S2E6: Art Therapy Can Provide Healing Beyond Words

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[00:00:20] Jasper Nighthawk: Welcome to The Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories, and come together to win victories for humanity.

I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. Today, I’m really looking forward to a conversation with two art therapists, who are also scholars in the field of art therapy and instructors of art therapists in training. We’re planning to talk about what art therapy is, how it’s arrived at this place of increased prominence across the world of therapy and also who art therapy can benefit as more and more people have the opportunity to access it.

When I was thinking of questions for this episode, I remembered this famous line from the cultural critic Theodor Adorno. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, he said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This is a somewhat contested line. It’s also so famous that a lot of people have ideas about it, and I think he later walked it back. I was thinking about it. I was thinking that art therapy kind of inverts this pronouncement. It says that after trauma, we should make art, that art can help us heal, and that maybe it even offers some pathways to healing that more traditional talk therapy can’t, like art making is this really powerful act.

To wind through to introducing our guests, I would say that as a poet and fiction writer myself, I have seen this power of making art, but I just want to clarify that art therapy is more than just that, and that’s really what I’m excited to talk about and draw out from our guests.

To learn about all of this, I want to introduce, first of all, Amy Morrison. Amy is Core Faculty at Antioch New England’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program, and she is herself a Board Certified, Registered Art Therapist and a Licensed Mental Health Counselor. Amy has been teaching in higher education for over 15 years, and she is herself an active artist and an active art therapist. Welcome to The Seed Field Podcast, Amy.

[00:02:26] Amy Morrison: Thank you, Jasper. Happy to be here.

[00:02:29] Jasper Nighthawk: We’re also joined today by Beth Donahue. Beth serves as Teaching Faculty in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Antioch Seattle. Beth, like Amy, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and a Registered and Board Certified Art Therapist. She has many years experience practicing as an art therapist in an inpatient residential treatment facility for adolescents who are struggling with acute mental health diagnoses and developmental disabilities.

I’m hoping that we’ll get to talk a little bit about how art therapy can access and help people struggling with those issues. In addition to her teaching work, Beth currently maintains a private practice in Downtown Seattle. Welcome to The Seed Field Podcast, Beth.

[00:03:13] Beth Donahue: Thank you Jasper, I’m happy to be here as well.

[00:03:15] Jasper: To start us off, I want to make sure that I am understanding what art therapy really is. I think that a lot of people who’ve ever worked with clay or played music or whatever, like there’s this therapeutic relaxing effect and especially if you’re dealing with depression or anxiety, that can feel really good, but that’s not exactly what art therapy is. So maybe we could start with Beth, what makes art therapy different? What is art therapy?

[00:03:38] Beth: Yes, absolutely. It’s true that art making is therapeutic, and it doesn’t matter who’s in the room, if it’s just yourself or you’re with a group of other artists, making art can be healing, and it can be a way to communicate symbolically with one another, but what makes it art therapy is the presence of a trained art therapist in the room.

A lot of that training and experience focuses on how to appropriately use media, how to choose which media is most therapeutic in the moment for the issue or goal that clients are working toward, as well as how to communicate about the art that is created. While creating art at all can be therapeutic, art therapists can really take it to the next level with you because of their training and experience.

[00:04:30] Jasper: Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. Amy, would a classic session with one of your clients include a lot of discussion? Would you be making art for most of the time or would it vary? If you could just walk us through what a session with a client might look like?

[00:04:46] Amy: Sure. I’m so happy to do that. Well, it depends on who I’m working with, but typically, most people are coming to therapy for a reason, there’s a treatment goal or there’s a treatment plan in mind. If people are walking into my office, which also looks like a studio, the first part of the art therapy experience really is the relationship with the art therapist. There’s typically a moment of hello and catching up from when you last saw each other so there’s this link to the importance of the work that you’re doing together.

