Expressive Arts Therapy

Day 38 - Today was my first time walking on the Somerville Community Path near Davis Square.   Not only was it a great place to walk and people watch but the artwork that lives along the path was quirky, delightful, and inspiring.   There were the giant giraffes, birdhouses, a collection of fairy houses, and a scrap sculpture garden.   I tried to find out who had made the sculptures, but I couldn’t find out.   One of the best parts of the sculptures, is that they are interactive – by pulling on a lever you can make the giraffe’s ears wiggle!   I was entranced, delighted, and surprised by these various collections – it was clear that there were not done by one person, but by a “community!” And I thought – I want to be able to walk here all the time!!   It reminded me of a project near my home – the Yard Art Watertown project. I walk past a collage sculpture right in front of a neighbor’s house every time I walk the dog, and it’s so quirky and fun t...

Day 37 – Art is practice…   Many years ago, I bought a book at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Art is… Each page offers a single word or phrase and a piece of art… for example, the first entry is “art is practice.”     Today I sat with a kid who likes to draw.   We drew.   We practiced – drawing, being together, thinking about broken hearts, having perspective, women’s loneliness, and feeling co nfident.   It reminded me of a series of drawings I did of a “horse” in a session many years ago… In the end, I really liked one of the horses. Can you guess which one?   I also always feel as though I’m “practicing writing.”

Day 36 – I’m still working on the article about professionalizing expressive arts therapy.   This article is an expansion of the blog piece on connections between Mestiza consciousness and expressive arts therapy that I wrote back in 2018. As I was working on the final draft today, I started thinking about whether my use of mestiza consciousness is a form of cultural appropriation.   I need to think this through a bit more, and I think it’s important to question this.   I don’t have a quick answer, but I am looking at the ways that others have also referenced Anzaldua’s work.   I particularly enjoyed Hernández-Wolfe (2011)’s description of Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness as “borderlands epistemology.” She writes,   Borderland thinking addresses our right to self-representation as individuals and as a collective. These issues of self-representation are about both the development of a personal identity and a professional identity. As people who struggle wi...

Day 35 – I’ve never been that good at thinking about the “big picture.”   I overwhelm easily, and really want to understand things I don’t get – a bad combination.   As a result, I procrastinate, get distracted, avoid complexity, and sometimes even completely retreat.   I’m not necessarily proud of these coping strategies because I do also value showing up and hard work, but we all must work with what we have. Still, I’m usually surprised when I can actually write something I feel proud of… it has taken years and LOTS of practice.   It’s often hard for my colleagues and students to imagine the hard work of crossing the divide – of letting this “academic” work be my work.   Curiosity, a capacity or desire for complexity, time to reflect, resources for tackling these complexities – these are often accessible when you’re not struggling to survive.   When you are – your intellectual resources are often being used in the struggle for survival.   As a ...

Day 34 - Every other Monday I go to the Suffolk County House of Correction for an arts and spirituality group.   I coordinate the group of volunteers with a colleague at Lesley University, E. Kellogg.   We also have an intern from Lesley University whose primary internship responsibility is with Emmanuel Church in Boston .     The Arts and Spirituality group was begun by Pamela Werntz, an Episcopal priest from Emmanuel Church. The program began in the fall of 1998 and involves a group of volunteers from various faith-based organizations and incarcerated and detained women. Pam ran the group for many years and then asked a group of us at Lesley whether we would be willing to take on the volunteer coordination.   We have been doing so for about five years, but Pam continues to volunteer once a month, and many of the volunteers have been attending the group either bi-weekly or monthly for many years.   The group seems to provide an i...

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash Day 32 and 33 – This weekend I have been trying to get a better understanding of “neoliberalism” and of its effect on therapy and the arts.   One of my main sources has been a collection of articles by Manu Bazzano , who I stumbled upon when I started to research the impact of time on the person-centered approach to psychotherapy. I was starting to wonder how person-centered psychotherapy was standing up to the 21 st century – what made it relevant or irrelevant?   I came across an article called The conservative turn in person-centered therapy by Bazzano (2016a) .   This post will likely be a bit clumsy because I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I’ve been reading, but I will try to take it one step at a time.   Bazzano (2016b) defines neo-liberalism this way. At times described as the most successful creed in world history, neoliberalism is both ubiquitous and invisible, everywhere and nowhere. It is the ideolo...

