Expressive Arts Therapy

Expressive arts therapy builds confidence by providing a language to express yourself and a space to be seen in your authenticity.

Sensitive individuals often have a colorful, deep inner world, and sometimes words just aren’t enough to explain how we think and feel. Expressive arts therapy offers an avenue to connect with that part of us via visual art, movement, storytelling, drama, music, and more. When we can accurately represent our inner world, we allow ourselves to be genuinely seen by another. There are no expectations or standards to meet in expensive arts therapy. A mere willingness to be open to the process will lead way to revealing our true selves bringing us in alignment with love, joy, and liberation.

Expressive arts therapy focuses on four major therapeutic modalities:

Human beings have used expressive arts as healing modalities since ancient times (Malchiodi, 2020). Expressive arts therapists facilitate multimodal creative expression, sometimes in one session, usually non-directively.

Dr. Cathy Malchiodi is a psychologist and expressive arts therapist who explains the four core healing practices when using expressive arts to work with trauma: movement, sound, storytelling through image, and silence through contemplative and self-regulatory practices.

Here are some of the many forms of expressive art:

  • Playing music

  • Listening to music

  • Writing lyrics

  • Theater or improvisation

  • Reading or writing poetry

  • Journaling

  • Reading fiction

  • Drawing

  • Painting or fingerpainting

  • Sculpting

  • Dancing

What to Expect

Expressive arts therapy can be accomplished via the creation of different art forms; the commonality is the use of multiple senses to explore your inner and outer worlds. A therapist or counselor helps you communicate feelings about the process and accomplishment of making art, and together, you use the creative process to highlight and analyze problems and difficulties. The therapeutic work is based on the creative process, not on the final result, therefore, it is not necessary to have a background or training in the arts to benefit from this expressive therapy. Throughout the process, you learn new and different ways to use the mostly nonverbal language of creativity to communicate inner feelings that were not previously available to you by simply thinking or talking about them.

Excerpt from Psychology Today