What Is Expressive Arts Therapy
Expressive Arts Therapy combines psychology and the creative process to promote emotional growth and healing. This multi-arts approach to counseling uses our inborn desire to create—be it music, theater, poetry, dance, or other artistic forms—as a therapeutic tool to help initiate change. The difference between Expressive Arts Therapy and Art Therapy is that Expressive Arts Therapy draws from a variety of art forms, while Art Therapy tends to be based on one particular art form.
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"Lament" by Jenny Flowers
What to Expect
In Expressive Arts Therapy, you use multiple senses to explore your inner and outer world through the experience and creation of different art forms. Expressive Arts Therapy moves you from everyday expectations into a place of imagination and creativity resulting in art making. Because art comes from a deep emotional place inside you, creativity becomes the pathway to the expression of inner feelings, leading to a process of
self-discovery and understanding.
Your counselor helps you communicate your feelings about the process and accomplishment of art making, and together, you use the creative process to highlight and analyze your problems and issues. Your creative process becomes your road to emotional health.
Since Expressive Arts Therapy is based upon the creative process, not on the final product,
it is NOT necessary to have a background or training in the arts to benefit from Expressive Arts Therapy. Throughout the process, you learn new ways to use the nonverbal language of creativity to communicate your inner feelings, which were not previously available to you by simply thinking or talking about them. Journaling, reading and writing poetry, and making life maps and memory books are all forms of Expressive Arts Therapy that can help you make meaning of your life, tell your life story, as well as help you engage with family and other significant people in your life.
Expressive Arts Therapy Groups and Workshops
Stay tuned for more information on upcoming groups and workshops...
Human Trafficking Resources
Shared Hope International strives to prevent the conditions that foster sex trafficking, restore victims of sex slavery, and bring justice to vulnerable women and children.They envision a world passionately opposed to sex trafficking and a community committed to restoring survivors to lives of purpose, value and choice – one life at a time.
A21 is one of the largest organizations in the world that is solely fighting
human trafficking at a
local, domestic, and international level. All over the world, they are not
just responding to trafficking that is already taking place, but they are actively working on the frontlines to prevent it from happening to begin with.
Exodus Cry is committed to abolishing sex trafficking and breaking the cycle of commercial sexual exploitation while assisting and empowering its victims. Their international work involves uprooting the underlying causes in our culture that allow the industry of sexual exploitation to thrive and helping those who have been sexually exploited.
Rebecca Bender is the CEO of The Rebecca Bender Initiative and founder of Elevate Academy, an online school for human trafficking survivors. She is a human trafficking survivor, leader, advocate, and consultant who equips individuals and organizations to identify and fight human trafficking in their own back yards.