Expressive Arts Therapy Can Empower Clients of All Ages

When Suzanne Degges-White, PhD, NCC, LCPC, was serving her first internship as a master’s student more than 20 years ago, she worked in a center that encouraged the use of expressive arts in counseling sessions.

“My interest in the arts began there, and I continued to explore the literature and training in the use of creativity in our work. I integrated sand tray, expressive drawing, and so on into my counseling,” she says.

Dr. Degges-White says that clients of any age can benefit from expressive arts therapy, not only children.

“The expressive arts provide clients with a means of expressing complex feelings, complicated emotions, and even cognitive dissonance in a non-verbal, non-threatening manner,” she says. “Just as play is the language of children, the expressive arts can be another language for adults that allows for expression without verbal description.

“My practice has shown that virtually anyone can benefit from engaging in creative expression in counseling,” she continues. “All of us are ‘artists’ of our own lives—we are constantly making choices as we orchestrate our lives and create the ‘story’ of our lives. Art as therapy has been around forever; in fact, the ancient Greeks would ‘prescribe’ comedy as a treatment for melancholia/depression. The arts usually come very naturally to children and adolescents, but allowing adults to flex their creative side can be just as therapeutic, if not more so, than some sessions of talk therapy.”

To help young people express themselves, Dr. Degges-White recommends that counselors provide drawing materials during sessions, unless there is a safety concern with doing so.

“Inviting clients to draw their feelings versus asking them the traditional ‘Tell me what you’re feeling’ can be really freeing for a client. If a client is dealing with significant prior trauma, sometimes integrating the expressive arts into their session can be extremely empowering. Expressive movement can be a great addition to helping people feel more empowered and able to ‘hold their head up’ or ‘claim their space’ in session and in life.

“With adults, sand tray is a great way to encourage creative exploration of the issues that bring them to counseling,” she says. “Inviting an adult to ‘create a world in the sand’ provides a contained space where the clients are free to build the world, they feel they are functioning within, and this contained space can help a person feel that their concerns are within their control and ‘containable.’

“One of the greatest benefits of expressive arts interventions is that they provide a creative way to express emotions and experiences where words might fail. Sometimes our experiences can be confusing, complicated, or just seem ‘bigger’ than words can adequately describe. By utilizing a more expressive means of communication, clients are able to both get difficult things ‘out into the world’ while also freeing themselves of the burden of holding in their feelings.

“Expressive arts interventions provide metaphors, too, that can feel ‘safer’ to explore and observe and work with than the actual traumatic experience or overwhelming memory/fear that is the motivating factor that brings a client into counseling.”

Dr. Degges-White stresses the importance of focusing on the counseling process rather than analyzing the details of a client’s artistic creation.

“We have to remember that the process is where the healing happens. Counselors recognize that it’s the process, not the product, that truly is the key to healing,” she says, adding that “counselors can invite clients to discuss their work as they create or ask them to share what it was like to engage in the creative process, or to share their feelings as they observe their work, or even invite them to title their work.”

Counselors can learn a lot and gain a new perspective by watching their clients create art, she says.

“Expressive arts provide new ways of looking at problems, creative outlets for imagining new solutions, and a new language that is created by the client and gives a voice to things that a client may feel too uncomfortable to actually speak about at the present time. Just by observing their process, you can watch where they are hesitant to take action or how they may add something to the work then try to undo or erase or go over what they’ve done. Asking about the process helps you help them make sense of their process and their experiences.”

Counselors don’t necessarily need artistic skills to incorporate expressive arts into their sessions, she says.

“One common misconception is that you must BE an artist to engage in expressive arts therapy—people can be so quick to make the statement ‘I’m not an artist’ or ‘I have no talent.’ The counselor needs to help them understand that it is the process, not the product, that holds the healing.”

She recommends some resources for counselors who are interested in learning more about art therapy.

“There are workshops and trainings that counselors can attend that provide information and interventions that can be introduced to their practice. Becoming a music therapist or an art therapist requires a more specialized educational program than most CACREP-accredited clinical mental health programs provide,” she says. “There are institutions that specialize in expressive arts therapy. There are also great resources for counseling professionals as well. I and my co-editor, Nancy Davis, wrote the book Integrating the Expressive Arts into Counseling Practice. It’s in its second edition and was published by Springer Publishing. It includes chapters on the leading theories in counseling and provides specific creative interventions that align with those theories.”

She encourages counselors who are considering adding expressive arts into their sessions, noting that they can be integrated in a multitude of ways to achieve a better outcome.

“My advice is always ‘Go for it!’ The creative arts are so basic to human experience—from prehistoric cave paintings, to the Greeks prescribing comedies or dramatic plays, to the use of poetry to express feelings that prose is inadequate to express, to children engaging in art as soon as they can hold a crayon, to the use of art therapy with World War II veterans by occupational therapists, the use of music to reach adolescents, the power of music when working with older adults, as well, to the use of movement/yoga therapy with PTSD sufferers, and so on. There are so many ways to integrate the expressive arts into counseling practice—the magic of creative expression in the safe space of a counseling relationship is indescribable.”

Suzanne Degges-White, PhD, NCC, LCPC, is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Counseling and Higher Education at Northern Illinois University. She is also a licensed counselor in private practice. She received her master’s in counseling, a graduate certificate in women’s studies, and a doctoral degree in counseling and counselor education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a blogger for Psychology Today and has been interviewed for articles in the New York Times, Time, and other popular publications. She has also been a guest on Good Morning America and frequently appears on local news stations, along with programs on PBS, the BBC, NPR, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Her book Integrating the Expressive Arts into Counseling Practice is available in its second edition.