Expressive Arts Therapy.
Wanting to feel more connected to yourself?
• Longing for a way to bring creativity, playfulness, and meaning back into your life?
• Noticing that you’re stuck in your head way more than you’d like to be?
• Wanting to learn new ways to express yourself and understand your inner world?
• Feeling like you’re at a crossroads in life and need a fresh way to gain insight into your next move?
Expressive arts therapy can help you replenish, reconnect, and reclaim.
Feeling disconnected from oneself and one’s creativity is common in today's fast-paced, logic-driven, productivity-oriented world. Between long workdays, the incessant distraction of technology, and a multitude of pressures (including being “creative on demand”), it can feel difficult to switch gears into something more spontaneous and playful. Yet when we don't take the time to engage our creativity—and we are all innately creative—we lose access to a vital source of well-being and growth.
Feelings of disconnection can be uncomfortable. However, they can also be calls to action. These signifiers of "divine discontent" can often be important messages that it's time to replenish your body, mind, and soul; reconnect with your inner self; and reclaim your creative self-expression. Expressive arts therapy is a way to answer those calls to action.
Person-centered expressive arts therapy encompasses a wide range of creative modalities: visual arts (drawing, collage, painting, photography), writing, poetry, music, movement, storytelling, sand tray, and drama, to name a few. In expressive arts therapy, these art forms aren’t used for aesthetic judgment or critique. Instead, they’re potent tools for self-exploration and self-expression.
The psyche and soul speak in images, sounds, and stories. Working in these registers offers a direct line to what the rational intellect alone cannot reach—the deeper layers of self that hold our wounds, our wisdom, and our unlived life.
This makes expressive arts therapy particularly well-suited for artists, creatives, and seekers who are already fluent in working with the imagination. In addition, those who have found talk therapy alone to be insufficient can benefit from working with an expressive arts therapist.
Many people find that engaging creatively in therapy helps to decrease stress, anxiety, depression, and the effects of trauma.
One reason for this is that expressive arts therapy serves to create containers to express and process emotions that may feel big, unwieldy, or beyond words. Further, expressive arts therapy can help to increase access to emotional centeredness and creative problem-solving abilities.
How I work with expressive arts therapy.
My approach to expressive arts therapy is gentle, invitational, and never prescriptive. For example, we might use others’ art—images and words cut out from magazines, published poetry, symbol cards, or music—as a jumping-off point to start. From that point, there’s an abundance of creative ways to explore your inner world at the pace that works best for you.
The art that emerges in our sessions is for you. It’s not intended for critique, a gallery wall, or being shared beyond the therapeutic space unless you choose to do so. If you come from a formal arts background, I actively encourage breaking the rules, being messy, and experimenting with unfamiliar mediums. Process is emphasized over product.
My training in this area is extensive and draws from multiple lineages, including a certificate in Creative Expression from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, graduate-level training in drama therapy, and additional training in sand tray therapy, dance therapy, play therapy, poetry therapy, and Jungian approaches to expressive arts therapy. (You can read more about my educational and training background on the About page.)
Depending on where you are and what the work calls for, expressive arts in our sessions may include:
• Visual arts: Drawing, painting, collage, and photography as ways of giving form to what lives below the surface.
• Writing and poetry: Journaling, free writing, and working with poetry as portals into the unconscious and the imagination
• Drama therapy: Embodied role, story, and gesture as tools for exploration, processing, and achieving deeper insight
• Movement and dance: Working with the kinetic body as both expressive instrument and source of wisdom
• Sand tray and symbolic play: Working with image, symbol, and play to give form to inner experience
• Music and sound: Using music as a jumping-off point, a container, or a direct access point to emotion and memory
• Expressive arts between sessions: For those who are interested, I offer optional creative prompts to keep the thread going between our time together
Expressive arts therapy is a natural complement to depth therapy and somatic work. When we engage the imagination, the body, and the unconscious together, it can facilitate a reconnection to your inner knowing and what is most alive in you.
