Questions about art therapy I've been asked over the years

Yes, I'll try to describe problems where I've come to know that art therapy has unique tools to treat:

Low self-image

And dealing with failure and success. Since creation often incorporates both success and failure, it allows processing the issue and gives a more flexible space to the concept of success and failure. In the process, one learns to love what they created — an experience that symbolizes self-acceptance and elevated self-image. All of this, of course, happens alongside the connection and trust created in therapy between patient and therapist, and the processing of content that arises.

Compulsiveness and rigidity

The option to be more diverse in materials, colors, and techniques allows one to be more flexible and less rigid. Thinking is not black and white but in shades.

Eating disorders

Art materials can serve as a symbolic substitute for food. Understanding the need for control (anorexia) or the need to "swallow" everything (bulimia) can be processed through concrete materials as food substitutes. Working in art therapy will influence behavior in life and eating habits.

ADHD / Hyperactivity

In art therapy there is much doing and happening — an experience familiar to attention deficit / hyperactivity. The space that allows and contains the many happenings calms and eases. Additionally in therapy, an opportunity is given to people who find it difficult to think and verbally express their emotions, to express them visually (usually a powerful medium) and understand them this way. Through art therapy, the opportunity is given to go through an experiential process of organization. A corrective experience around failure and success becomes possible.

Bed-wetting

In art materials there are many ways to work with wet materials, like gouache paints, where one can experience wetting symbolically. This also allows controlling and stopping the fluids. The symbolic engagement allows experiencing the experience with permission and processing the motives during the process, and the need to wet outside the room diminishes and disappears.

Constipation and stomach problems

Art therapy is characterized by engaging with dirt and cleanliness that often characterize stomach problems. It also allows working with material that sometimes resembles feces, thereby making it possible and "allowed" to experience regressive and aggressive needs, as well as experiencing control and lack of control. The content that arises will be processed with the art therapist and will help in the change process.

Selective mutism

For those who prevent themselves from speaking in certain situations despite knowing how to speak (selective mutism), art is another language that allows speaking and expressing, and opens a new and safer channel for communication, with verbal communication following later in the process.

Stuttering

The various materials that allow freedom and flow open blockages and anxieties that caused the stuttering. Like the flow of materials, so will the flow of words come…

Shyness

The combination of experiencing art materials and verbal processing allows and helps shy people to open up and be more courageous and open to new things.

Aggression

Art materials and the conditions in the room allow aggression to be expressed through alternative means. The rage is directed to paper that can bear the aggression without being hurt, alongside the containing and allowing therapist who gives meaning to the process.

Self-harm

When a person hurts their body, they usually lack the ability to express anger and difficult emotions outward. Art therapy is an additional, less direct language for expressing these emotions. For aggression directed inward, there is a place and an additional, creative language to express it outward without harming others or oneself.

Psychosomatic illnesses

Usually, when a person cannot express emotions verbally and directly, they revert to the "childish" expression of body aches, stomach pains, etc. Expression through art with the facilitator's guidance allows expressing emotions through the language of art, thereby helping prevent the formation of illnesses that "guarded" against expressing emotions.

Depression

Creation, activity, the different materials and colors help rediscover joy and vitality. Sometimes the expression of sadness and depression is also enabled through art more than through words, and is comforted by the very product that is born.

Of course, there are more problems that can be helped through art therapy that I haven't mentioned.

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