Expressive Arts Therapy

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash Day 100 – Celebrations!!   It’s my last day of sabbatical and I am proud of the work I did!   I kept track of this blog for 100 days – I didn’t write every day, but I did keep up with the process!   I wrote about the things that were capturing my attention and imagination. I tried to think through difficult concepts and not step away from complication or hard-to-convey ideas.   One of my main goals was to make my research practice transparent – and I feel I did just that! This is how I work. If you were to read every post in this blog over the past 100 days, you’d have an up-close picture of my method and process   I spent the day thinking about the Supervision course I plan to teach in the Summer/fall/spring.   It’s a year-long course that accompanies students in their 2 nd field placement. For many students, this happens in their third year of the program.   I usually teach the first-year courses, and the f...

Day 98 and 99 – I love paradoxes and dialectics.   From my apple dictionary:   Paradox: par·a·dox| ˈperəˌdäks | noun  •       a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true :  in a paradox, he has discovered that stepping back from his job has increased the rewards he gleans from it .  •       a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory:  a potentially serious conflict between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity known as the information paradox .  •       a situation, person, o...

Photo by Jack Skinner on Unsplash Day 97 – As I continue to try to define “well-being” in a way that attends to the critical social justice model, I came across this exploration of the model in Quiñones-Rosado’s (2020) chapter, Liberation psychology and racism:   Common to these non-Western paradigms for well-being, human beings are conceived as integral to, and in a sustainable relationship with, all other beings, elements, the Earth itself, and beyond. Human well-being occurs in the context of, and is dependent on, an individual’s personal and a people’s collective ability to meet challenges and adversities in their environment through the intelligent, skillful, and ethical use of strengths and resources available to them. Person and community coexist—dynamically, interdependently, and integrally. (p. 54)   Quiñones-Rosado is suggesting that one way to begin to practice a decolonial approach to liberation psychology is by recognizing models of “well-being, concept...

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash Day 95 and 96 – For the past several years, I have been proposing that Expressive Arts Therapy has 5 established theories and even more emerging theories. Several years ago, I wrote a revision of a chapter I wrote back in 2005.     One section of this revised chapter – which was edited and will not be included in the new chapter coming out reads:   These foundational theories within expressive arts therapy grew out of work published beginning in the early 1990s (Atkins, 2002; Halprin, 2003; Knill, Barba, & Fuchs, 1995; Levine, 1992; Levine, 1995; Levine & Levine, 1999; McNiff, 1992; Rogers, 1993).   Knill, Barba, and Fuchs (1995) note, “intermodal expressive therapy is a discipline unto itself, with its own theoretical framework and focus” (emphasis in original, p. 16). In their text, “Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy,” Levine and Levine (1999) claim that expressive arts therapists are “specialists in inte...

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash If love was possible             on the day after Roe v Wade was overturned   This is one thing I know for sure I could not go back I could not live Where I was not loved   By the people most responsible For loving me   Mother brother   It was my life Or hers   Of course, there is no telling Whether she would have been A she   My first child was born On my birthday I remember thinking I will never be The main attraction again But oh, how I love him   Now I am a mother It is my responsibility To love   We have a fighting chance   She was different I was not able to Share my life With her   It would have killed Even the possibility I had of living Much less loving   Which is all I had At the time   I wanted to live Even as I mourned the death Of ...

Photo by Victor on Unsplash Day 93 – Sustainability and radical relationality   Human societies are guided by stories people tell one another. The narrative that has brought us to the present situation is that of progress made possible by economic growth and advances in technology. According to this tale, humanity is steadily moving toward a brighter future. When it comes to material prosperity, particularly in certain parts of the world, this is not a mere fairytale. However, in many other aspects, the story has lost its credibility, as the price of the so-called progress has proven to be far too high. (Helne, 2021, p. 220)   I read a great article today called, Well-being for a better world: The contribution of a radically relational and nature-inclusive conception of well-being to the sustainability transformation (Helne, 2021).   In it, Helne, a Finnish social policy maker, proposes that we question our conceptions of the “good life” and ask how our definitio...

