Creative Art Therapy and Gestalt Creative art therapy has its roots in the psychoanalytic teachings of Sigmund Freud. Freud was the first to attribute psychological significance to the content of dreams, fantasies and misstatements ("Freudian slips"). Freud paved the way for modern psychology to interpret symbols, but he was stuck in a narrow interpretation that all symbols point to penis envy or castration fears. Thankfully, Carl Jung and other modern psychologists moved our understanding of symbols forward. As Janie Rhyne, author of The Gestalt Art Experience, explains: "I am not intimidated by sexual problems in the art forms; I just find it a bit absurd to go snooping around for covert sexual symbols when overt ones are so fully displayed" (p. 82). Thanks to the groundwork of Freud and Jung, therapists in the early decades of the twentieth century accepted art symbols to be revealing of emotion. Then in the 1940s, art therapy emerged as a therapeutic modality. One of the first practitioners, Margaret Naumburg, relied heavily on psychoanalytic theory and practice. She would ask clients to draw spontaneously and then interpret their pictures through free association. Since that time, practically every branch of psychology has found applications for artwork in therapy. Art therapy gives the client a more holistic medium of communication. Instead of struggling to put feelings into a linear format of one word after another, the client can spill out all her feelings simultaneously without worrying about grammar, syntax or logic. Art is spatial; there is no time element. It's much closer to the way the mind works when we think about our problems. Another advantage of art therapy is that it leaves the client with a tangible product. The art, which becomes a visible record of the therapy, can reveal emotional patterns or produce significant insights. An art object may also create a bridge for the resistant client to contact his or her inner self and relate to others. This process is called "objectification" because the client's feelings are externalized in a drawing, collage, or object. Expressing the feelings in this way, the client can recognize and integrate the feelings more easily. Having an art object that embodies the dilemma adds another dimension to therapy. Besides the relationship between two people (or between people in a group), there is the relationship to the art product. Further, since the art product is an expression of the client's self, the therapist's respect for the object will move the client to deeper self-understanding, self-appreciation, and self-disclosure. Art therapy is fundamentally a process of adding meaning to one's life. All artists experience a type of spontaneous therapy when they create. Artists' creations are often deeply personal and profoundly touching to many people, besides just the artist. The creative process taps deep layers of the collective consciousness that includes the world of myth and dreams. Thus, art therapy gives the client resources that would not be available in ordinary talking therapy. Artistic ability is immaterial. Even the most minimal drawing, done sincerely, may express something from deep in the unconscious. In non-directive art therapy, the client is ultimately responsible for interpreting his or her own artwork. The therapist does not impose a particular meaning on the client's piece prematurely. After some time, the therapist learns the language of the client's visual imagery. Symbols are a language, but not a ready-made language. Rather, symbols lead us into a process of understanding. One of the pioneers of non-directive art therapy was Virginia Axline, who used play therapy with abused children. All survivors and therapists may learn something from Axline. Her method is based on the writings of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May. Axline describes non-directive counseling as more than a technique. She said it is a basic philosophy validating the capacity within the individual to be self-directive. Axline enumerates eight basic principles of play therapy, which speak of the client-centered nature of her technique. She believed that permissiveness would have a positive effect on the client's desire to work on his/her own problems. As she explains, "These attitudes are based upon a philosophy of human relationships which stresses the importance of the individual as a capable, dependable human being who can be entrusted with the responsibility for himself" (1947, p. 62). Some art therapists prefer more structure in their sessions, but Axline's book, Play Therapy, published in 1947, remains a standard text in art therapy education. Here are all eight principles: 1. The therapist must develop a warm, friendly relationship with the child, in which good rapport is established as soon as possible. 2. The therapist accepts the child exactly as [he or she] is. 3. The therapist establishes a feeling of permissiveness in the relationship so that the child feels free to express [his or her] feelings completely. 4. The therapist is alert to recognize the feelings the child is expressing and reflects those feelings back to him in such a manner that he gains insight into [his or her] behavior. 5. The therapist maintains a deep respect for the child's ability to solve [his or her] own problems if given an opportunity to do so. The responsibility to make choices and to institute change is the child's. 6. The therapist does not attempt to direct the child's actions or conversation in any manner. The child leads the way; the therapist follows. 7. The therapist does not attempt to hurry the therapy along. It is a gradual process and is recognized as such by the therapist. 