Then, yes, I immediately, we go to the table or we go to the shelf, we go to the materials or to the portfolio and find the work we’ve been working on, find the drawing, find the painting, and remind ourselves of what we’re doing together. I think that’s really important, and check in about the symptoms or the problems or how people are doing. Then, in my way of working with art therapy is working alongside the client, but is both of us are making art for a large portion of our time together. Then, there’s a time where we’re talking about the artwork that we made.

[00:06:03] Jasper: That’s beautiful. It has that kind of reflective, but you’re both engaged, but you’re very much making art. It’s not like you’re just doodling while you have a therapeutic conversation.

[00:06:13] Amy: We don’t want to minimize doodling though. Doodling is also quite important, but you’re right, the art we’re making has a different kind of purpose, but yes, exactly, Jasper.

[00:06:24] Jasper: What are some of these media that you would be working with?

[00:06:29] Beth: Oh. Well, it’s a long list, maybe I’ll start with some, and Amy, you can add what I miss. Thinking about conventional art materials that many people are familiar with, painting, acrylic and oil, drawing with graphite or color pencils, markers. Art therapists work also in three dimensions with clay and other sculpture, media. Art therapists more recently are also working with digital media, tablets and styluses, photography, has been present in the field for many years. Amy, what am I missing? What would you add?

[00:07:09] Amy: Yes. I think developmentally, and I work with a lot of younger folks. I’m thinking about a lot of sensory materials, like anything basically that you can get your hands into, all different types of clay, including natural clay and Model Magic and even some self-made salt clay, all different kinds of exciting things that can be made, finger painting, found objects. I’m also a big fan of using office supplies as art materials. I really feel like just as creative as we can be in session, we can be just as creative as what we understand an art material to be. Yeah.

[00:07:53] Jasper: I love this. I want to ask some maybe uninformed questions, but is art therapy mainly primarily for children?

[00:08:01] Amy: Oh, yes, that is a wonderful question, and I think one that Beth and I probably get this question frequently. Even though yes, I do work primarily with children and adolescents, I also work with adults, but art therapy is for everybody.

[00:08:16] Jasper: Beth, I would ask you, art therapy, does it work for people who already have an identity as artists or is it for people who are further from making art as part of their everyday lives?

[00:08:28] Beth: Oh, that’s a wonderful question. Along with the question about, “You’re an art therapist, you work with kids,” is an assumption people make, and sometimes people think, “Oh, you’re an art therapist, that means you’re a therapist for artists,” which is also true. Many of my clients are also artists. That does bring a different flavor to the art therapy session, but artists and not-artists are both equally benefited by working with an art therapist.

[00:09:01] Jasper: That’s great. Beth, I understand you’re going to be teaching a class about the history of art therapy in this next term, and I think it would be really useful for this conversation for us to also bring in some of that history. I was hoping you could give us the two-minute pocket history of art therapy.

[00:09:20] Beth: I can definitely, yes, give it a try. In interest of time, I’ll try to keep it as brief as possible. One helpful way to do that is to narrow the scope of that question a little bit to possibly the history of art therapy in North America. Art therapy is practiced all over the world, and I am less familiar with international art therapy practices, but here in North America, art therapy kind of evolved along two tracks and there are two founders of our field that we talk about a lot,Margaret Naumburg and Edith Kramer.

Margaret Naumburg practiced what we sometimes refer to as psychoanalytic art therapy. For her and for people who align with this way of working in our therapy, it’s about using art as a communication tool and using the foundations of psychoanalysis along with art making to explore symbolism and thoughts and feelings alongside the client.

Edith Kramer approached art therapy in a very different way, but that also works congruently, and for Edith Kramer, it’s all about the art making, the art making process is the therapy, that is the therapeutic nature of art. The field of our therapy in North America sort of coalesced around these two ideas and over time, has incorporated both ways of working.

The art therapy in North America began emerging during and after World War II, really gained some traction in the ’60s mostly on the East Coast and then has evolved and merged over toward the West Coast and now we’ve got our therapists all over the place. There’s art therapists anywhere you can think of.

[00:11:07] Jasper: Now we have you, Beth, in Seattle, and you, Amy, in New England,-

[00:11:11] Amy: It’s true.

