The Different Creative Therapies

All of the Creative Therapies encourage the development over time of a consistent, trusting relationship between the therapist and the client.  This can address many issues relating to attachment and trust.  However, there are also slight differences and emphasis on different elements in each of the different modes of creative therapy.

Art Therapy

Art making as therapy encourages a playful, and often less intrusive processing through image language.  Image language comes before verbal language in our developmental stages and can access our metaphoric and symbolic thinking more directly.  Symbolic and metaphoric thinking are very powerful tools in problem solving.  Art therapy also encourages imagination and offers a space where people can experience themselves as creatively powerful people with choices.

Creating a physical image also enables the client to express and reflect upon inner senses, emotions, or feelings – especially those which may be ambivalent, paradoxical or less concrete – without needing to find words or translations.  In this way the created images can often hold or contain ambiguity, ‘not knowing’, and areas of messiness.

Images do not have a set ‘meaning’ that therapists interpret, but are viewed alongside the client and reflected upon together.  The image can also hold undesirable, or conflicting parts of the client.  It is important therefore to remember that Art Therapy is not about being good at art or about making aesthetically pleasing images.  However, beautiful images are created frequently in Art Therapy, often after an initial period of disarray, and the ability to create or be part of beauty can also be a hugely positive experience for many people.

Drama Therapy

Dramatherapy has as its main focus the intentional use of healing aspects of drama and theatre as the therapeutic process. It is a method of working and playing that uses action methods to facilitate creativity, imagination, learning, insight and growth.

Dramatherapy is a form of psychological therapy in which the expressive arts – such as drama, movement, voice and sound – are used within the therapeutic relationship. Dramatherapists are both artists and clinicians and draw on their training in drama and therapy to create methods to engage clients in effecting psychological, emotional and social change. The therapy gives equal validity to body and mind within the dramatic context: stories, myths, playtexts, puppetry, masks and improvisation are examples of the range of interventions that a dramatherapist may employ. These will enable the client to explore their life experiences through an indirect approach.

Dramatherapy encourages the use of both the body and imagination to explore thoughts and feelings.  The use of imagination and the body allows the client to come to inner difficulties indirectly, through the safe distance of symbols and metaphors.  By enacting a symbolic story, the client can express themselves at their own pace, both verbally and non-verbally.  The use of stories, improvisation, role-play, games, movement, voice and music also offer the client a chance to explore different ways of being, behaving and relating to others.  Acting in therapy may also help to manage difficult feelings and reduce the need to ‘act them out’ elsewhere. 

Dramatherapy is not geared towards performance – the focus is on the creative process, not the finished result. 

Music Therapy

Music Therapy focuses on using improvised music to access our inherant creativity and promote well-being. Music Therapy uses music as a mode of communication with which to develop a trusting therapeutic relationship. Therapists and clients have access to all sorts of musical instruments including a range of tuned and non-tuned percussion. Self-expression and co-creation in music can enable clients to access and process thoughts and feelings that they may be unable to process using words alone. A feature of the ‘First Relationship’ between mother and infant is the innate ability to communicate cross modally; particularly by translating movements, gestures, facial expressions into sounds and vice versa. In the safety of the therapeutic space, clients of all ages can develop their ability to play creatively and symbolically, increasing their self-understanding and their ability to convey meaning to others. Within the musical interactions, clients can safely express painful, conflicting and abstract feelings, which may feel unmanageable and impossible to express in other ways.

Within the musical relationship, clients sometimes have a very different experience of themselves, including a level of control and a feeling of power, which may be hard to achieve in other areas of their lives. Depending on their reasons for referral, the music therapy relationship can sometimes involve aims such as development of social skills, turn taking, listening, concentrating, language, self-awareness and empathy towards others as well as emotional self-awareness and understanding.

Movement Therapy

More information coming soon…