For further reading, check out these articles:
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Person-centered expressive arts therapy is an approach to therapy that uses creative modalities—visual arts, writing, poetry, music, movement, drama, sand tray, and storytelling, among others—not for aesthetic purposes but as tools for self-exploration, expression, and healing.
The underlying premise is that the psyche and soul speak in images, sounds, and stories. Working in these registers offers a direct line to what the rational mind alone cannot always reach. That is, the deeper layers of self that hold our wounds, our wisdom, and our unlived life.
Expressive arts therapy doesn't ask you to analyze your art. It asks you to make it, and to pay attention to what emerges. -
Not at all. This is one of the most common misconceptions about expressive arts therapy, and it stops many people from exploring something that could genuinely serve them.
You don't need to identify as an artist, have any particular skill, or produce anything "good." The creative arts are for everybody—they are tools for self-expression, which is our birthright.
The art that emerges in our sessions is for you, not for anyone else's eyes or judgment. It doesn't have to hang on a gallery wall. It doesn't have to be shared with anyone. Rather, it exists to help you access and express what's alive in you—which ultimately requires curiosity, not “talent.” -
No. My role in expressive arts therapy is to witness, guide, and facilitate what unfolds—not to judge, analyze, or evaluate what you make. The art is respected as a doorway rather than a product.
In fact, if you come from a formal arts background, I actively encourage you to break the rules, be messy, and work in mediums that are unfamiliar to you.
The inner critic that may have formed through years of training, critique, and performance is often one of the things we're working with—not reinforcing. Process is always emphasized over product. -
Expressive arts therapy can be a powerful companion for a wide range of experiences. These include stress, anxiety, grief and loss, trauma, burnout, creative blocks, life transitions, a longing to reconnect to oneself, and a desire to deepen creativity and emotional range. It is also well-suited for anyone who feels they've been living too much in their head and wants a more direct, embodied way of exploring their inner world.
Expressive arts therapy can be particularly meaningful for artists and creatives who want to explore parts of themselves that don't get expressed in their professional work. Many people find that there is power and healing in making art with no audience but yourself and the therapist, in the service of your own growth rather than a finished product or external standard.
Frequently Asked Questions
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The key difference is intention and container. In an art class or creative workshop, the focus is on developing skill, producing work, or exploring a medium.
In expressive arts therapy, the creative process is in service of your psychological and emotional well-being. Moreover, it happens within a therapeutic relationship, with trained and thoughtful attention to what emerges.Expressive arts therapy also draws on multiple modalities rather than focusing on one art form. We might begin with music as a jumping-off point, move into writing, and close with a simple drawing following the thread of what the session is calling for rather than sticking to a predetermined medium.
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Sessions vary depending on where you are and what the work calls for. We might begin with others' art— images cut from magazines, a piece of music, a poem, or a set of symbol cards—as a way of stepping out of the analytical mind and into a more imaginal space. From there, the session might move into drawing, collage, free writing, movement, or simply sitting with what has emerged and exploring it together.
Nothing is forced or mandatory. The creative modalities are always offered as invitations, and your comfort and consent guide everything. If something doesn't feel right for you, we simply follow a different thread.
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Expressive arts therapy can be done quite effectively online. I provide clients with a short list of simple, easy-to-find art supplies to have on hand for sessions.
We work collaboratively. For example, I offer ideas for different creative explorations based on what's coming up in session and what you're drawn to.
For those who are interested, I also offer optional creative prompts to engage with between sessions, to keep the thread alive between our time together. -
The three are natural companions. Depth therapy works with the unconscious: the images, dreams, and symbolic material that live below the level of ordinary awareness.
Expressive arts therapy offers a direct way to access and give form to that material: through drawing, writing, movement, and other creative modalities that speak the language of the unconscious.Somatic work brings the body into the room alongside both. When we engage the imagination, the body, and the unconscious together (rather than one at a time), something more complete becomes possible. A kind of integration that doesn't just change how you think about your experience, but how you live in it, and how it lives in you.
Art is medicine.
“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?”
—Angeles Arrien