[00:11:12] Jasper: -both doing art therapy in the same art therapy program. It’s super interesting to know the history of the field a little bit better, and thank you so much for clarifying that this is kind of the history of art therapy in North America in the last 100 years. I think it can be easy to just operate in a world where we’re just imagining that the US is the center of everything and all time so that’s really useful.

Talking about the history of art therapy, I also would love to know both of your history, I think that that informs this conversation too. Before we go on, Amy, would you share with us what we would need to know to understand why you have decided to make this your life’s work?

[00:11:55] Amy: I love hearing that, my life’s work, and that’s really true, but I don’t think I’ve ever really said that phrase that art therapy is my life work, but it really is. I think what’s important to understand in my own professional development is that, first, my family has a really strong value of if you can give, then you should give; if you can do something to help someone, then you should be doing that, so there was a real support for volunteering, for working with people who were disadvantaged.

Along with that was also this real freedom in my own childhood to be imaginative and to play and to be able to develop my own world, and that for myself was incredibly healing and then I was really fortunate to have an incredible art teacher who just asked me about myself and was curious about my own art, and through conversations with her, she said, “You know what? I think you need to meet my friend who’s an art therapist.” Then–

[00:13:11] Jasper: Wow. This is when you were a child or a teenager?

[00:13:16] Amy: Yes, in high school, high school art teacher. Then, her friend who was an art therapist named Katharina Bruner, was an art therapist in what they called then a psychiatric institution. Another important part of this is that my young self, my 17-year-old self, went into a place where I’d never been to where people were experiencing symptoms and actively expressing those symptoms through hallucinations, talking about things they saw that I didn’t. Then, the art therapist’s name was Katharina Bruner.

Katharina took me into her clay studio where these same people came in, started working on their art, started working on making whatever they were working on, a bowl, a pot, and the conversations really shifted to their artwork. Their identity became one of an artist, and they were no longer what was then called mentally ill. They were bringing their best selves into the space, and what I saw was such an identity shift and such wellness emerging. It had a huge impact on me, and I think maybe I even raised my hand and was like, “Yes, sign me up. This is what I want to do. This is who I want to be. I want to be able to offer this beautiful opportunity in spaces that maybe are kind of scary.”

[00:14:44] Jasper: Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Amy. That’s an amazing – your description of your childhood as both having this ethic of if you can give, you should, and at the same time being filled with play and art. That’s such a great combination. Then to have this transcendent experience of this is where I’m meant to give back. That totally sounds like your life’s work, like it makes sense on a whole life level.

Turning from you Amy, Beth what’s your story with art therapy? Like what should we know to understand why you’ve chosen to be an art therapist and train other art therapists and perhaps even make this your life’s work?

[00:15:26] Beth: Jasper, this is one of my favorite questions that art therapists answer for each other and for other people, it’s always fascinating to hear what draws people to this field. My story is a little bit different than Amy’s. I wish that I had known that art therapy was a thing at all, but I didn’t until long after I graduated from college. I’ve always identified as an artist and a maker of art.

I was also very drawn to the field of psychology. My undergraduate work was in psychology, I have bachelor’s in Psychology. I was very lucky and so grateful that during this time I met a person, who went to my college, he went to my university, who was an artist. He was in the Fine Arts Program, and we, after school every day, most days, would go hang out at a cafe close to the university and make art together. I was so grateful for that time because as a psych major, there wasn’t a lot of art making time in my schedule, but I had that time with this person.

Then, really quite tragically, this person who I was very close friends with developed schizophrenia and over time, over about a school year, our ability to communicate verbally was really challenged. We were experiencing two different realities and unable to connect really the way that we used to through talk but what we were able to do more and more was communicate through the art. We were able to communicate through symbols and through color and shape and I was able to still connect with my good friend even though we weren’t able to talk together.

