Sensorimotor Art Therapy®

Art Therapy is psychotherapy and no artistic talent is required for the process. Art therapists are trained at Masters level and in this region of the world are registered with the professional body ANZACATA, the Australian, New Zealand and Asian Creative Arts Therapy Association. Art Therapy is suitable for all age groups and practised in a variety of mental health institutions, also prisons, nursing homes and schools. It has been integrated into family therapy, social work, counselling and personal development. Art therapy similar to music, drama, dance and movement therapy has the invaluable advantage of allowing expression without words. Drawing, painting and sculpting can provide nurturing, structure and inspiration in times of stress, burnout and disease.

Initiatic Art Therapy is taught at the Institute for Sensorimotor Art Therapy as a two-year long foundation course for mental health professionals. It introduces a wide range of art making approaches and incorporates Somatic Experiencing, Jungian Depth Psychology, Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology, Gestalt Therapy and mindfulness practice. The name “initiatic” is derived from the term initiation as an awakening of the senses and of inner perception. A significant proportion of the course will focus on Guided Drawing® and Clay Field Therapy®.

Both Guided Drawing® and Clay Field Therapy® are sensorimotor, body-focused, trauma-informed art therapy approaches.

Sensorimotor Art Therapy® has emerged in recent years as a term to describe body focused psychotherapies that use a bottom-up approach. Instead of a cognitive top-down strategy, such as intentionally creating an image and then talking about it, Sensorimotor Art Therapy® encourages the awareness of the implicit felt sense; how the muscles and viscera, the heart-rate and breath shape our sense of being. With this heightened awareness of the embodied self, as you touch the clay, for example, it touches you. As you move your body, it moves you. Motor impulses and their sensory feedback define the core relationship of ourselves with the world. This is how infants learn to interact with their surroundings; they touch objects and they receive instant sensory feedback from the texture, the temperature or else about the pleasurable or dangerous potential of this object or person. Love and safety, but also violence and abuse are communicated through touch in this sensorimotor feedback loop.

Early childhood experiences, but also accidents, medical and sexual trauma are embodied in this way. Such memories can often not be reached with words, because the cognitive function of the brain was not online or insufficiently developed, when events happened. As a consequence, telling the trauma story is frequently distorted or frustratingly inaccessible. In a safe and trusting environment the sensorimotor art making process taps into these learnt, painful or dissociated structures of the past, but then also encourages new sensorimotor experiences that are capable of communicating a felt sense of self-value, self-esteem and empowerment.

Rhythmic bilateral drawing or connecting with the physical resistance of clay supports an immediate feedback loop of interaction with the world at hand and its resonance within the individual. It fosters the development of new neurological pathways that can bypass traumatic memories to restore wholeness and wellbeing.