Federica Dubbini

 

Creative Expression Workshop

 

During childhood and adolescence drawings and graphic, plastic and pictorial expression represent spontaneous and natural means to free your emotions and past experiences, rework delicate and important moments of growth, get to know and discover yourself. When childhood is over, the re-discovery of these modes of expression in the adult age can be a very effective method to investigate and get to know yourself and achieve greater self-awareness, through the use of free means as are those offered by art tools.

 

 

Art therapy provides an approach that ensures listening and receptiveness, absence of judgement and maximum encouragement to individual creativity, favouring the strengthening of the sense of identity and self-esteem, improving your ability to recognize your emotions and widening each person’s communication and relational possibilities.

 

 

Putting your feelings on paper also helps you creating a distance and seeing your issues better. Art therapy workshops become a sort of container where you can put your past experiences, be positively mirrored in the group and start a process of elaboration and consideration. The use of such methods may be particularly indicated with children and adolescents, who are often distrustful to open up on personal topics such as the intimate sphere of emotions. Focussing on working with images helps bypassing a past of rejection and shame that may act as a block, gradually allowing wider and wider spaces of trust and sharing to appear.

What is art therapy?

 

 

Art therapy is a methodology for helping and supporting the individual, exploiting techniques and methods that are typical of art expression. It gives you the opportunity to approach and explore your inner world, gradually becoming aware of it: perceptions, feelings and imagination. Art therapy favours the creative expression of your past experiences with the aim, if possible, of achieving more consciousness and awareness. The therapeutic factor resides right in the creative process, in the free gestures through which the individual is able to shape his/her (conscious or unconscious) inner material in the image of him- or herself. This way the person learns to know him- or herself better, to understand his/her emotions and feelings and to become aware of what he/she is able to do, thus strengthening his/her sense of identity and self-esteem.

The art product will acquire a valuable dimension not because it is aesthetically significant, but because it is rich in the author’s emotional content and values.

 

 

Art therapy workshops take place in times and places that are always the same in order to allow for continuity and a sense of trust, and may be in an individual or group setting.

 

 

The art therapist

 

First of all, the art therapist works in a protected and reassuring environment that is free of judgement.

The art therapist promotes a type of relationship where verbal and non-verbal communication may take place.

He/she is available for both the patient (or group) and the work of art produced. The latter allows the patient (or group) and the therapist to interact, looking in the same direction and favouring, if possible, the relationship.

 

 

Of course, the work of the art therapist may be of significant value to support the existing team of psychologists and psychotherapists (when working in a medical setting with specialists), with the aim of achieving as much synergy and cooperation as possible.