More Deeply Real

Responsive Tree - mulit-media collage

I want to describe what happens in what I consider an ideal art therapy session. My hope is that visitors to this blog, and potential new clients, can glimpse how I work. The following story is an account of one session with a fictional client named Claudette. Although Claudette comes from my imagination, she is based on what I have experienced working with women like her for over 20 years. She is fictional in order to protect the confidentiality of my clients while also describing, in story form, what could really happen in an art therapy session.

Claudette’s Story

Imagine Claudette, a divorced woman in her mid forties, seeking therapy from me after a relationship ended. In our first sessions together, we talk about her feelings of being unsupported and unnourished in most relationships, especially after her mother died when she was 16.

We are currently exploring how she under-supports and under-nourishes herself through restrictive dieting, and not pursuing career goals. For homework this week Claudette has journaled about what needs to be fed and supported within herself.

Today she comes to therapy with a written description of a dream which she had after writing about her nourishment needs.

The dream (as written by Claudette):
In a dim, dusky place, there is a solitary tree with a large hollow cavity, like a small cave. The tree is old and dying. I feel drawn to it and realize the tree wants me to enter it. As I do, I realize the tree is – at heart – young, feminine, and very sad. The tree needs me to cry because it can’t. My tears fall on the ground within the hollow place and the ground changes from hard and dry to soft and alive. The tree drinks in moisture now and grows younger, filling in with new wood. I am afraid that I will be trapped inside. But the tree tells me to wait. I feel a glowing, warm energy and strength. The tree’s new heart begins to undulate, like muscles gently pushing me out, and I step from the tree into a bright day-lit forest.

The intensity of the dream frightens Claudette but she feels unable to forget it. She had vivid dreams when younger but over the years her dreams seemed to fade.

Claudette wants to create the tree in the dream because she knows it is her. She feels old and dying on the outside but young and deeply sad inside. The weeping in the dream is what scares her the most. But she wants to feel the energy and strength that she had in the dream and the new born hope with which it ended.

She works intently, quietly, urgently using paper, collage materials, oil pastels, to piece together her tree. I create a tree also. As I work, I think about how often trees occurr as healing symbols in client’s art, and in my own. I am struck by the dark center in what we both have made. This dark hollow makes the image more powerful, just like truly grieving connects us to the soul.

Claudette describes her tree as “coming back to life” and points out the “old, grey haired woman” side of it next to a younger, colorful self. She wanted the hollow place to remain unfinished. We talk about how she is becoming conscious of her own sense of emptiness and loss and that it will help her stay present to those feelings by allowing the tree its hollowness. We also talk about the tears she will need to shed as she becomes more accepting of her own grief. Claudette acknowledges that she feels ready to “go there” in our future sessions. We talk about how we can use the imagery of going inside a hollow but also motherly tree to help set the stage for her grief work in future sessions. She takes the tree sculpture home with her with the intention of setting it on her desk and writing a dialogue with it before our next session.

Welcome to my blog.  This is my first post, and my first venture into blogging.  The creative possibilities of this excite me and my goal is to create a place where anyone who is interested in living an authentic creative life can find inspiration, guidance, and affirmation.

I have entered my 21st year as an art therapist.  When I reached my 20th anniversary in this work, I knew that I would need to create something that would help me both reflect on, and honor, the 20 year process of working, living, and engaging with community and world as an art therapist.  Originally, I thought that creative reflection would be done in one of the art forms I have come to know deeply during these 20 years – mosaic, printmaking, poetry, storytelling. Instead, the creative process has totally surprised me.

It began with a total reorganization of my studio, inspired by a series of dreams calling me to give my work a larger, more generous home.  That lead to renewed excitement for the business work of promoting my practice – creating brochures, marketing workshops, etc.  A deep tending and self-validating of my work.

I also sat down at the computer to begin writing what I called my “art therapy memoir”.  So many transformative moments with so many amazing people have been part of my ongoing work-life, with never adequate time to write about them, reflect on them in the here-and-now as I am living them. My thought was that I would go back and reclaim them in this “memoir” process.

But something kept stopping me. Memoir writing energy just wasn’t there.  The last time I sat down to work on this I found myself writing, “I don’t want to go back over the past. I want to write about the present. To live a new, immediate process, not direct my creative energy toward what has already been.”

I also realized that even my methods for writing are based on old practices.  Sitting in the college coffee shop with my spiral bound notebook worked 25 years ago.  Writing at the computer in solitary hours to slowly compile a book that I would send out to publishers has been another way I have often worked. But now I want to combine my own doodles, writing, art projects, photos of others healing art experiences, community interaction, dialogue, story, poetry all in one place.   A living journal, a creative process that does not ever have to be finished, completed, finalized. Something organic. Something that will engage me in a new creative process.

And so this week, when a friend suggested I try a blog rather than update my old, and sorely out of date, website to market my current work, I realized that the blog medium opens up all kinds of new ways of creating for me.  And presents the opportunity for me to share with you the here-and-now life changing events that art therapy, and engaging with unexpected living images, offers us all.

I am very much looking forward to sharing with you the blessings of my work.

So, welcome to this dialogue with creativity.

And welcome to my blog.