How Art Therapy Can Help Children Through Trauma?5 art therapy exercises for kids

Yet art therapy isn’t just about coloring, despite what the coloring book trend may suggest. They are on to something, however, as we have learned from my own experience. Art therapy, like talk therapy, has tremendous healing potential when performed by a trained professional. In fact, for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), working with an art therapist has been a lifesaver.

What is PTSD?

PTSD is a psychiatric disorder resulting from a traumatic event. Terrifying or threatening experiences such as war, abuse or neglect leave traces that remain etched in our memories, emotions and bodily experiences. When triggered, PTSD causes symptoms like retraumatization, panic or anxiety, touchiness or reactivity, memory lapses, numbness or dissociation.

“Traumatic memories typically exist in our minds and bodies in a state-specific form, meaning they contain the emotional, visual, physiological, and sensory experiences that were felt at the time of the event. They are basically undigested memories.

Recovering from PTSD means working through these undigested memories until they no longer cause symptoms. Common treatments for PTSD include talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). These therapeutic models aim to desensitize survivors by talking and expressing their feelings about the traumatic event.

However, people experience PTSD through memory, emotions, and the body. Talk therapy and CBT may not be enough to address all of these areas. Reliving trauma is difficult. This is where art therapy comes in.

What is art therapy?

Art therapy uses creative mediums like drawing, painting, coloring, and sculpting. For PTSD healing, art helps process traumatic events in a new environment. Art provides an outlet when words fail. With a trained art therapist, every step of the therapeutic process involves art.

An art therapist uses art throughout the recovery process from post-traumatic stress disorder. For example, to “help clients identify coping strategies and internal strengths to begin the healing journey,” they can create collages of images representing internal strengths, she explains.

Clients examine their feelings and thoughts about the trauma by making a mask or drawing a feeling and discussing it. The art develops basic and coping skills by photographing pleasant objects. It can help tell the story of the trauma by creating a graphical timeline.

Through such methods, the integration of art into therapy addresses a person’s whole experience. This is essential in the case of PTSD. Trauma is not only experienced through words.

How Art Therapy Can Help With PTSD

Although talk therapy has long been used for the treatment of PTSD, sometimes words just aren’t enough for the task. Art therapy, on the other hand, works because it offers an alternative and equally effective means of expression, experts say.

Artistic expression is a powerful way to contain trauma and separate it from the terrifying experience of trauma. Art gives voice and makes visible the experience of a survivor’s emotions, thoughts and memories when words are insufficient.

When you bring art or creativity to a session, on a very, very basic level, it calls into other aspects of a person’s experience. It accesses information…or emotions that you may not be able to reach by talking alone.

PTSD, the body and art therapy

Recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder also involves recovering the safety of your body. Many people who live with PTSD find themselves disconnected or dissociated from their bodies. It is often the result of feeling threatened and physically insecure during traumatic events. Learning to have a relationship with the body, however, is essential to recovering from PTSD.

Traumatized people feel chronically unsafe in their bodies. To change, people need to be aware of how they feel and how their body interacts with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step to releasing the tyranny of the past.

Art therapy excels at bodywork because clients manipulate art outside of themselves. By externalizing difficult elements of their trauma stories, clients begin to safely access their physical experiences and relearn that their body is a safe place.

Art therapists, in particular, are trained to use media in all sorts of different ways, which might even help someone have more energy in their body. Just as art can bridge feelings and words, it can also be a bridge to feeling grounded and secure in one’s body.

The benefits of art therapy for children

As we can see, art therapy for kids has a lot of advantages. Some of them are:

• It fosters imagination
• It enables the expression of ideas and emotions.
• It encourages the fusion of social, psychological, and physical factors.
• It improves executive abilities like focus, memory, and spatial orientation.
• It strengthens language.
• It fosters awareness of oneself.
• It helps to work in groups.
• It fosters a sense of safety and attentiveness.
• It promotes investigation
• It boosts self-assurance.
• It promotes conversation
• It promotes making decisions.
• It aids in resolving issues.
• It enhances motor abilities.

Art therapy is one method of promoting children’s well-being. A one-of-a-kind strategy for teaching people to articulate, solve, and confront difficulties in an entertaining way.

Art therapy for childhood trauma

Art therapy allows the child, the teenager, the adult, to express the indescribable through matter, color, form (clay, graphite, watercolour, pastels, colored pencils, tales …)

The distancing by creation, of a traumatic emotional experience, makes it possible to free an interior space and thus find a breath, a breath, to reconnect with Life.

How Art Therapy Can Help Children Through Trauma?

