Читать книгу The Creative Arts in Counseling - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 14

From reading this chapter you will learn about

 The nature of creativity and how the arts have been used historically in helping professions

 The rationale for using the arts in mental health

 The strengths and limitations of using the creative arts in counseling today

As you read, consider

 What your favorite artistic expression is

 How your favorite art has helped you be more mentally healthy

 How you think you might be able to help someone using your favorite art or theirs

Counseling is a profession that focuses on making human experience constructive, meaningful, and enjoyable both on a preventive and on a remedial level. It is like art in its emphasis on expressiveness, structure, and uniqueness. It is also creative in its originality and its outcomes. Both are novel, practical, and significant.

This book is on the uses of the creative arts in counseling. The creative arts are frequently referred to as the expressive arts (E. Levine & Levine, 2017). They are defined here as art forms that range from those that are primarily auditory or written (e.g., music, drama, and literature) to those that are predominantly visual (e.g., painting, mime, dance, and movement). Many overlaps exist between these broad categories. In most cases, two or more art forms are combined in a counseling context, such as literature and drama or dance and music. These combinations work because “music, art, dance/movement, drama therapy, psychodrama, and poetry therapy have a strong common bond” (Summer, 1997, p. 80).

As a group, the creative arts enhance and enliven the lives of everyone they touch (Neilsen et al., 2016). Cultivation of the arts outside of counseling settings is enriching for people in all walks of life because it sensitizes them to beauty, helps heal them physically and mentally, and creates within them a greater awareness of possibilities. The arts help patients and clients by increasing self-esteem, improving motor coordination and body control, providing relaxation, teaching coping skills, decreasing acting-out behaviors, and developing awareness of emotions or underlying issues (H. Kennedy et al., 2014). “It can be said that . . . creative endeavors offer multidisciplinary ways to give voice to the human internal experience and to act as catalysts for learning about the self and the world at large” (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 44).

In counseling, the creative arts help to make clients more sensitive to themselves and often encourage them to invest in therapeutic processes that can help them grow and develop even further (A. Kennedy, 2008). As such actions occur, participants may give more form to their thoughts, behaviors, and feelings and become empowered. Aside from formal counseling sessions, “acts of artistic expression, in and of themselves, carry their own healing” (MacKay, 1989, p. 300). Involvement with the arts helps individuals recover from traumatic experiences and the stress of daily living. Thus, individuals who are involved with the creative arts inside or outside of counseling usually benefit in multiple ways.

The possibilities for using specific creative arts in counseling, singularly and together, are covered in various ways in this book. Mental health professionals can use established arts, such as books and drama, or art making, such as writing and role playing, to improve and enhance the physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being of individuals of all ages. The processes and outcomes of using the arts in a therapeutic manner are addressed here as they relate to specific client populations. Just as becoming a painter takes talent, sensitivity, courage, and years of devotion, a similar process is at work in counseling: The actual practice differs from knowledge of theory. Csikszentmihalyi (1996) hypothesized that it takes at least 10 years of being in a field before a person is able to master it. Thus, the 10-year rule for bringing talent to fruition seems to apply to artists, counselors, or anyone who is refining their talent. Therefore, although the ingredients necessary to enrich counseling through using the arts are emphasized here, effective implementation of these skills and processes will only come with practice on the part of the counselor—you!