The Therapeutic Power of the Arts

One or Two Day Training Workshop

This course was devised and is facilitated by Helen Cruthers

The creative arts can play an important role in any therapeutic work, giving individuals of all ages broader opportunities for self-expression, self-exploration, and self-development. The arts (movement, music, painting, drawing, puppets, sandtray work, metaphor) can offer new languages with which to communicate and encapsulate experience. This is especially important for those who find it hard or limiting to express themselves verbally.

Using the arts therapeutically can enhance clients' opportunities to:

• Express and externalize feelings and perceptions

• Articulate and communicate their experience

• Gain insight and understanding into themselves

• Nurture and strengthen their ‘inner child' – through play and creativity

• Contain powerful and complex feelings

• Explore transformation and potential.

The arts may also offer therapists the opportunity to enhance their own creativity, insight and self support. This workshop will provide a safe and stimulating space for practitioners to explore their creative energies. There will be opportunities both for personal exploration and for facilitating others' self expression.

Theoretical input will include:

• the role of the arts in humanistic therapy

• the Gestalt contribution

• ethical issues in working with the arts

• the arts and subpersonality/inner child work

What's the next step?
Please feel free to contact me for any further discussion of how I may be able to help – 07753 474768 or
helen.cruthers@gmail.com.