The healing power of art

As a therapist working with children and teens, I find I learn much more about what is going on for them by using right brain creative approaches such as play and art.

They often don't understand their emotions, yet alone know how to 'manage' them but these feelings need to be released otherwise they build up and we see explosions of anger and tears, fears and obsessive behaviour to try and control what they feel they can control before things get overwhelming for them.

Because these feelings are usually not logical (left brain) although we do as parents try to find logical reasons by asking 'why' questions, they seldom are that easy to explain which adds to the problem because on top of all the fears and anger, anxiety and sadness, now they feel 'not good enough' because they can't explain them in a way that we the parents, teachers, therapists can understand so we can help them.

But what if instead we allow the incredibly powerful right brain that conjured up the feelings in the first place, to release them?

Expressing the feelings through play and art, enables them to go where they need to go to heal themselves. Change is in your hands, I say. Let your subconscious mind choose colours, shapes, texture, to express and heal those emotions. Suspend the desire to find solutions for them but let them find them in their own way.

Ask your child to just get their feelings onto the paper with whatever colours they want to use. Just use scribbles, shapes, lines or whatever they want but not actual things or people because it's about the feelings not what happened. So if they had a bad day at school ask them to think about how they feel about the day or what happened and express the feelings on the paper. Use large sheets of paper, at least A4 and as many different colours as you have - remember they may well want black which isn't always included in a set of felt pens.

Good questions to ask are:

• tell me about that colour, what does it mean for you?

• that's an interesting shape, tell me about it

• if your picture could speak, what would it say?

• is there anything about the size of that shape?

• is there anything about the number of dots/waves in the wavy line or specific shapes

• anything about where things are on the page

These are examples of 'clean' questions which allow your child to dig deep to explore further. be curious and suspend judgement. This isn't a picture as they might do in an art class at school.

Find out more in my book 'Understanding children and teens' available as an audiobook, paperback, kindle.

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