Diploma in Creative Expressive Arts Therapy

It therefore includes creative and arts therapy ideas from the Gestalt, Jungian and Transpersonal psychotherapeutic schools, as well as spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Gnosticism. As a result, this wide range of knowledge and felt experience allows you as an arts therapist to go to a deeper level in your client work. You can also tailor your therapeutic work to fit individual clients, ages and mental health issues.

Creative expressive arts therapy supports our physical and emotional personal growth as therapists

Forms of creative expressive arts therapy can therefore help us to release our own  feelings and transferences in a kind and loving way. So, there will be self-process and group work on this course. Creativity is an excellent tool in supervision and in our own self-care. We will show you ways of using arts music and other creative media to nourish yourself as a practitioner.

This creative expressive therapies course concentrates on the ideas of Alchemy .

This is the concept of changing ourselves from ‘lead’ to ‘gold’ on a psychological and spiritual level. We will also relate this to the idea of Relational Alchemy, which is the latest trauma model based on the Sensorimotor work of Pat Ogden. In particular, we will explore the belief that our bodies hold suppressed feelings and memories. We believe that somatic, creative therapy can help our bodies to process and dissolve trauma.

Creative expressive arts therapy is more than just art

We will also include arts based therapies such as sandplay, meditation, guided visualisation, movement and poetry during this course. This allows us as practitioners to guide clients to the places where they are drawn. Visual art is very easily incorporated into other therapeutic arts modalities. We will give you the skills to encourage even the most paintbrush-shy client to make their mark.

Creative arts therapies are especially useful when working with complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD).

We will show you accessible techniques to encourage your clients to safely communicate with any young, dissociated parts. A talking therapy session can’t access very early trauma because it happened when we were too young to speak. Our brains weren’t joined up enough to make cognitive meaning out of the world around us. There are many evidence-based and researched techniques behind expressive arts and trauma. We will use the work of Bessel van der Kolk and Stephen Porges.

Art can help us to recover some meaning from our life’s experiences. It can also help us process and therefore heal trauma without having to talk about it.