Below is a 500 word blog written on a two day deadline for an addiction recovery and retreat center. My task was to highlight the benefits of art therapy in a unique brand voice characterized by a warm, supportive and empowering sense of community and confidence in the professional staff and personalized treatment options. In addition, the client requested that I infuse a sense of creativity and adventure. This center focused on young males in recovery. The name of the business has been changed.
By Kyle Eason
At Warm Springs Recovery, we treat addiction from every angle in our commitment to achieve long-term recovery. Each person’s experiences are unique, and each individual’s journey to recovery is just as unique. Art therapy is one of the many therapies we offer individuals on their path to recovery. As with other creative therapies, art therapy provides a fresh approach to the treatment of addiction that respects an individual’s needs and is well suited to our small community approach to recovery.
Once one of our practitioners is trained in the visual arts such as drawing, painting, and sculpture and other creative processes, they must become equally qualified as a professional in human development and, especially, psychological and counseling theories and techniques. At Warm Springs Recovery, our approach to art therapy allows us to make use of a variety of forms of self expression such as Soul Collage, Creating a New Story through art journals, Experiential Mask Making, Sand Tray Creation, Sculpting the Stuck Places, Poetry Salons, Painting the Inner Voice and Wounded Maps. Each form has its own unique way of facilitating self-expression and self-development within the broader field of art therapy.
We know that the creative therapies can be very useful as people move through the process of recovery from a place of addiction. Art therapy can provide time to examine and encounter the inner self as well as one’s higher power by providing a form of expression for emotions and feelings that are difficult if not impossible to put into words. These are the experiences, thoughts and feelings that are sometimes, in fact, described as ineffable or unspeakable. They are, simply, beyond or outside of words. Art therapy has a welcome place in our lives when we realize that some experiences need something special - something other than words - to express or describe in a way that enables us to be understood by others and by ourselves. Often, when we are more fully understood, we can allow ourselves to experience our own hearts, our family, friends and acquaintances in a new way. We can say that the world has opened up.
We have found that by facilitating the expression of the unexpressed, art therapies enable us to become acquainted with our more authentic selves and, thereby, raise self-esteem. They give us the security we all need to move into new experiences that exist beyond or outside of our addictive script which has, too often, brought us pain and stagnation. We find new ways to relax into our true selves through creative work.
The creative arts uniquely enable us to create distance between our lived experiences and our reflective selves leading to an experience of greater objectivity with regard to the whirlpool of competing emotions that can often commandeer the attention of our hearts and minds. This objectivity, in turn, leads many to experience a sense of greater control or agency with regard to behaviors. From here, greater social skill development is possible. Individuals often, then, experience enhanced self-esteem, reduced anxiety and a strengthened connection with “reality”.
Ultimately, art therapy brings results that lead to an improved sense of well-being and healthy functioning in society.