“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for”
-Georgia O’Keeffe
Art therapy is the collaborative meeting place of art making, counselling, and psychotherapy. It is grounded in the core belief that expressing ourselves through the creative process and supported reflection can give insight, comfort, and a clearer understanding of our lived experiences and emotions.
Working with arts materials in session allows a means to express, process, integrate, and contain experiences that may be too big or too overwhelming to put into words. It can also be useful in tapping into and expanding capacities for joy, connection, insight, and peace.
Art therapy is a means to get in touch with ourselves, our experiences, our feelings and emotions beyond the limits of language;
a tool to support and guide us, and connect to our healing in a way that words alone cannot.
HOW I WORK
Approach
My approach to art therapy depends heavily on your specific needs and comfort level. For some, art therapy may look like space and permission to create while we talk, either intuitively or with a specific theme or image in mind. For others, I may present a prompt aimed at expressing or uncovering feelings about your life experiences and reasons for coming to therapy.
Sometimes we may work with art and imagery to bring you back to yourself, to create a sense of safety, or to contain an overwhelming experience or feeling. Other times, we may work with art and imagery to lean in, to uncover and to process those experiences.
Whatever we do, however we create, the emphasis is on your process and what feels authentic and supportive to you in the moment.
Cairn Counselling & Art Therapy 