Читать книгу The Creative Arts in Counseling - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 103

When working with people with eating disorders, for whom perception of self is greatly distorted, counselors sometimes combine dance and movement with projective drawings (Krueger & Schofield, 1986). The idea in this treatment is to help clients to

 immediately visualize the movement experience they just had,

 symbolize and objectify this experience in a drawing,

 depict current developmental issues that have arisen because of what they have been through,

 have a concrete means (i.e., the drawing) of bridging the transition between nonverbal and verbal means of expression, and

 measure progress and change.

Drawings are usually made at the end of each DMT session, and the individual and overall effects of the drawings are analyzed by practitioners for patterns and symbols that will help create insight. Art and movement are also combined in the treatment of chemically dependent individuals. In this inpatient work, “concrete art and movement tasks are applied to parallel” each of the first four steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (www.aa.org; Potocek & Wilder, 1989, p. 99). For example, in Step 1, in which addicts admit they are powerless over alcohol, participants construct with chairs the walls of a pit while despondent, self-absorbing music plays in the background. They take turns climbing over the walls and sitting in the pit in a darkened room. While there, they draw their feelings on a large piece of brown paper on the floor. In all four steps, similar movement and art exercises are experienced with the intent of promoting abstract thinking and making intangible emotions clear.