Art opens up a form of non-verbal communication for children who have difficulty expressing their thoughts and feelings. Often it can also point to the source of the trauma, therapists say

Devika Jasra saw her father collapse on the ground and be rushed to hospital. She heard her mother frantically coordinating with the doctors. While Devika’s father survived the heart attack and recovered, what became a victim was Devika’s sleep. Cut off from her usual world due to the pandemic, Devika became restless and even had panic attacks at times.

In February, art came to her rescue. Weekly drawing and painting sessions over the past four months have helped her calm down. “The classes have helped her open up and she is slowly coming back to a more secure mental state,” says her mother Snehali.

According to child psychologist, art opens up a form of non-verbal communication for those who have difficulty expressing their thoughts and feelings. Special educators suggest that working with colors and drawings while talking about traumatic experiences helps reduce feelings of anxiety, anger and fear in children. Additionally, it can offer clues to the sources of the trauma.

Nikita uses art in many of her sessions, particularly when working with a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Autism Spectrum Disorder. and she says it has been an enriching experience. Not only does this allow students to express their emotions, but it also provides them with behavioral support and stress management.

The colors utilized as well as the designs themselves are colored. “Colors work in the world of ‘feeling’. They use techniques like wet-on-wet watercolor painting to talk to people in a direct and distinctive way, each with their own quality that is apart from shapes. Children are said to find relaxation through repetitive, gratuitous, non-instructional painting with just two primary colors. Here, creating an aesthetically flawless form or piece is not the goal.

Children with cerebral palsy, ADHD, and sensory processing issues can benefit from this kind of art therapy. “It enables individuals to freely express themselves without being overpowered by excessive color, shape, or detail. In Waldorf education, archetypal hues are also employed to represent particular temperaments.

What colors reveal about your child’s mental health

One of the most common methods for assessing a child’s mental state is the House-Tree-Person method. A projective test, it is designed to measure aspects of a person’s personality. The child is asked to draw a house, a tree and a person and the tester asks questions about each picture. “It’s very subjective and subject to interpretation by the tester.”

According to art therapists, the way a child engages with an art medium changes as they grow. For a child, wet-on-wet painting becomes more complex with shades and shapes. It is then replaced by veil painting, which is meditative.

“In this method, children use a watercolor that spreads easily on damp paper and blends with other colors. Only the primary colors (red, blue and yellow) are used as they mix together to create many shades of green, orange, brown, gray and purple. This provides children with a rich canvas of imagination. Colors, when flowing freely, also evoke many emotions and feelings. We usually see children favoring a specific color that either calms them down or excites their individual temperament.”

And calmer children can become happy learners. Art has and will always continue to have healing powers, provided we are not guided by the goal of a perfect work of art.

How to find the right art therapist

To find an art therapist qualified to work with PTSD, seek out a trauma-informed therapist. This means that the therapist is an expert in the art, but also has other tools to support survivors on their recovery journey, such as talk therapy and CBT. The art will always remain the centerpiece of the treatment.

When seeking an art therapy therapist for trauma, it is important to find a therapist who is particularly familiar with the integration of trauma-based approaches and theories. It is important to note that any intervention made with visual and sensory material can also be triggering for the client and should therefore only be used by a trained art therapist.

A trained art therapist will have at least a master’s degree in psychotherapy with an additional degree in art therapy. Many therapists may advertise that they do art therapy. Only those with certified credentials have gone through the rigorous training essential to treating PTSD.

To liberate oneself

Using art therapy to treat PTSD addresses the whole experience of trauma: mind, body, and emotions. By working on PTSD with art, what was a terrifying experience that caused a lot of symptoms can become a neutralized story of the past.

Today, art therapy helps me deal with a traumatic period in my life. And we hope that soon, this time will be a memory that we can choose to leave alone, to never be ashamed again.

IF you need therapy to free yourself and find your inner peace, do not hesitate to call us or fill out the form to suggest the therapist who will suit you.

art therapy for childhood trauma, stress relief

5 art therapy exercises for kids

Children are great explorers. Day after day, they express their motivation to know and discover new things. They are beings who marvel at everything around them and make their lives a magical world where discoveries reign.

Children’s curiosity shapes the potential of their creativity. They have a great ability to generate new ideas, which is reflected in their games and questions. And they rely on the imagination as a treasure, an important resource that helps them have the best fun.

However, children’s creativity can be explored in various ways, one of which is through art. Through creative processes, children can learn, explore, stimulate various sensations and perceptions, motivate themselves, learn resources to face difficult situations, improve attention, motor and visual-spatial skills, among others.