It wasn’t till years later that I finally thought about Googling “art and psychology.” In my defense, Google wasn’t a thing when I first had my first experience with the therapeutic power of art making, but I Googled art and psychology and found that art therapy is a thing and not only that but there was a very well-respected program in Seattle at Antioch University. I had moved away from Seattle but was interested in moving back, and there it was, and it all came together. I applied and was accepted and then finally got to learn about art therapy as a profession.

[00:17:45] Jasper: Wow. Thank you so much for sharing that story. That’s also really beautiful and has a sad part, I’m really sorry about your friend went through that, but I think that that kind of leads into my next question. I want to talk about the power and also the social justice possibilities within art therapy. One of the things that art therapy offers is this potential of reaching folks that maybe traditional therapy can’t offer. Amy, could you tell us maybe some of the ways that art therapy can be useful in place of or alongside other therapies or maybe in situations where other therapies would be less useful?

[00:18:23] Amy: Yes, what a fantastic question. I think that that’s one that is easy to answer, and I’m stumbling thinking about all the ways to answer it. One is that a lot of our experiences being human that we may have may not easily be translatable into words. Specifically, I’m thinking about people who experienced trauma and how language does not– there may not be words to describe what happened or how somebody survived a situation, and yet art making can access a way to share what that experience was or begin to unlock some more possible ways of communicating.

Definitely I think about people who have experienced trauma and also developmental trauma. Just in class today too– and I know Beth and I are teaching and sometimes our classes crossover, and in ways we were talking about how the sensory nature of using art materials can sometimes access a memory recall that was not accessible before, so the process of creating can kind of make a memory available that wasn’t before. Then, again, the presence of the art therapist is what supports the safety in that moment for that to be expressed.

[00:19:52] Jasper: Yes, like the safety and also the accountability, like you might have a memory on your own and be like, “Nope, not today,” and push it back down.

[00:20:03] Amy: Yes. That’s a really good point. The art therapist does bring the purpose for your time together into the center. That’s for sure.

[00:20:12] Jasper: Yes. I’m so interested what you said about it being embodied. I think between– I mean, the famous book, The Body Keeps the Score, but it seems like there’s an evolving understanding of trauma across our society to see that it’s really something that’s embodied and it’s not necessarily something that we can just get out through the brain. There are all these therapies like EMDR or other somatic therapies that aim to access the body what the body knows, but does art therapy present these different ways to access traumas that might not be at the surface otherwise?

[00:20:50] Beth: 100% along with what Amy was talking about being able to access memories that we might not have words for. We actually know that some traumas are actually not even stored in the same part of the brain that language is, so it’s not actually even possible to make that connection in the brain and have words for what has happened to you, but it is stored where our symbolic language is stored. If you are trying to process a trauma, if you were trying to explain what has happened to you to someone else and there are no words, there is no way to access that through language, but you can put something on a piece of paper.

You can put some symbols and some lines and some shapes down on a piece of paper that represents what happened to you. Not only does that help you to communicate your experience to the art therapist, it also gets that memory outside of you and onto a surface that you can then reflect on, that you can get some distance from, that you can put aside if you need to, and then bring out again when you’re ready. Art making not only helps us access the information that we need to to process a trauma, it also helps us communicate that to someone else, and both things we see as therapeutic and necessary.

[00:22:18] Jasper: Yes, that’s beautifully put, that two-step process. It seems really clear to me that this is an important therapeutic modality and really should be accessible to all the people who it could help. I want to talk about the future of art therapy. I didn’t mention this in your introductions, but you have both spent like the last year setting up this new online art therapy master’s program here at Antioch University. You just launched it a couple of months before we’re taping this in fall of 2021. I think, first of all, I just want to say congratulations, what an enormous thing.

[00:22:55] Amy: Thank you.

[00:22:56] Beth: Thank you.

[00:22:57] Jasper: I know that one of your goals in designing the program was to infuse it with Antioch’s social justice mandate and that’s something that you see as setting your program apart maybe and make it distinctive is that you have this social justice mandate in the program. Amy, could you tell us some of the choices that you made differently and like how specifically you approached designing this curriculum to make sure that it had those characteristics and that maybe distinguish it from the way art therapy has traditionally been taught?

