Practicing Art Therapy

I brought my notebook and some art supplies to Thanksgiving with my immediate family and another family we grew up with. One person in the other family, who is a visual artist, was very excited to try out some art therapy activities with me. I was planning on just doing it with her, but others became interested, and I ended up doing it with her and her sister, and my two sisters. So it became a group of  them. This was fun, but probably kept things a bit more like a class dynamic as opposed to the depth that can happen one-on-one. It made sense to try to keep it somewhat light, given the intensity of the people in the group and the context.

We had colored pencils, oil pastels, and plain white paper, so activities were limited to these materials. I tried to stick to exactly what we did in class. We started with the activity we first did in class - drawing the first letter of your name as a bubble letter. I told them it was a kind of warm-up activity, but then the way I gave the prompt made it more challenging. I ended up saying "fill in the letter with anything that represents you right now", instead of just saying "with whatever you want". I think this direction moved it out of the realm of a "warm-up", and created too much pressure and self-consciousness for a first activity. I tried to back peddle by saying it could really be anything, but the tone had been set. It was interesting to me to notice that a lot of the images that came out of this were abstract. I think this is reflective of the way I asked the question:

Everyone shared what they drew with the group, and also reflected on what the process was like. One person shared frustration with drawing as a medium, sharing that she didn't feel she could really communicate through drawing, felt bad at it, and remembered deciding she was bad at drawing as a young child after comparing her work to others. This is interesting since her sister is a visual artist. A lot of doodling  happened on the pages during the sharing.

Then I decided to try a partner activity since we had a group. Siblings spilt up so each person had a partner who was not a sibling. They made this choice, not me. We did the mirroring exercise with each person taking a turn as a leader and follower with the prompts of making sure the follower could follow you, not worrying about the follower, and then trying to lose the follower. Here is one of them:

People seemed to enjoy this and had a lot of feelings and reactions. I asked them to share which role they were most comfortable in and which most uncomfortable. Everyone had different answers. Some people shared enjoying the first prompt, finding synchronicity and connection in trying to stay together -experiencing it as mutual. Some people expressed being unable to let go of worrying about their follower. After discussing for a while the conversation took an unrelated turn, and some people seemed like they wanted a break.

We were going to end, but then the person who was originally interested said she'd like to do another individual activity. As I started doing this with her, two of the others decided to re-join. We did one of my favorite activities from the class: making a list of six characters representing different roles you take on in your life and then putting two of them in a scene with each other. I really let people take their personal time with this one. I wrote out reflection questions, and then asked them take the additional prompt of writing/drawing a third character into the scene that represents components from each character that you would like to keep and build upon. Everyone was excited to share, although also a little self-conscious. As we began to share some other people started coming into the room- it was important to people that we wait until they had left and closed the door to do the sharing. I think this sense of a closed group was mainly pre-existing (we were all of one generation who had grown up together, and the parents were all in the other room), but was interesting to notice regardless.

Two people chose to write instead of draw - although one of them drew mini representations of the characters, and then of the traits she wanted to pull out of each one. One person drew the scene, but didn't want to draw the new third character in it. She explained it though, and shared about how she is already trying out that new, third character role in her life. One person chose the two characters she liked the best of the six, so in a way the third character prompt was challenging because she didn't select material that she wanted to change, instead chose the characters she most wanted to bring to life in her own life. I really enjoyed doing this. The one person who had originally requested to participate said she loved it and would be excited to do more with me.  She has since asked me to share more of the activities from the class with her.