8. The therapist establishes only those limitations that are necessary to anchor the therapy to the world of reality and to make the child aware of [his or her] responsibility in the relationship (pp. 73-74). These principles work with any number of activities: playing with toys, drawing, painting, clay working, dancing, making sound and music, and making up stories. These all fall under the heading of creative art therapy because they are all non-linear media for expressing feelings. The therapy is similar for adults, and anytime we practice creative activities, it is healing. To find an art therapist, contact the American Art Therapy Association for A.T.R. referrals (Registered Art Therapist). Activities Here are some suggestions to get started with art therapy right now, by yourself: Make a life map. There are infinite ways to do this. Using pencils, pens, pastels, or paint, draw a timeline and mark the major events and turning points in your life leading up to where you are now. You may make it look like a road, a clock, or just a straight line. Another way to do it is with collage. Cut out pictures that symbolize the important events and paste them onto the timeline. Another variation with collage is to make a map of your life that also uses headlines and words. Do another timeline, limited to one aspect of your life, such as your history with your family, with sex, with God, or another major issue you have faced. Do another life map, but instead of a line, make it a house, a landscape or abstract design. Do another life map, but only of what your future will be like. Do a life map that freezes one moment in time. Draw a cartoon that represents your life and draw bubbles to write in what the characters in the drawing might say. More visual art projects: depict "my good side and shadow side," or "my past, present and future." Make a pamphlet about yourself, including all the details you want other people to know about you. Make a mask that shows your inner self, or some aspect of yourself that you want to integrate. Put it over your face and let it talk. Draw a picture that represents a problem you are working on. Draw a picture that reflects your present mood. Date it and start a journal of "present mood" drawings. Telling stories: Choose several cards from a deck of tarot cards and weave them into a story. You may make up a story, trusting it will mirror something deep inside. Also, you may use the cards to illustrate a story you've wanted to tell. Or, if you have a story in your mind (without using the cards), just write it down quickly and clearly. Gestalt Therapy Gestalt is the Zen branch of psychology, which allows clients to become centered in the present moment, freed of the shackles of the past and fears of the future. The therapy is gentle; the gestalt therapist is never demanding or controlling. In gestalt, the client integrates the fragmented parts of self, while the therapist acts as a guide. Gestalt transcends time and space, bringing all of life's experiences into the now. If a client still experiences emotional pain from past events, involving long-dead or lost relations, this is no obstacle to healing. Gestalt therapy offers the support and guidance necessary for the client to resolve themes such as love, anger, forgiveness, shame, and so on, getting it straight inside. For this reason, gestalt is a good choice for ex-cult members. The client may call one of the former cult abusers forth into the empty chair for a confrontation, gaining the satisfaction of an actual successful encounter. If you were to eventually run into a person you talked to in the empty chair, you would handle the situation with complete clarity, because you have put the matter to rest within yourself. In a gestalt session, the client begins with a dream, an art object, or simply a memory. Through talking to the people, or even the elements of the art object or dream, the client begins to recognize the buried emotions that come to the surface. The emotions reside within the consciousness of the client. Thus, gestalt teaches that they may be resolved within the individual. In fact, parts of the dream are projections of the dreamer. The focus of therapy is to play out the parts to reintegrate them and the emotions they represent. Many of the psychology schools represented in this book promote the theory that we create our own reality. Gestalt is one of the cornerstones of creating our own reality. Even though I may not believe literally that I create all of outside reality, or that I'm totally responsible for every ache and pain inside, there is still something to the hypothesis. There are definite outside forces like other people, the Earth, nature, corporations and governments that impact my reality, but the way I react to them is totally under my control. Gestalt therapy brings us face to face with the present moment and attempts to bring us to peace within the moment. Dr. Frederick S. Perls is the father of gestalt therapy, which he formulated and developed in the mid-twentieth century. He theorized that if a person brings together all their fragmented parts, they will become a complete whole of the form they were meant to be; more than the sum of their own parts. Perls took up where Freud left off in using dreams. Perls developed the theory that all parts of the dream represent the dreamer. Thus, instead of rejecting a frightening image from a dream, Perls (like Jung) believed that all the parts need to be processed and integrated. Perls directed hundreds of training sessions in which individuals took the "hot seat" to explore their dreams with input from the therapist. Perls said that to become a "wholesome person, which means a unified person, without conflicts, what we have to do is put the different fragments of the dream together. We have to re-own these projected, fragmented parts of our personality, and re-own the hidden potential that appears in the dream" (p. 67). Actually, though, gestalt was not a new thing. The ideas were already circulating in Germany and Perls himself (and Jung) were freely borrowing and reshaping philosophy from the Buddhist tradition. Here Perls explains: We can reassimilate, we can take back our projections, by projecting ourselves completely into that other thing or person. What is pathological is always the part-projection. Total projection is called artistic experience, and this total projection is an identification with that thing in question. I give you one idea, for instance. In Zen, you are not allowed to paint a single branch until you have become that branch. Along with Perls were several other prominent gestaltists. Perl's wife Laura worked side by side with him. Another important figure was Janie Rhyne, who invented the gestalt process of working with art. The gestalt art experience has become a fundamental part of gestalt therapy due to her influence. Rhyne led hundreds of gestalt art experience training sessions with thousands of people from all walks of life. She explains in her book The Gestalt Art Experience: "Not until I met Fritz Perls in 1965 did I learn that he had applied some concepts of gestalt psychology in formulating a pracice of gestalt therapy in a way that paralleled my own applications of gestalt psychology theories in the kind of art experience work I was doing. In training and working with Perls and other gestaltists, I learned more about