The Secrets to Using Art as a Healing Process

• • Identify and overcome challenges that therapists face when inviting clients to engage with a creative process
• • Detect and minimize safety issues associated with asking clients to make art in session
• • Increase therapists' skill level with employing art interventions
• • Implement art invitations that assist your clients in reaching a broad range of therapeutic goals
• • Utilize creative therapeutic dialogue with clients about their art
• • Integrate art invitations into therapy
• • Recognize the relationship between problem-solving and the creative process
• • Apply art therapy interventions that effectively accommodate the client's developmental stage of emotional representation
• • Explain to parents of child clients how they can best respond to their child's art and support their child's creative problem-solving
• • Describe how art can be helpful in creating felt sense experiences in therapy

Using Art in Therapy Safely and Effectively
Going beyond words and creating felt sense experiences in therapy is important in promoting lasting change in client behaviors, functioning, and relationships. Making art can be a powerful tool in therapy to create movement with stuck clients and establish a new level of discovery and change. While many therapists recognize the power of art in therapy, few understand the risks associated with asking clients to create art. Furthermore, the ability to utilize an art invitation in session as a problem-solving tool requires artful introductions, creative communication and dialogue, and practice with the creative process. While some clients benefit from talking about their art, others do not, and it is essential that therapists understand where clients fall on this continuum. To invite a client to make art in session is to ask the client to be creative. Therapists cannot be effective in this endeavor if they do not understand that the creative process entails risk-taking, partnering with the unknown, tolerating fear and anxiety, and overcoming past criticism.

This course will provide participants with skills to invite and inspire clients to make art in session. Using art in therapy requires a creative approach. Ten powerful art invitations will be taught as tools participants can use to seamlessly introduce art into therapy. Participants will learn the importance their words have on clients' art-making, starting with the way in which the client is invited to make art, all the way through to closing an art-making session. Creative therapeutic dialogues will be modeled and practiced so participants can take their clients beyond interpretation into new discoveries that are highly personal and experientially productive. Participants will become confident in utilizing creative art interventions and approaches in therapy by discussing, modeling, and practicing the creative process. Attendees will participate in several hands-on art activities during the seminar that will be meaningful, both professionally and personally. Attendees will leave knowing the safety issues and warning signs that can cause re-traumatization and other negative side effects, and understand how to minimize these risks.