Art Therapy Reflection

C is a graduate of the Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness program currently working with at risk youths and their families. She volunteered to work with me as my subject in my class on Psychological Testing, and it felt natural to ask her to do this project with me as well.

She arrived at the session, which was held at my apartment, a little late, and appearing flustered and dissatisfied, complaining about her hair and the general lack of care she’d been giving herself. She said she’d had an intense session that day and I asked her not to say anything more about it, but that we would use this as our material for our session. She immediately asked if I had black paper, and she chose the oil pastels to work with. She was pleased with them because they weren’t “the messy kind.” She drew with a lot of pressure on the paper, and crumbs from the pastels were left behind the strokes she made.

The image is of drops of water falling from the top of the page. As the drops fall they change in color from white to mixed blue and white to mixed red, blue, and white. They also get larger. At the bottom of the page, the drops form a puddle that is red. As she drew, C scribbled both red and white in this puddle, and I mentioned that the pastels could be used as watercolors and got her water and a paintbrush. She used these to blend the colors, but in the finished piece the white strokes as left as distinct shapes within the murkiness created in the blending.

C drew the outlines of the drops first, then went back and drew white highlights to them, showing their reflectiveness. She eventually filled all the drops in with varying amonts of red, white, and blue. There is a progression from the drops on top, which are all white, to a slow dominance of red in the drops toward the bottom where they form the pool.

As C was drawing, I felt a growing heaviness in myself as I felt the pain and sadness that was contained in the picture. With someone I knew less well, I imagine I might have also felt anxious and unfit for the task of interacting with this picture, but with C I felt trusted and trustworthy for this. In the course of our interviews for her pscyhological testing, C has confided some personally intense information, so I was not surprised to find her entrusting me with these intense and heavy images.

When C finished she said “I think I’ve got it all in there now.” It is hard to describe what happened in the next twenty minutes. I first did neutral observing, as described above, and we evenutally discussed what different parts of the drawing meant to C. The drops were tears that represented the sadness that she and “everyone” would feel for her client who had experienced terrible things. They were white at the top because they were the trauma unformed and not fully experienced by him, but as they fall they get bigger and acquire more detail, and eventually become red as the pain becomes more apparent.

Her client is 15 and in a lot of trouble, but C feels that he has never once had a fair shot at life. She feels hopeless that he will ever be able to overcome the trauma. This is why she chose the black paper. She did not want to draw a hopeless drawing, and she thought the black paper would give gravity to the bright colors she meant to use. I mentioned our activity in class where we had to draw something “coming out of the darkness” and C’s eyes squinted and she nodded and said “ohhhhh…” Yes, she said, that’s what she was doing.

C talked about the hopelessness she felt for her client, about how she thought that she could no longer be shocked by terrible stories like his, about how she wanted to be shocked and not inured to evil, and about how she thinks she is just way too sensitive, in the end, to do a job like this one. She thought she had always been a positive person, who saw more good than bad in life, but she didn’t feel that way about this client or life itself in this moment.

Perhaps my own countertransference of not wanting to just sit with unpleasant feelings was at work here, but I wanted to know if there was any light in this darkness, and C said she didn’t know. The pool of suffering and pain at the bottom offered no light. But still, I said, the first detail she had drawn had been to draw glints in the drops. She nodded and smiled. When we finished I asked how she felt and she nodded vigorously and said “Better. I’m so glad about the light that I put in there, and about having had the chance to talk about all this.” She never told me the specifics of her client’s experience, and I did not ask, because it was C’s experience of her client I was focused on, not the severity or content of what had activated her. There may be something quite specific about this particular experience that we could come back to if we were to ever talk about it again, but in this session, it was really about the art and C’s processing of her own reaction in the moment that was the goal. Overall, I think painting the painting and sharing it with me was an excellent process for C. When she arrived for the session she had been flustered and dissatisfied, but after the session, she was more herself. Sometimes, words are really not enough to express a feeling, and creating the art to share with me seemed to allow C to be felt and understood in a deeper way than just telling me about it might have.