The 'clay field' is a large, flat box filled with smooth clay. With closed eyes one makes contact with the material and allows the hands to find their way through touching, scratching, digging, kneading, patting, beating ... until shapes start to emerge. Scenes become created, destroyed, recreated ... telling one's story. At the end of a session, there will be no art object to take home, except an intense and transformative experience.

Clay Field Therapy® is touch therapy. The haptic sense of touch is the most fundamental of human experiences. Universally infants experience safety and love through touch; being rocked and held soothes and settles them. Love, sexuality, but also violence are primarily communicated through touch. Our skin boundary becomes invaded through inappropriate touching, through accidents and medical procedures. The vast majority of traumatic memories involve touch.

As the hands touch the clay they will remember these formative, implicit experiences. The smooth texture, the weight and resistance of the clay will evoke attachment patterns, developmental setbacks and traumatic events. This does not occur in a cognitive way, but as learnt action patterns and felt sensations. In a safe and supportive setting, the hands of clients will find their way out of restriction, collapse and frozen fear into growing trust and fulfilment, because the clay has the unique ability to feedback any contact we make with it. Initially clients’ hands may expect something cold, unavailable or disgusting, because this was their experience in the past, but almost inevitably they will search for increasingly reliable contact, balance in the relationship with the material and self-fulfilment through it.

The therapeutic focus is neither on symptoms nor on the story of what-happened, but on the innate urge to find a more adequate response to the world at hand. In this way the encounter at the clay field allows us to gradually rewrite our biography. Emerging PhD research shows that Clay Field Therapy® is deeply therapeutic, particularly for children with learning and behavioural difficulties – and for traumatised adults.

Watch the video for a case study showing Clay Field Therapy® with a boy diagnosed with ADHD.

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Sensorimotor Art Therapy®

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Guided Drawing®

 
 

Related Blogs

Featured
The Trauma Therapist Project: Cornelia Elbrecht interviews Sabâ Başoğlu on Clay Field Therapy
The Trauma Therapist Project: Cornelia Elbrecht interviews Sabâ Başoğlu on Clay Field Therapy

The Trauma Therapist Project guest host series presents this interview with Cornelia Elbrecht interviewing Sabâ Başoğlu on Clay Field Therapy.

The Sensorimotor Feedback Loop and Trauma
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.

Touch. The Most Fundamental of Human Experiences with Cornelia Elbrecht
Touch. The Most Fundamental of Human Experiences with Cornelia Elbrecht

For the last several years Guy Macpherson has dedicated himself to the study of trauma, post-traumatic growth, and most recently, the intersection of trauma and psychosis - specifically assessing and treating signs of early psychosis. He holds a Doctorate in clinical psychology and with The Trauma Therapist Project brings together resources for clinicians and therapist of all kinds who are starting out on their trauma-informed journey.

In this interview Cornelia Elbrecht and Guy Macpherson discuss the hands-brain connection and how at the Clay Field we are able to treat early developmental trauma through an inter-relational touch experience.

Phenomenology as Curiosity in the Clay Field
Phenomenology as Curiosity in the Clay Field

The Philosopher Husserl (1931) formulated phenomenology as a theoretical construct. His interest was to learn what the direct experience of the person is and what meaning they attach to their experience. Husserl recognised that reality is always played out in the present tense, not the past and not the future. That if access is gained to sensory input of a person’s original experience in the here and now, then we would be able to view that person’s subjective reality. By substituting ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions instead of ‘why’ questions he posited that we could avoid interpretation and explanation; rather to be open and aware of the given data and see the client as he is and ‘what is happening right now?’

The study of phenomenology has evolved from the theoretical construct of Husserl (1931) with more ongoing developments in both physical sciences and social sciences (Van De Reit, 2001). The phenomenology of today is a sensory based moment to moment process that is uniquely my own as I interact with and I am impacted by the wider field in the here and now. At the Clay Field this plays out in every session. This interest, curiosity and tracking of my client’s experience in the Clay Field in the here and now supports to deepen the awareness and experience of their reality. There are moments when as a therapist I silently retract, giving minimal encouragement to the client’s action patterns in the clay and as they explore the field...