We often even think that children don’t have problems, but that’s not the case. Of course they have them, just like fears and worries, the difference is that they show them in a different way. Art therapy exercises are a great option to help them find a way to express themselves and resolve them.

Below we explain 5 interesting art therapy exercises for children that strengthen their creative world and also facilitate the expression of what is most important to them.

The magic of mandalas

Mandalas are sacred circles from Eastern cultures that have begun to spread throughout the world today. There are different ways to use them with children. Here are some examples:

Mandala coloring. Children can decorate or paint mandalas that are already designed. In this way, we will encourage them to enter a state of calm and relaxation.
Create and decorate mandalas. When they have the opportunity to make more precise designs, they can create their own mandalas and then decorate them. In addition to relaxing them, they will awaken their creativity.
Mandalas and full attention. The therapist invites the children to pay particular attention to the creative process. To do this, he uses elements that promote this situation, such as music.
The magic of mandalas is to make it easier for children to connect with themselves, with their deepest thoughts and emotions. Thanks to them, children can express what they feel and improve their creative and visual abilities. In addition, the art therapist can analyze the child’s thoughts and feelings through what he projects onto them.

Coloring mandalas is an art therapy exercise for children that promotes relaxation and calm.

Art therapy for children with plastic art

Plastic art exercises are wonderful. Through elements such as photographs or drawings, children create their work of art and explore various sensations and perceptions in the process. The ideas are many, here we show you some of them:

Photography. Here, the child knows himself through the images of himself and his world. Subsequently, he reflects on the choice of his photographs and the relationship with their conflicts.
Paint. Through it, the child is able to show part of his inner world. Moreover, the paint can also be used with children to stimulate their senses. For example, they can paint with their hands.
Collages. By creating a collage, children can stimulate their minds to put in what they feel and think.
Sculpture. It’s about creating things using clay or a moldable material, even their own body can also be used to express their thoughts, situations and certain feelings.
All of these exercises promote the release of problems and changes in perspective. Even the therapist may suggest that the children redo the play as a representation of the change. In this way, problems will take a different form and new paths can be found.

“When I was a child, I drew like Raphael but it took me a lifetime to learn how to draw like a child.”

-Pablo Picasso-

Art therapy for children through movement

Through movement, children can achieve an integration of their emotional, cognitive and physical aspects. In addition, it allows them to better orient themselves in space, strengthen their creativity, release endorphins and express their emotions and ideas.

Theater. Children can show what happens to them through representation, and they can even be asked to represent a way to solve the problem.
Dance. Dance has incredible therapeutic power because it helps children channel their emotions, connect with themselves, and become aware of their bodies and their place in space.

The power of music

Music is an element capable of connecting with the deepest emotions. So it can be used in many ways to perform different art therapy exercises for kids. Some of them are:

Music and reflection. In this exercise, the child explores the deepest part of himself in a space of reflection favored by the music. Then, an analysis of what happened is done so that the child can integrate his experiences at the physical, emotional and cognitive levels.
Compositions. This exercise involves letting children use all their ingenuity to compose a song that reflects what they think and feel, then sing or comment on it. In part of the session, you can analyze what happened to encourage the child’s learning, and you can even reshape the song as a symbol of conflict resolution.
Song. Through singing, children can express their feelings in a fun way. For example, they can choose the songs they most identify with and explore what happens in the singing session by working with the therapist and the group.
Tools. In this case, children explore instruments and compose, expressing through music what happens to them.
Music encourages emotional problem solving, enhances creativity and promotes socialization. It also improves attention, memory and helps structure language. It is an unparalleled therapeutic tool.

“Music is a moral law, it gives soul to our hearts, wings to thought, flight to the imagination. She is a charm to sadness, to joy, to life, to everything.”

-Plato-

The world of writing

For art therapy with children through writing, age must be taken into account in the choice of activities.

A possible exercise would be to make a description of themselves. Once completed, an analysis is made with them on the why of each aspect, as well as on what they would like to improve and what they would not like to improve.

Another art therapy exercise for children is story writing. It’s about children creating a story, paying attention to each character, where it takes place and the scene. In addition, they reflect together to understand the story, while asking the child who is the author if he associates the characters with people he knows, if he followed the same process to define the places and activities in the story. This will provide a lot of information about what is happening to the child and how we can guide them to a resolution.

As we see, writing encourages attention, encourages creativity and allows children to free themselves from their problems, guided by the therapist.

“Writing is the painting of the voice.”

-Voltaire-

Art therapy for childhood trauma