Creativity can be a way of knowing yourself.
You might feel most alive when you’re drawing, dancing, singing or writing.
Expression can come through your hands, voice or body, not only your words.
Music, movement or making something can help you feel more like yourself.
Maybe you feel:
- cut off from your feelings
- drawn to music or art
- stuck in your head
- unsure where to start
Your nervous system holds experiences as images, movements and sensations.
Expressive arts therapy gives what you’re holding a way to be expressed.
What is Expressive Arts Therapy?
Expressive arts therapy uses art, music, movement, drama or writing to explore what you feel and live.
It starts from the idea that creating can help you know yourself in ways talking alone can’t.
Expressive arts therapy works by using creative expression, sometimes in one art form and sometimes moving between several.
It’s especially helpful for grief, trauma and self-esteem, and for people who find talking hard.
Expressive arts therapists care more about the process than how anything looks.
What is an Expressive Arts Therapist?
An expressive arts therapist is a registered therapist trained to use one or several art forms in therapy.
Training ranges from certificates to graduate programs.
Some therapists hold the Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT) credential.
Therapists often move between several art forms, such as art, music, movement, drama and writing.
Expressive arts overlaps with therapies that focus on one art form. Art therapists, music therapists, drama therapists and movement therapists each have their own training.
Many therapists also bring simple creative practices into talk therapy without specialized training.
What matters most is that the therapist is a good fit for you.
The Process of Expressive Arts Therapy
Expressive arts therapy is relational and exploratory, shaped by what you feel.
You might begin with simple materials, like paper and pastels, a song you love or a few lines of writing.
As trust builds, you might let yourself create more freely.
Between sessions, you might sketch, journal or notice the music you reach for.
There's no set length, and the goal is to understand and express yourself in new ways.
Trauma-sensitive expressive arts therapy lets you choose what to make and what to share.
The origin story starts in a hospital bed.
In 1938, artist Adrian Hill was recovering from tuberculosis in an English hospital.
Twenty years earlier, he had been sent to draw the Western Front as an official war artist. Now, stuck in bed at the King Edward VII Sanatorium in Midhurst, he began drawing whatever was around him. He felt it was helping him heal.
The next year, the sanatorium asked him to teach drawing and painting, first to injured soldiers, then to other patients. He watched art ease their distress. By 1942, he had a name for it: art therapy.
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Other arts were finding their way into care too. Musicians played for wounded veterans in hospitals during and after the Second World War. In 1942, dancer Marian Chace began leading movement groups at a Washington, D.C. psychiatric hospital. Drama, poetry and music each grew into therapies of their own.
Expressive arts brought them together. In 1974, artist and psychologist Shaun McNiff started an arts institute at Lesley College near Boston. A year later, it offered one of the first graduate programs to combine art, dance, drama, music and poetry with therapy. Swiss colleague Paolo Knill saw moving between art forms as a way to find what one alone might miss.
Psychologist Natalie Rogers, the daughter of Carl Rogers, had helped lead her father’s encounter groups. She added movement, art, sound and writing to his person-centered approach. She called this way of moving between the arts the creative connection.
But art isn’t always a safe place to express yourself.
Drawings are sometimes treated as tests, with experts deciding what a house or a tree or a color says about you. Being interpreted can feel like being judged.
Movement and drama put your body on display. Being watched, or acting out a scene, can feel like being exposed.
Art can reach trauma faster than you’re ready for. Images can surface before words do. A drawing or a sound can bring back a memory before you know it.
And some residential schools in Canada had children paint while their own cultures were being taken from them. For many families, art still carries that history.
Trauma-sensitive expressive arts therapy works inside those gaps. It lets you be the one who says what your art means. It offers ways to create or move or play without being watched closely. It lets you create at a distance and go slowly. And it makes room for the songs, stories and art forms of your own culture.
Trauma-sensitive therapy starts with what you choose to make.
Trauma-Sensitive Expressive Arts Therapy
What if it isn’t safe to create?
After trauma, expression can feel dangerous and you might go quiet.
In trauma-sensitive expressive arts therapy, you might start by finding colors, rhythms or textures that help you feel safe.
5 phrases you might hear in Trauma-Sensitive Expressive Arts Therapy:
- What would you like to try today?
- It’s okay if nothing comes yet.
- We can keep it small and simple.
- What do you notice?
- It’s okay to move a lot, a little, or not at all.
Trauma-sensitive expressive arts therapy invites you to create safety first.
Principles of Trauma-Sensitive Expressive Arts Therapy
No skill needed
There’s no right way to draw, move or sing here. What matters is how you feel when you make it.
Your meaning
No one else decides what your art means. You can keep it private, talk about it or leave it unexplained.
Distance helps
Art can hold a feeling outside you, where it's easier to look at. You choose how close to get.
Your creation
You decide whether to keep, share or let go of your creation. Some people tear it up, and that’s okay.
Trauma-Sensitive Care
Expressive arts therapy was built to give feelings a form beyond words.
After trauma, feelings can flood you.
Holding back, keeping it small or putting it away can be ways of protecting yourself.
Trauma-sensitive care is a way of practicing expressive arts therapy that uses art to hold feelings, not only to release them.
It honors what you express, when you’re ready.
A trauma-sensitive expressive arts therapist helps you find your own forms of expression.
Trauma-sensitive care lets creating feel like yours.
Questions About Expressive Arts Therapy
How is it different from art therapy?
What happens to what I make?
Can it help children and teens?
Do I need to be artistic?
Does expressive arts therapy work online?
Can it help with trauma?
Where would you like to go next?
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