What's it all about?

I am often asked about the mechanics of what I do.

“What is this Art Therapy stuff anyway”

“Its drawing about how you feel right?”

“Is it mainly for kids and people with differing abilities?”

“Do you need to be artistic? Cause I’m not artistic! I can’t draw!”

“How does it work?”

Being part of a new wave of alternative and complementary therapies, at least in Australia, there are still some blurry edges to the image most people conjure up when I tell them that I am an Artist and a Transpersonal Art Therapist.

 This therapy isn’t new, in fact we have been making marks for thousands of years to express and understand our stories. In Europe where Carl Jung trail blazed an intentional use of this work as a form of psychotherapy, the uses are wide and common. Over here we are just starting to see it begin to catch on.

One of my clients recently told me that she had received more benefit from one session with me, using Transpersonal Art Therapy (TAT) than she had in three years of seeing her psychologist.

Now I’m not here to discredit the valuable outcomes that some people receive through psychology and other more traditional forms of therapy. Various modalities work better for   some people, than others. The people that usually come to me though, have found that with traditional therapies they haven’t been able to really get to the core of their issue but talked around it in circles.

This could be due to the fact that we are so much more than our mind. We are whole beings also made up of emotions, physical bodies and a spiritual aspect (that being quite individually interpreted). We hold so much wisdom in our whole being, we can hold trauma in our cells and our interpretation and memory of the world is much more sensory than intellectual. As well as being complex organisms, we have a variety of learning and communicating styles, some which respond much more efficiently through visual and felt senses. This information is then processed consciously and subconsciously, the subconscious being a direct influence on 80-90% of our behaviour…. most of which we are unaware of or baffled by.

So when someone comes for a session of TAT, we make space for all of this, we work with all the parts of a person and we intentionally explore and strengthen their internal landscape.

We almost always start with mandala work, for they are a symbol of safety and as Jung put it, ‘the seat of the soul’ and that is where we can connect with the core of who we are. There are no rules for our mark making, for some people it might look like using colours, shapes and scribbly lines to express how things are feeling for them. For others it might be a more detailed visualization using a language of images and symbols; the language of the subconscious. We then reflect upon the marks as to what they represent for you.

The key to this work is learning to be present to ourselves, learning to listen deeply and find a map to the mystery of the internal world. When we do this, when those I support do this, I see amazing insights emerge and missing puzzle pieces found. Every single time I journey with someone through their process, remarkable shifts occur and wisdom is revealed. The power of this work is profound, my role is to listen, hold space, guide and allow- when we make space for this allowing, we find new ways.

I count myself as fortunate to have found a language for something I intuitively lent into most of my life and to have deepened that understanding, so as to walk alongside my fellow humans as they find new pathways to wholeness.

These new ways emerge out of the integration that occurs in our whole selves. It occurs for some people quickly and radically, for others it may look like a gentle dismantling, regrouping and slower path of re-building. I have seen change occur for those aged 2 – 70, those feeling out of sync with themselves or with the world, those with cancer and other physically diagnosed symptoms. I have seen both men and women find parts of themselves that they felt they had lost, seen people put parts back together that had been broken by trauma, and children anxious of the chaos in our world, find a way to anchor themselves.

This form of therapy is all inclusive, we all use the language of symbols every day in our pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. The difference here is in the intention of meeting ourselves as we need to be met, with openness, absolute respect, a need for connection, soul expression and a life of meaning while making space for new awareness and New Ways.

I am glad we travel the same road,

Till we meet somewhere again along the path,

Kind regards,

Naomi Wild

Founder of Newcastle Art Therapy

Artist-Therapist-Educator

Photo by Easton Oliver on Unsplash