Therapy art

This is a work of knitting I did last spring for a class in positive psychology. The assignment was to map a strength using any format we wanted. I decided to knit a map of "connectedness."

But what I really want to say about it was how therapeutic the actual knitting was for me, and illuminating. I felt relaxed knitting maybe for the first time ever. Usually, my shoulders are around my ears and I'm clenching my teeth while I knit, but this was a pleasure. I felt more artistic than I do even when I make a pattern up because while that's a technical feat that only requires math and diligence, I had no idea what this would look like when it was done, and no expectations either. It feels like such a finished piece, especially because of the instructions that I wrote as my map of connectedness which extended all the metaphors of the materials and its structure in a very satisfying way.

This project made me fantasize that as a therapist I could knit people artifacts of their therapy. While they talked I could reach for different materials that were somehow significant and knit them into a piece that could represent the journey they had been on. I read somewhere once that Anna Freud knitted while she saw patients, but haven't been able to verify it!  This fantasy gave me an idea of what I would be like as a therapist, as a client spools out the material and together we create the artifact of the therapy. I like the idea of having something concrete coming from the symbolic.

More practically, it inspired me to take this class, because I saw a possibility for a new kind of communication through artwork that words aren't quite enough for.