how they did what they did: they were finding ways to facilitate therapeutic growth by showing people how to get out into the open feelings that had been walled off inside themselves" (pp. 7-8). Although every field of psychology has some way to use for art, I believe art's most stunning application is in gestalt therapy. Rhyne explains the gestalt art experience in this passage: Gestalt, as I use it here, means the ability to perceive whole configurations -- to perceive your personality as a totality of many parts that together make up the reality of you. Gestalt art experience, then, is the complex personal you making art forms, being involved in the forms you are creating as events, observing what you do, and hopefully perceiving through your graphic productions not only yourself as you are now, but also alternate ways that are available to you for creating yourself as you would like to be. That's how I describe the work I do now. When I began doing this sort of thing as a child, I didn't call it work, and I gave no name to my activities. I just did what came naturally. In the gestalt analysis of an art therapy piece, the therapist may ask probing questions, but will never try to interpret the piece on their own terms. Their symbols are never dictated from a fixed list; nor does the therapist look for tell-tale signs of dysfunction as a recovery therapist might do. They simply want the person to acknowledge and integrate all parts of the artwork. In her book and in her workshops, Rhyne simply opens the class with directions for the exercise and then facilitates the sharing of the resulting artwork. Rhyne explains this process of becoming whole: Healthy children are naturally gstaltists -- they live in the present; give full attention to what they are doing; do what they want to do; trust their own experiental data; and, until they are trained out of it, they know what they know with direct simplicity and accuracy. Janie Rhyne's book is the standard text on the subject and another book, Windows to Our Children: A Gestalt Therapy Approach to Children and Adolescents, by Virginia Oaklander, is the text for using gestalt art therapy with young people. In the middle twentieth century, many of the leading humanists wrote books to describe what it was like to be the therapist. One of the best by a gestaltist is Don't Push the River (it flows by itself), by Barry Stevens. She trained under Perls and her book is her journal of three months as a facilitator at the Gestalt Institute of Canada on Lake Cowichan, British Columbia, in 1969. Stevens recounts and critiques Perls' teaching methods and her learning process. Her portrayal is remarkably candid, embellished with fictional short stories, poems and childhood memories. She also gives detailed descriptions of what happened in the day's group sessions, along with what she learned or how she felt afterward. The states she describes sound Buddhist in nature, but a casual Buddhism than would only suit herself. Here are some of her reflections: "Sometimes I prefer Zen even if it does take twenty years. I'm not sure that Gestalt doesn't take twenty years to reach the same place" (p. 9). "I try as far as possible not to think." - Fritz, of himself as a therapist. "When I am at my best, there is no therapist. I don't know anything and don't know what I'm doing. At such times, I am 'amazing' to others, 'have my own style' and I am delighted with what happens" (p. 35). "All my 'why's' of not wanting to lead a group here now were perfectly good ones. The only trouble is, they were fantasies. Until the moment came, I couldn't know what I felt. I could only imagine what it would be. When Fritz asked me, I didn't feel the way I thought I would; I felt the way I did" (p. 83). "What I learned this morning from the group is so much that I would have to be nuts to try to write it. I wouldn't have time for anything else" (p. 113). "What is Gestalt? When I didn't know, I couldn't tell you, and now that I know, I can't tell you. (p. 127). "How much these two weeks of 'being leader' -- which I was afraid of -- have done for me. Everything rights itself. That's why it doesn't matter if I do something wrong. I got that insight while slicing beets. It's trying not to make mistakes and trying to correct them that louses me up. Trying, trying, trying, when I am so built -- like birds flying" (p. 142). "I know that the state I am enjoying now (not high, not low) may not last. It may 'go away' any moment -- or tomorrow. But now, I have just finished 'doing' the dishes. I didn't do them. They did themselves with me and I enjoyed the water, the suds, the plates, and pots, and washing the beet spots off the stove was like a miracle: they're there -- they're not. Movement of body. All senses sensing" (p. 143). Gestalt is a specialization, in a category by itself, but most psychologists have studied gestalt methods and have integrated these into their practices. You may contact a nearby gestalt school for referrals. Look up the words "Gestalt Institute" on the Internet. Cult Survivors Handbook Table of Contents Preface, Frontmatter This book is written for people who joined high control groups as adults, but people born or raised in such groups may also benefit from reading it. I have also included a note to non-cult family members to help them interpret their loved one's experience. Family Therapy Dangerous cults function like dysfunctional families, so good counseling in the field of family therapy may help an ex-cult member process the experience. If the root of the problems go back to family of origin issues, family therapy can help. Abuse Recovery Emotional, physical, and sexual abuse is common in cults. Read this chapter if you suffered abuse in a cult. Depth Psychology Carl Jung's philosophy can help ex-cult members find meaning in their experiences. The Twelve Steps If you practiced abuse in the cult, the Twelve Steps can offer you relief from the pain of guilt. Mind-Body Here are some tips to get out of depression without drugs and learn the messages of your symptoms of disease. Creative Art Therapy and Gestalt For people who were victimized in a cult, humanist psychology is the best route to recovery. Eastern Mind Eastern philosophy has benefits; learn to keep the parts you enjoy, while you throw away the garbage the cult may have served with it. Ten Reasons Not to Hit Your Kids by Jan Hunt, M.Sc., Director of The Natural Child Project Bibliography and Suggested Reading Read more books about the topics covered in Cult Survivors Handbook. next