[00:23:27] Amy: I definitely feel like Beth has been my partner in this development and that alone is a social justice piece, is that we come together to have conversations and discussions and there’s, I guess I’m thinking hierarchically too. Like we have support to have these conversations before we make decisions. We’re really thinking about our curriculum development.

We’re thinking about whose voices we’re including and we’re asking ourself about what voices are missing, but even before that, choosing to have a program online is a socially just decision in that people don’t actually have to move to New England, which is an extremely expensive place to live and people don’t have to move to Seattle or the West Coast. Really with this online platform, the way that we can open up our programming and training of art therapists is expansive.

[00:24:26] Jasper: Yes, that seems like a great foundation to build upon, is that you want it to be accessible both that people can enroll in it without having to totally upend their lives and go into tremendous amounts of debt, but also to see themselves and their experience reflected in the curriculum that you’re putting together.

[00:24:44] Amy: Absolutely.

[00:24:44] Jasper: Beth, did you have anything to add to the decisions that you guys made and how you infused the social justice mandate into the curriculum?

[00:24:53] Beth: Yes. Along with what Amy is talking about, once we thought about the delivery, we also thought about the admissions process and how the traditional application process to a graduate program often makes graduate school inaccessible for people. We thought about changing the ways in which people can express their desire and interest in a program, how they can express their particular gifts and talents, what they hope to bring to the field. Usually that traditionally has been done through essay questions. You apply to grad school, of course you have to write these essays.

We do find that that is an important part of an application, but we also included a video response. One question is asked, and we ask for students to submit a video, that allows people to communicate with us in a way that isn’t writing, which is not everyone’s strong suit. We also opened up the letters of recommendation that we require. We made that more expansive. We’re interested in hearing from people that can speak to applicants’ skills and passions and desires to become art therapists. What am I missing, Amy? We spent a lot of time talking about admissions and making that so much more accessible than it has been traditionally.

[00:26:14] Amy: We also have an interview, and we try to keep that either individual or a very small group, and that gives us an opportunity to really meet the person and to get a sense of them and for them to get a sense of us as well and then there’s the portfolio, being able to see artwork as well that they’ve selected to share with us. That’s also really important.

[00:26:39] Jasper: Thank you so much for spelling this out. I don’t know if this is like specific to me, but I’m always so interested to know, just like the thought process that goes into setting things up and all the different points that you’re able to identify and be like, we can lower a barrier here or we can make this more accessible to a broader range of people.

I naturally was thinking like, “Oh, they’re going to just change who they read, or like, they’ll add a couple Black theorists who are overlooked,” but this sounds like a much more profound change. It’s just super interesting to hear you guys and also just like you’re collaborative, back and forth how you identified all of these places to make these changes.

[00:27:21] Beth: We’re hoping so, and this is also an ongoing process. It’s not possible to design a socially just graduate program and then say, “Okay, we’re done. That’s it. We’ve got it nailed down.” It’s an ongoing process, and one thing that we did explore and are continuing to explore is something that you just alluded to, changing the material that is delivered in class, changing the readings and the assignments that we offer to students to promote and assess learning.

We did explore changing. We did change text, we did change articles that are assigned, but we expanded our definition of graduate school material to include not just peer-reviewed articles and textbooks, which are important parts, but also those leave out a lot of very important voices that are talking about things that we want our students to learn about and things that Amy and I also want to learn about. We include vlogs and blogs and social media posts, TikToks, and Instagram. We want to make sure that we are giving a place for the voices of people who are talking about the issues that are important to our students, so those things are all included in our classroom experiences as well.

[00:28:37] Jasper: That’s great. It sounds like such an approach of like “yes and and”-

[00:28:41] Beth: Exactly.

