Healing Though Art

The creative modalities are now being recognized as important instruments for therapeutic communication. Through these modalities, people can experiment with new ideas, express feelings, experience fantasies, and resolve fears. Art offers an opportunity to explore personal problems and potential through verbal and nonverbal expression.

The use of Art suggests that the creative process can be a means both of reconciling emotional conflicts and of fostering self-awareness and personal growth. The subconscious mind directs the healing process through the drawing’s focal points. That is what our attention focuses on in a drawing. It is through such drawing that the therapist can utilize the use of symbols as a healing agent. If drawings are direct communications from the subconscious mind, then they cannot be as easily camouflaged as can verbal communications.

Based on the idea that art is a means of symbolic communication. This approach emphasizes the products–drawings, paintings, and other art expressions–as helpful in communicating issues, emotions, and conflicts. The art image becomes significant in enhancing verbal exchange between the person and the therapist and in achieving insight; resolving conflicts; solving problems; and formulating new perceptions that in turn lead to positive changes, growth, and healing.

In other words, both the idea that art making can be a healing process and that art products communicate information relevant to therapy are important.

Art is the symbolic language through which the heart speaks. It is the soul’s voice and the key to transformation. Art is an effective tool used as an alternative to tap into the subconscious mind.

Art offers an opportunity to explore personal problems and potential through verbal and nonverbal expression. The combination of art and hypnosis brings emotions to the surface and allows the client to release them. Once the emotion is exposed and interpreted, the combination of art and hypnosis facilitates the healing process. Art helps us tame our sorrow and allows us to move on to more productive experiences.

The combination of art and hypnosis is an effective tool used as an alternative to tap into the subconscious mind – a creative way of rediscovering the memories and emotions that sometimes cause blocks in more traditional therapy.  I enjoy using this combination in therapy because it can be a guide, a way for me to see what’s going on in a person’s subconscious.  It’s interesting to observe how my client completes each task.  It can be fun, sometimes confusing, healing and certainly diagnostic.