Photo by The New York Public Library     Day 31 - Happy Earth Day 2022!   So, those of you who know me know I’m a big reader… I love to read – mostly fiction, but also (auto)biography, books about writing, memoir, history, cultural studies, nature writing, and contemporary nonfiction.   I’m currently re-reading Parable of the Sower , by Octavia Butler.     If you’re not familiar with Octavia Butler’s work – check it out.   I think Kindred was the first novel of hers I read.   I’m also a VERY big fan of her collection of short stories and essays, called Bloodchild and other stories .   She has an essay there on writing for publication Furor Scribendi which I go back to often.   Her advice, “ Persist!” Many people have written about her inspiration.   She is a sci-fi, Afro-futurist, feminist author whose ideas and characters stay with you!! I’ve found Parable of the Sower the perfect work to accompany my reading of Care work ...

Day 30 - Today I’ve been thinking about returning to teaching and about readings students might find useful.   I have particularly liked this article on “doing intersectionality” (Brinkman & Donohue, 2020).   I really like the idea of thinking about a social justice approach through an intersectional lens.   Brinkman and Donohue say, Intersectionality theory offers a framework for social justice oriented clinical training as it addresses the cultural and interpersonal domains of social identities, it also provides an analytical tool for examining the structural (institutional structures) and disciplinary (organizational practices) domains. (p.110)   The propose the idea of “doing intersectionality” as a way of resisting formulaic templates for thinking about clients in specific ways and hope that this approach will instead offer “a dynamic, relational, contextualized practice rather than a generalized theoretical framework that can be learned abstractly and t...

Day 29 - I’ve been working with a writing coach – shout out to Mace Dent Johnson !   Mace has really helped me get organized, focused, and clearer about what and why I am writing what I want to write.   I’m working on the article about the professionalization of expressive arts therapy, and on an article about the application of critical pedagogy and social justice to expressive arts therapy, and a few other smaller pieces.   Each of the pieces are related and so it’s been somewhat difficult to figure out how and why to separate each piece, and Mace’s guidance and prompts have been particularly helpful.   It has also just helped to be “in dialogue.”   I think it’s something I really needed intellectually and emotionally, but also in order to write!   Today Mace asked me the question: In your ExAT practice, what does care mean to you?  This is related to the work I’ve been doing on understanding Disability Justice and the “ethics of care.” ...

Day 28 - I’m continuing to work my way through Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2018) book Care work. In addition to discussing Disability Justice, she talks about Healing Justice in a way that offers those of us working as “therapists” something to really think about!   She describes Healing justice this way, Healing justice as a movement and a term was created by queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and People of color, beginning with the work of Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective in 2004, to define a movement of politicized Black and brown healers reclaiming our traditional methods of healing and redefine what healing and health could mean, especially in terms of dealing with intergenerational trauma. Of course before “healing justice” was a term, healers had been healing folks at kitchen tables and community clinics for a long time—from the acupuncture clinics run by Black Panthers like Mutulu Shakur in North America in the 1970s to our bone-deep Black, Indigenous, people of col...

Day 27 - I sort of wish I was a more disciplined researcher – I often stumble upon, expose myself to multiple sources of information, and follow up without noting the original sources of my interests or finds… so it is, with the book, Care work: Dreaming disability justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018).   I bought the book several years ago but cannot remember now why or where I heard of it.   Also, the book Feminist Queer Crip by Alison Kafer (2013), bought in May of 2018 along with Queer: A graphic history by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele. How did I come to these voices?   And how is it that I’m only now delving into it a bit more??   Also, again – can’t even tell you why, but a few weeks ago I insisted on going to the Porter Square bookstore to buy Crip kinship: The disability justice & art activism of Sins Invalid by Shayda Kafai (2021).   Couldn’t tell you why I needed to go immediately to buy the book, except that I knew that their...

Day 25 and 26 -  I’m still thinking about Potash’s (2022) editorial on Credentials and professional identity. I’m also thinking about the amazing work presented by my colleagues and our alumni at Lesley’s recent Arts and Healthcare Conference .   Did most of the projects presented at the conference require working with a license or a credential in order to take place?   What role did the professional identity of those presenting have in their embarking on such a project? Potash (2022) begins his editorial by describing the cohort of art therapy students with whom he graduated as passionate about art therapy.   He notes that in the 1990s, licensure was not yet widespread and plenty of us could work without it—and indeed, several of us did (and still do). After we graduated and settled on our professional paths, some have continued to work only with art therapy credentials, some pursued credentials in other fields, and some worked as artists. (p.3) This intereste...