Expressive Arts
What is EXA?
Utilizing the Expressive Arts (EXA) in counselling and coaching involves supporting clients through engagement with various creative arts processes. It can be used with both children and adults, in individual and group settings. When life in all its depth cannot be explained in explicitly, the arts provide a vehicle to communicate and experience different viewpoints, bringing people together in our commonalities instead of focusing on differences.
EXA vs. Music or Art Therapy:
While art and music therapy are similar to EXA in that the premise is about going through a facilitated, creative process that contributes to transformation, EXA is unique because:
1. It involves the integration of all different kinds of artistic methods.
2. It is more interested in hearing how the client experienced the creative process instead of making meaning out of the art.
3. It strongly asserts that having a client connect with different art methods can deepen the counseling experience.
EXA is NOT:
1. About the therapist analyzing a person's work, deciphering the meaning and providing feedback or a diagnosis.
2. Pathology-driven, focusing on what is wrong about a situation or person from the perspective of an expert.
3. About the final product; it's about the therapeutic process.
4. Only for self-defined artists or people with skills: anyone can benefit from an EXA framework.
EXA involves:
1. A skilled practitioner respectfully guiding and shaping an activity with a client that both physically and psychologically allows for healing. The practitioner is the "holder of the space", encouraging a client to take risks, supporting the client through challenges that arise, and bearing witness to the surprises that emerge.
Sessions follow an arc consisting of an opening conversation, progressing into the art-making process, closing with reflection.
Basic art materials are recommended and your counsellor might have specific tools that will be helpful to you. However, they are not required; we can use whatever is available around you and still move through a creative process.
2. Collaboration; your wellbeing is at the heart of this therapy and will involve constant renegotiation and self-exploration. Before anything is done within EXA, your consent is required. Your personal strengths are an integral part of the EXA treatment plan.
3. The whole person in their unique context; therefore, it is often combined with other approaches that also contribute to healing and change (i.e, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - CBT).
4. A dynamic process that allows for many possibilities to transpire.
5. Remembering the fundamental need to play.
6. An active recovery; you are responding to the life in front of you.
7. Developing a creative problem-solving process that moves you beyond focusing on the problem.
8. Temporary surrender of our immersion in what you know and opens you up to a new vision of existence.
9. Your creativity becoming your road to health and wellness.
10. Creative endeavours that enable you to undergo a profound self-discovery.
Our Creative Services
Visual Arts in EXA
The use of art in counselling offers the ability to express aspects of experience that words alone are unable to access.
Using colours, lines, shapes, textures, and imagery, clients can convey feelings and emotional tones accompanying an experience. A sense of heaviness, closeness, airiness, or a feeling of being trapped or empowered can be expressed through visual form, structure, and symbolism. Materials (i.e, paint, clay) are chosen that offer the right, safe "container" for a given experience or feeling.
The use of art in counselling:
1. Helps a client express unconscious inner content, which increases self-awareness and personal growth.
2. Allows a cathartic release as feelings and experiences are discharged into the process.
3. Activates the inner witness, the part of self that can stand outside of a feeling, experience, or perception, and observe it from a distance.
4. Involves an integration of body, mind, and spirit.
5. Connects a client with the "inner creator" which is inherently healing.
Creative Writing in EXA
Everyone is a writer.
Those who do not write stories and poems on solid surfaces tell them, sing them, and in so doing, write them on the air.
Already we are creating characters, voice, suspense. It may not be committed to paper, but life and story is at play.
When we write, we create, and when we offer our creation to one another, we close the wound of loneliness and may participate in healing the broken world.
Learning to embrace fear is important in this process. Often behind fear in writing is breakthrough.
Our words, our truth, our imagining, our dreaming, may be the best gifts we have to give.
Music & Sound in EXA
Music has been a source of healing for centuries, and humankind has utilized this powerful medium to develop a sense of connectedness and to express emotions and thoughts.
The elements of music (melody, harmony, and rhythm) can serve us when verbal expression is too limiting. Music is a creative tool that can also assist us in understanding how to make sense of our lives.
Examples of using music in sessions include: Drumming; singing; listening to music and going through a guided visualization/meditation, analyzing song lyrics, discussing how particular genres of music impact your nervous system, and using background music combined with other art activities.
Using music in counselling promotes body awareness, regulates the nervous system, improves imagination, and facilitates and contains nonverbal emotional expression.
Photography in EXA
Dance & Movement in EXA
Choosing images that are already created in a magazine that resonate with your experience, for example, or snapping a shot in the moment yourself, photography is another option in the EXA experience.
Using and taking photographs can contribute to your health and personal development in the following ways:
1. It can deepen insight into what you love about your life, as well as what you feel compelled needs to change.
2. It encourages an emotional and embodied connection to your life and surroundings.
3. It increases self-awareness of how your outside world symbolically reflects your inner life.
4. It intensifies appreciation for your surroundings.
Dance & Movement in EXA
Dance & Movement in EXA
Dance & Movement in EXA
Somatic approaches are integral in EXA, such as dance, yoga, and use of intentional, therapeutic gestures and touch.
Dance as a healing art is traditional in many non-Western cultures, but this application of dance has been ignored in the Western world.
Movement works with the components of sensation, movement, feelings/emotions, and imagery. All of the stresses of our lives are stored in and affect the body, often creating distress and imbalance, which are reflected in our emotional, mental, and physical states.
Movement affects the way we feel; the way we feel affects the way we move. In a mutual feedback process, this in turn feeds the images evoked. In working with movement, our intention is to help the client understand themselves in an integrated and embodied manner.
What Do I Bring To Expressive Arts Therapy Virtual Sessions?
A common question for many clients, these are some ideas to have with you if you are participating in a virtual session.
None of these are required; in fact, you could just bring yourself, and that is more than enough for a creative process.
Heart Times is able to provide recommendations (no financial gains whatsoever; no affiliate marketing) if you would like some suggestions, depending on your area(s) of interest.
Even having some paper and basic writing utensils is more than enough.