The Touch Map In Our Hands

While clients are engaging with crayons, collage materials, paint and clay, their hands act as neurophysiological sensory organs (Linden 2015) (Grundwald, M. (Ed.) 2008) (Elbrecht, C.; 20013; 2021) As the hands reach out to touch an object, they also receive sensory feedback from this encounter. These object relations are not only informed by the present encounter, but also by past experiences. Virtually all traumatic events involve touch, such as unwanted, violent, painful, disgusting touch, or the absence of existentially needed touch due to neglect. Our skin boundary becomes invaded through inappropriate touching, through abuse, accidents and medical procedures.

Regulating the Nervous System with the Lemniscate

The Lemniscate, or horizontal Figure Eight, is one of the core intervention tools in Guided Drawing. It can be introduced by the therapist as a shape to stimulate nervous system regulation. In this case clients draw bilaterally on large sheets of paper; adults, if possible, with their eyes closed. They draw in a rhythmic rising and falling flow, moving from one circle into the next, crossing over the midline from one side to the other.

For most clients this is deeply harmonizing. The rising and falling motion is simultaneously settling and uplifting. The motor impulse can connect the left and right side of the body, as well as the left and right brain hemispheres and synchronize the flow between these opposites.

Children can experience safe flow with this shape. They can move in a structured way without getting overwhelmed if their nervous system tends to get easily disorganized. Some may trace this shape with a finger on a sheet of paper. Others maybe after the therapist has drawn this shape as a racing track, and they can now drive a toy car in the loops. Or they can ‘dance’ the shape with the assistance of gymnast’s sticks.

Embodiment through Rhythm

Life is rhythm. Every cell in our body pulses in rhythmic repetition. Our breath flows. Our heart beats. Our muscles expand and contract allowing us to move. Blocked rhythm might feel like a lump in the stomach, a stiff neck, or we register it as pain.

When we dance with a partner, joy and elation are generated through synchronizing our movements with each other. When we make love, we need to find mutually satisfying rhythms together. When we fall out of step with loved ones, we suffer from asynchronous patterns, which we tend to identify as rejection or loneliness. We thrive in an environment that offers safe resonance.

Rhythmic repetition is the key feature of Guided Drawing. Not only do clients draw bilaterally on large sheets of paper, and adults preferably with their eyes closed, but most important is the way how clients draw in rhythmic repetition. When we dance to music, our foot taps the rhythm until our body eases into the beat; in Guided Drawing we dance to our own inner music...

Body Mapping with Guided Drawing

When a client comes into an art therapy session, she will usually begin to tell me why she is seeking support. If she is a recurring client, we will discuss what noteworthy or conflicting events happened in the past week or months. However, before she will go into too many details, I will look out for verbal body references such as ‘this made my skin crawl’, it was ‘heart-breaking’ or ‘I felt sick in my stomach’.

There might be a significant posture such as folded arms, or a hand protecting a shoulder, or sitting slumped over. If this seems to relate to the events my client is talking about, I will ask her to draw these body sensations in rhythmic repetition with both hands, just how they feel: tense, broken, braced, holding on, jagged, painful or otherwise. My client does not have to understand these movements, but just to track them in her body. I encourage her to bilaterally express them in rhythmic repetition, until the movement on the paper feels like the movement in her body.

The Sensorimotor Feedback Loop and Trauma

At the core of life is a permanent feedback loop between sensory perception of the environment and our response to such information through active motor impulses. Complex early childhood trauma severs or distorts the feedback loop between sensory perception and motor impulses. Clients either act out with lots of motor impulses, but have dissociated the sensory feedback loop, so internally nothing ever arrives. Or they act in, being hyper alert, “oversensitive”, but have shut down most active impulses to fly underneath the radar to stay safe.

What is Guided Drawing?

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…

Art Therapy Conference for the United Arab Emirates

The Institute for Sensorimotor Art Therapy was recently invited to participate in the inaugural Art Therapy Conference for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), held in Abu Dhabi over October 17-18, 2023. Our highly experienced Institute faculty members Clare Jerdan and Chris Storm attended the conference, held workshops and presented to the delegates.

Creative Healing Strategies for Victims of Natural Disasters

When the earthquake shook an area the size of Portugal in southeast Turkey and northern Syria, at least 56 thousand people died, 126 000 suffered non-fatal injuries and at least 2.6 million people were displaced. I was asked by the Psychology Department of Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul to speak about trauma-informed strategies to support large groups affected by a natural disaster. An event such as this earthquake is overwhelming for all involved, even the news were overwhelming to watch. And while the world by now has turned elsewhere, the aftershocks for those millions directly affected will last for years, if not a lifetime…

Recently I stumbled on a collection of studies by Dr Jess Bone, a Research Fellow in Statistics/Epidemiology in the Department of Behavioural Science and Health (UCL) and a member of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health. Bone has conducted extensive research with colleagues on the arts and well-being.

These studies include all the arts and not necessarily arts as therapy…

Stabilization, Pendulation and Titration

In a recent group discussion, the question arose about the difference between stabilization and pendulation. The term stabilization in the context of trauma therapy was coined by psychiatrist Pierre Janet (1859 – 1947), a pioneer, who profoundly influenced the work of Freud, Jung and Adler. His approach to treating traumatized clients was a three-stage model that is still relevant today…

Recently I stumbled on a collection of studies by Dr Jess Bone, a Research Fellow in Statistics/Epidemiology in the Department of Behavioural Science and Health (UCL) and a member of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health. Bone has conducted extensive research with colleagues on the arts and well-being.

These studies include all the arts and not necessarily arts as therapy…

The Arts and Happiness

While I was still an Ugly Duckling, secretly reading novels by torchlight underneath my bedcovers, I discovered a world of likeminded Swans, where my spirit belonged. My wild emotions resonated with the music I listened to throughout my teens. I know I am preaching to the converted with this blog, however research always adds another level of credibility to something we seem to know but have no evidence for.

Recently I stumbled on a collection of studies by Dr Jess Bone, a Research Fellow in Statistics/Epidemiology in the Department of Behavioural Science and Health (UCL) and a member of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health. Bone has conducted extensive research with colleagues on the arts and well-being.

These studies include all the arts and not necessarily arts as therapy…

The Treatment of ASD and ADHD with Sensorimotor Art Therapy

Many times I read the mental health records of children and teens and shudder at the long list of ASD and ADHD related diagnoses, while I wonder how much these young clients’ learning and behavioural difficulties are in fact caused by developmental trauma. For young children, threat is not about what is actually dangerous, but about what their brain perceives as such. This can happen from real threats or perceived threats – the brain will respond the same way to both…

Pendulation as a Core Trauma Healing Model

The term Pendulation was coined by Peter Levine (Levine 2010), describing a process of oscillating between two vortexes, a trauma vortex, and a healing vortex, to titrate the recall of stressful events. Pendulating between fearful and hopeful or joyful memories makes the trauma therapy process manageable, rather than re-traumatising. Levine’s insight into Pendulation has informed my approach to trauma therapy fundamentally. Thousands of therapists and clients have benefitted from this approach…

Blog & Essays