taking on more import … [Read more...] about The Difference Between Teaching Art and Doing Art Therapy
Third Stage Recovery
Father, Mother, God group collage This is a collaborative project that explored the concept of right parenting on both the personal and archetypal levels. Each participant collaged their piece of the circle with images that described "good fathering" and "good mothering", whether we actually received it or not. When we put the pieces back together, I proposed that we had created a picture of God- the perfect combination of right … [Read more...] about Third Stage Recovery