Drawing as a form of self-knowledge through the body

The body is the vessel in which the soul lives, so let external problems remain from the outside. Provide purity of thought – a crystal clear receptacle for the soul.

If it hurts – draw:

• spastic pains – spirals;
• aching pains – strokes;
• pulling pains – cones and pyramids;
• sharp pains – circles.

 

When pain appears, create a drawing-question “Why does it hurt me?” . After all, if we have created a disease for ourselves, then we have the opportunity to find the necessary medicine.

 

I will give several examples of the work of an art therapist psychologist with bodily manifestations of mental states, their transformation in drawing techniques.

Quite often, different types of mental stress manifest themselves through a bodily response, which allows a person to be filled and feel his psychological components in a form that is convenient and familiar to him.

It is much more convenient to feel your processes in a bodily form than to work through them through emotions, understanding, awareness, reacting in new forms of reality. So psychosomatic states of different etiologies become part of the composition in the consultative practice of psychological support specialists.

Let’s try to comprehensively approach the process of relieving stress through forms of creative self-expression as the main means of psychoprophylaxis of somatic response.

1. Search for the causes of stress.

Provide the client with all possible means of creative self-expression and invite him to create a menu of factors due to which psychosomatic tension arises. Let these phenomena crystallize in the form of art products through abstract and, perhaps, insufficiently conscious images. Divide them into simple and complex, understandable and incomprehensible, familiar and new, your own and others. Let the client independently determine the level of significance or insignificance in the process of analysis to enable the response of his body to them.

2. Choice of the main destroyer.

Try to identify with the client what causes the psychosomatic state. This can be done quite simply through a series of drawings on the topic “Everything in my body that is related to the state.” Simple spontaneous drawings provide visual material that informs about the involvement of the problem in the body. Using the associative method, find what connects the drawing and bodily manifestations. Using the analysis of associations, form a logical model of personal understanding of the connection between the body and the processes of living the problem.

3. Search for a way out of the maze.

The next important task necessary for successful accompaniment is to find ways to relieve bodily tension through the means of creative self-healing. So, to begin with, invite the client to play with color, which will help to remove the tension associated with the situation or problem from the maze of physicality. In the process of interacting with color, let the client capture and pronounce all the thoughts and feelings that come to mind. Further actions are the search for mechanisms:

– what can I do;

– what can I feel;

– what can I accept, realize, etc.

This will be the new opportunity.

4. On the way.

The continuation of the work is the motivational preparation of the client and focusing on the desire to change something in the bodily state, awareness of the need to get rid of or minimize psychosomatic manifestations. So the picture-motive for change will be a good visual form of the inner picture, which will clearly show the client the level of his readiness for healing.

 

©Victoria Nazarevich