[00:28:41] Jasper: -rather than being like, “We’re going to subtract here so that we could add in a little bit more here.” It’s like, “No, we’re just going to go around everywhere and try to make these changes.” I know that one other change that you made was you made a point of bringing in new technologies and multimedia into the space of art therapy. One of these changes is to ensure that every student has access to a tablet and a stylus so that they can make digital art. Can you guys tell me why are you emphasizing digital art and multimedia art?

[00:29:10] Beth: I think it’s a dual-purpose emphasis, at least two purposes. One challenge that Amy and I talked about when we thought, “Oh, we’re going to make an online art therapy program” was “Well, wait a minute. What about art making? Like so much of an art therapy graduate program experience is making art together in spaces and observing others making art and talking about art making. How are we going to do that if everybody is on Zoom?” We’ve got lots of good ideas and we’re exploring ways and succeeding in making art with conventional media over Zoom and then there’s this other world of technology that we can use.

Our students all have styluses and iPads as you mentioned, Jasper, and we can make collaborative art using those together. We can also quickly create and then share art via the share screen feature in Zoom, and that’s amazing. It’s partly we incorporated technology to facilitate learning in the program but also it is true that people who seek out art therapy, our clients are more and more bringing in technology into our offices, and we want our graduates to be experienced and skilled in working in that way so that they can meet their clients where they are at.

[00:30:33] Jasper: That seems relevant at any time that you’re running an online art therapy program, but it certainly seems hyper-relevant in the context of a pandemic that caused so many people to have to engage in teletherapy.

[00:30:44] Amy: Yes, absolutely.

[00:30:46] Beth: Yes.

[00:30:47] Jasper: Well, we’re coming to the end of our time with you guys. Thank you so much for coming in. We always like to close our show with an insight or a suggestion from our guests that listeners can bring to their everyday lives. For this, I know that if our listeners want to engage in art therapy, like the answer really is seek out an art therapist, get art therapy, but I think that there are also insights from this that we can bring into our lives if we’re not quite ready to make that step. Amy, I want to start with you, is there an insight or suggestion from the practice and theory of art therapy that we could all stand to apply in our lives?

[00:31:25] Amy: Oh, yes, and I agree this is a beautiful way to close. I think engaging with our natural world, we were just talking about the support for the digital world, which I also am a big advocate for, digital art making, but also getting out into nature and engaging with your world and making art, taking that next step to have a daily sketchbook. I’ve had a sketchbook, I think, since I was two, and that daily practice of recording our life experience can really provide for a lot of beauty and pleasure and reflections. Getting out and recording your experiences through journaling or sketching would be my suggestion for engagement.

[00:32:15] Jasper: I’d like to ask the same question of you, Beth, is there some insight or suggestion from art therapy that you think those of us outside the field could profit from incorporating into our days?

[00:32:24] Beth: I am going back to what Amy said. She said, “Let’s not minimize doodling as an experience.” I think that that is so important to remember. One thing we haven’t touched on during our time together is that art therapy is not about making fine art. It’s not about creating an image that we’re going to frame and hang on on museum wall somewhere. It’s really about the process of art making.

The process is what we emphasize as important, and so when we go back to thinking about doodling, if you can just put a mark on a page or on an iPad or play with a little bit of clay without worrying about the end result, not worrying about what happens at the end instead, just take a little bit of time, maybe five minutes a day to just focus on playing with some art materials, even that can be healing and therapeutic.

[00:33:20] Jasper: Well, thank you both for joining us here on The Seed Field Podcast. It’s been such a pleasure to get to talk with you and learn from you.

[00:33:27] Amy: Thank you, Jasper.

[00:33:28] Beth: Thank you so much for having us, Jasper.

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[00:33:39] Jasper: The Antioch art therapy program that Amy and Beth designed and currently teach in is available right now online throughout the US. We have a link to the program page in our show notes. We post these show notes on our website, theseedfield.org, where you’ll also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes and more.

The Seed Field Podcast is produced by Antioch University. Our editor is Lauren Instenes. A special thanks to Karen Hamilton and Melinda Garland.

Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you next time. Don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity. From Antioch University, this has been The Seed Field Podcast.

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