Photo by Florian Roost on Unsplash Day 91 and 92   Instructor vision for the course:   This class is about inter-related-ness and multiplicity – the interrelatedness and multiplicity of/in the arts, and the interrelatedness and multiplicity of/in us as a group, and the interrelatedness and multiplicity of/in counseling, arts therapy, and well-being. I am hoping to take a “radically relational and nature-inclusive approach to well-being” (Helne, 2021) as we consider ecological approaches to developing new theories of expressive arts therapy.     Expressive arts therapy (ExAT) is the newest creative arts therapy profession.   At Lesley, ExAT takes a multi-theoretical approach to the use of multi-arts processes for inquiry, engagement, liberation, expression, and change.   Students from all specializations, and even from outside of our program, take this course, not to become expressive arts therapists, but to understand the fundamental interrelat...

Photo by Andreas Brunn on Unsplash Day 89 and 90 – As I continue to prepare for Orientation and Theories of expressive arts Therapy, I have continued to think about and explore the Person-centered approach.   I was interested to read the first lines of the preface –   The expressive arts are ancient forms being rebirthed to bring much needed integration and balance into our world. In early times people knew well that dance, art, song, and storytelling were all part of the same process: that of being fully functioning and creatively human.   In 1993, this idea of the arts being “ancient forms being rebirthed” was one that was still very popular.   This glorification of the “people” of “early times,” is part of the exotification of the past.   And it is these ideas that we are wanting to think about critically.   I am just starting to understand what drives my discomfort with these ideas – first there is an assumption that “we” don’t understand this ...

Photo by Nikhil Mitra on Unsplash Day 88 –  Well – it’s been hard to focus as I get closer to the end of sabbatical.   Trying to spend lots of time with my family – and to enjoy the last few days before extra responsibilities.   That said, I’m very excited to have completed the Commentary for the special issue in The Arts in Psychotherapy: Intersectionality and the ethics of care in the creative arts therapies.     The article: Commentary: Troubling care – is available through this special link for 50 days for free.   https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1fHWeivMuDL0X   I like the double entendre of this title – Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the trouble was partly the inspiration for my title, as was John Lewis’ encouragement to “make good trouble .”   The idea that caring can be troubling, and that we should “trouble” our conceptions of caring, are at the heart of the commentary.   Here are a couple of paragraphs from my pr...

Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash Day 87 – I listened to a talk today given by Judith Flores Carmona entitled, Towards Epistemological Decolonization: “I Change myself: I Change the world” (Anzaldúa, 1997). The talk was part of Lesley’s spring Faculty Development Day.   One of the main ideas Carmona conveyed was that higher education was made for and continues to primarily serve the “elite” – that higher education never intended its primary use to be by and for BIPOC.   She spoke of the importance of celebrating the epistemologies, that is ways of knowing and of producing knowledge, that already exist within students’ cultural contexts.   She emphasizes that colonization, and continued racism and discrimination, has largely been responsible for an erasure of students’ knowing and pride of these ways of knowing.   By using testimonio and placticas students begin to reclaim a sense of themselves not as deficient but as a part of a larger cultural movement...

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash Day 86 – Been thinking about the 1970s today – yes, it is in many ways my era.   I came of age in the 1970s, graduated from high school in 1977, and became an adult – born in 1959, I’m right at the end of the Baby Boomer era.   Growing up in San Francisco in the 1970s, I experienced a particular side of the 1970s – the post-60s Flower Power era of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll meets Motown and Soul Train; the election of Harvey milk and the growth of the Castro.   I’ve been thinking about the 1970s because the program at Lesley University began in the 1970s.   Reading Kossak’s (2009) chapter, The Birth of a New Profession: Lesley’s Expressive Therapies program 1973-present, again I’m struck by how the Humanistic psychology movement and the Open Education movements (which in part gave rise to the Lesley program) seemed radical at the time, but looking back was still upholding many systems of privilege.   While the era was...

  Day 85 – The roof being redone and a burn   Yesterday we had our roof re-done.   I was pretty amazed at the destruction that needed to take place in order to re-roof the house!   There were a few places where the roof was leaking – but it was clear that the whole roof (after 23 years) needed to be replaced.   Still, the whole roof needed to be taken off in order to replace it with a new roof!   That destruction took many hands and many hours, and I was pretty overwhelmed by the metaphor of needing to tear it all off to put on a new one.   I also am recovering from a burn on my arm – I burnt it by accidentally reaching over a steaming water kettle not recognizing I was to the stream of steam coming out of the kettle.   It only took a second for me to scorch my arm – the skin so thin in the place where I burnt it.     Both of these events reminded me of the importance of letting go, of tearing down, and of the possibility of...