‘You choose your way’

I always make time for people to express symbolically, to listen, to witness, to visualise, remember, imagine, move and reflect. There are opportunities to explore hopes, fears and dreams through sharing favourite stories, poems, paintings, photographs and other artifacts that evoke something of importance from past, present or future. Other activities that people discover as creatively healing include, knitting, felting, cooking, growing plants, pressing flowers, scrapbooking, mask-making, face painting and bubble blowing. Each person is invited to discover her own routes of self-expression, and if she chooses to, to find ways of sharing these with the others.

I often repeat invitations to  ‘choose your way’. If a person has been disconfirmed in their identity, sometimes from an early age, and fears reprisals for non-conforming, self-expression, she may struggle with choices. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. They hear invitations as instruction, with an anxious concern to ‘do it properly’, ‘get it right’. My invitation is not about directing participants towards pre-determined, ‘ideals’ or outcomes. Responding or not responding to our invitations may mean acknowledging what cannot be changed, recognising current anguish or struggling with repeating destructive behaviours. This can be an immense challenge for those who perpetually feel dominated by punitive persecutory ‘protectors’.

I also offer opportunities: ‘I’d like to invite you now to allow the song/poem/story to pass through your awareness. Just notice what you are aware of. No effort. What do you notice? What did you hear? What thoughts, feelings sensations are evoked in you? What do you imagine? What do you make of what you heard?’ I always encourage individual choice and response, however this might be understood and expressed.

In Creative Therapies work, rather than ask people to explicitly describe or explain their problems or difficulties, I invite exploration of  creative, metaphorical ways of sharing experience across all dimensions of expression. In this way we travel via indirect pathways and cross metaphorical bridges. The intention is to facilitate a safe enough, boundaried distance from anything that might overwhelm, boundaries that are protective yet permeable. This allows for a growing openness to fresh possibilities for curiosity, awareness and acceptance of being, of what is, with ourselves and others in the present moment.

I invite transition into the world of ‘as if’ - an essential ingredient of creative dissociation, of journey, play, of metaphor, symbolic, embodied and disembodied experience.

 I encourage different forms of expression through the body, allowing what might be hidden to be expressed outwardly through movement, gesture or pose, which may be accompanied by vocalisation. We invite the body to speak, encouraging a release of tension, an easing of neuro-muscular locks and blocks. At first, some are understandably tentative about expressing themselves spontaneously in this way. Expression may be minimal at times and shifts may be tiny. All expressions are welcomed as valid contributions to therapeutic process.

Movements, however large or small, validates everything expressed. Insights may be gained as a person becomes aware of where feelings are buried or frozen within.

Creative Therapies involve risk, a leap into an unknown void of possibility that may change us in the process. It can be a messy, unpredictable and at times chaotic process, but at the same time, vibrant and alive. Therapeutic arts are an invitation to accept ourselves as many parts of a whole, wondrous human being. We may venture into into uncharted territory from which there may be no turning back.  

Nurtured within the containing and creative therapeutic circle, where every part of us is welcome, movement towards our own acceptance of our breadth and depth as individuals and as part of our community will have been developed.

If you are interested in finding out more about Creative Therapies/Therapeutic Arts, please contact me

You can read more about my Creative Therapies group work with survivors of childhood abuse in chapter 5 of

2017 – eds. Pool, Z & Jacobs, M. “Counselling Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse: From Hurting to Healing, (McGraw Hill Education)