Class 2: Child Centered Art Therapy Realized | Monday, September 11, 2023
Discover the ideal environment to reduce resistance & deepen affective participation through therapist mirroring of art & play and therapeutic storytelling.
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Learning Objectives: Participants will be able to:
• Describe the optimal child-centered therapeutic environment necessary for clients to heal, grow, and actualize their personal potential.
• Demonstrate 5 or more verbal and nonverbal cues art therapists may use to maintain the child centered frame while helping children to more deeply explore the metaphors in their art work.
• State the theory and application of Ericksonian Utilization and “living in the metaphor”.
• Create an original therapeutic metaphor story that parallels young clients’ issues in order to diffuse resistance, un-block therapy, and offer therapeutic vicarious healing.
Class Outline:
• How Child-Centered Therapy (CCT) meshes with the AT/FT model: removing obstacles to healing and growth
• Clinical challenges in child art therapy
• Impact of cognitive maturation on children’s understanding of & participation in psychotherapy
• How a metaphor-based, child-centered approach overcomes challenges to child therapy
• Metaphor in psychotherapy with children: surveying eclectic theory, philosophy, and applications integrating Freud’s unconscious, Jung’s archetypes, Rodgers’ humanism, Anna Freud’s ego-psychology, Ericksonian hypnosis, eastern religions’ “Trans-Mutation of Feeling”, and Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness
• No more pretending…provide REAL CCT: support “immature” defenses, focus on fun, children direct and pace treatment, delivering clinical Love, & “Living in the Metaphor”
• Brief overview of concepts in Ericksonian Hypnosis’ conversational, solution-focused, storytelling approach
• From resistance to reliance: incorporating TV, video games, movies, toys etc. using Erickson’s Utilization Theory
• Clinician courage: facing the anxiety of ‘letting go of control’ and not knowing what a metaphor means or where a child leads you
• Language patterns and practical strategies in an aggressively child-centered, metaphor-based approach, featuring kid-level congruence, joining, and empathy, tracking comments to build and enhance client self-determination, mirroring comments to demonstrate deep listening & encourage deepening of trance-like creative healing work
• Following children’s lead deeper into metaphors, affect, and the unconscious, including commonly used metaphors, archetypes; narrative story arcs common at the beginning, middle, and end of treatment
• How to help children dive deeper into metaphor and creative trance to enhance healing and growth, promoting open-ended, narrative-promoting directives, prompts to open up children’s metaphoric storytelling, deepening questions that avoid triggering children’s defenses and breaking their depth focus
• Transferring child centered art therapy skills to sand-tray and dramatic play
• Treatment technique: Therapeutic Storytelling and Art Making: overview and benefits
• Step-by-step techniques for creating original therapeutic metaphor stories to advance treatment goals