Guided Drawing is a bilateral approach to body mapping. The guidance refers to inner guidance, not to instructions from a therapist. Sensorimotor has emerged as a term to describe body focused psychotherapies that use a bottom-up approach. Sensorimotor Art Therapy encourages the awareness of implicit body sensations in the muscles, the viscera, the heart rate, and the breath. It also encourages to explore emotions as body sensations, rather than through the story attached to them. The drawing process is not necessarily concerned with image-making but supports the awareness of body memories. While these memories are always biographical, the therapy itself is not symptom oriented. Not the specific problem or crisis becomes the focal point, but the option to new answers and solutions as they are embedded in the body's felt sense.

Clients will sit in front of a stack of several large A2 sheets of paper. Coloured chalk and oil pastels, also finger-paints are available nearby. Once we have made contact and sufficient trust in the setting has been gained, I explain that it might be easier to imagine having a bodywork session rather than the idea of making art. If need be, I will take some time to explain that all emotions have a physiological expression. Fear might make your heart race, your palms sweaty and your stomach churn. Excitement wells up. Joy flows usually with ease. Anger is hot and intense and always rises. Grounding moves down, putting roots into the earth like a tree. Inspiration is closely linked to inhaling, taking in spirit. You might sense blocked motion such as a lump in the stomach or a stiff neck. Even a tumour is a movement.

Also, rather than translating the experience of, say, “fluttering in the stomach” into an image, I will encourage you to use repetition to test and try out this inner sensation. So, you will directly translate an internal movement into a drawn movement on the paper. You can flutter with the crayons just as “it” flutters in your stomach.

Guided Drawing differs from well-known scribble drawing exercises in so far as it encourages the alignment with body sensations and rhythmic repetition. Both, the emerging shapes, and their rhythmic repetition have the purpose of building trust and inner structure. This is important especially for clients who are afraid of their inside. Many traumatised individuals are terrified of their body sensations and experience them as a threat.

Let’s say you settle into a circular shape. As you repeat the movement, however, your body might signal to you that the circles you have been drawing are too small, or too big, or that the rhythm is too fast, or too slow. Follow these ‘instructions’ from within until the drawing movement feels right and in line with your experience on the inside. Paper is changed whenever one impulse is sufficiently explored.

In a second phase you may move from the question of “How do I feel?” to inquiring into “What do I need?” What movement do you need to resolve this tension? What could help to ease the pain? Do you need soothing, circular, ‘massaging’ motions or straight, sharp, even forceful lines to release pressure? Do you need to push something or someone away? Or do you need containment to be held?

In this way clients gradually find their own shapes borne out of a deepening contact with themselves. Motion and emotion can be expressed, as well as blocked motion and the way it is hindered. This new form of body language makes increasing sense as related emotions and thought forms become apparent, along with the way they constitute the body posture. For example, the feeling that “the circle I’ve drawn is too small” starts to correlate to a mindset of self-limitation such as: “I need to be really small in order to be safe”, or “I can hardly breathe, I need to get out of this”; or the circling motions feels like running in a circle, or like a vicious cycle.

 

 

Bibliography

Elbrecht, C. (2006). The transformation journey. Todtmoos-Ruette: Johanna Nordlaender Verlag.

Elbrecht, C. (2018). Healing trauma with guided drawing; a sensorimotor art therapy approach to bilateral body mapping. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.