ago? Five years ago? How has your taste in the arts broadened or deepened since you first became interested in them? What would you select as your three favorite art forms today (e.g., music, painting, photography, dance and movement, drama)?
Paralleling the growth of professional associations was a surge in the publication of periodicals dealing with the arts in counseling, such as The Arts in Psychotherapy. Likewise, the 1980s heralded an increased effort to share knowledge among mental health professionals interested in the arts. The National Coalition of Creative Arts Therapies Associations (NCCATA) was established in 1979. It held interdisciplinary conferences for arts therapists. The emergence of NC-CATA signaled a formal and systematic attempt to foster communication between creative arts therapies groups and individuals interested in these groups. NCCATA also focused on being an inclusive voice to achieve legislative recognition for creative arts therapists (Bonny, 1997).
Then in 2004, a new association within the counseling world, specifically in the American Counseling Association, was formed. It was the Association for Creativity in Counseling. Led by Dr. Thelma Duffey at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the association quickly attracted members and began publishing the Journal of Creativity in Mental Health.
Rationale for Using the Creative Arts in Counseling
Along with the increased growth of creative arts in counseling has come the formulation of modern rationales for using them in the helping process. Numerous reasons beyond the fact that they have a historical precedent exist for using the creative arts therapeutically. The Appalachian Expressive Arts Collective, which comprises professors in a number of academic departments at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, has given many such motives. Among them are that these arts celebrate “connectedness, deep feeling, . . . intuition, integration, purpose, and the totality of the human experience” (Atkins et al., 2003, p. 120). This group and others have influenced the counselor education program at Appalachian State University to include a specific track on creative arts therapies in counseling. Other counselor educators (Ziff et al., 2017) have summed up the research to find that the arts, such as music, film, movement, painting, and literature, may also play a role in the development of empathy in various age groups and different professions. More reasons to use the creative arts in almost all helping professions follow.
The first reason for helping professionals to use the arts in therapeutic settings is that they are a primary means of assisting individuals to become integrated and connected. Often people who become mentally disturbed, such as those with an eating disorder, have a distorted view of themselves (Robbins & Pehrsson, 2009). They become estranged from reality, become alienated from others, and thwart healing forces within themselves from coming into action. This type of estrangement is a phenomenon that Carl Rogers (1957) described as incongruence. It prevents growth and development. Many of the arts, such as dance, music, and poetry, have the potential to help individuals become integrated and more aware of themselves. For instance, Robbins and Pehrsson (2009) found that poetry therapy and narrative therapy gave women with anorexia nervosa a voice (a catharsis) that helped them reclaim their individual power.
A second reason for using the arts in counseling involves energy and process. Most creative arts are participatory and require the generation of behaviors and emotions. Activity involving the expressive arts gives individuals new energy and is reinforcing because it leads somewhere. In many cases, the input and output energy cycle involved in the arts is similar to that among marathon runners. Initially, runners use energy to cover mileage at a set pace. Later, after considerable physical pain, they experience what is known as a runner’s high, a feeling of renewal and energy that allows them to pick up the pace. After such an event, they can analyze what happened and how what they have learned can influence their future as a runner. This type of reflecting and talking, especially with arts activities, can lead to new and usually improved functioning for the people involved.
A third reason for incorporating the arts into counseling involves focus. There is an old African American saying that for people to achieve, they must keep their “eyes on the prize.” The arts, especially those that involve vision, allow clients to see more clearly what they are striving for and what progress they are making toward reaching their goals (Allan, 2008; Lazarus, 1977). Other nonvisual arts, such as those dealing with sound, also encourage this type of concentration.
Yet a fourth rationale for using the arts in counseling involves creativity. To be artistic as a counselor or to use the arts in counseling “enlarges the universe by adding or uncovering new dimensions” (Arieti, 1976, p. 5) while enriching and expanding people who participate in such a process. Thus, counseling as an art, and the use of the arts in counseling, expands the world outwardly and inwardly for participants. Better yet, the artistic side of counseling allows and even promotes this expansion in an enjoyable and relaxed manner.
A fifth reason for including artistic components in counseling is to help clients establish a new sense of self. Establishing this new sense of self is especially important in resiliency work in which clients are attempting to recover from adversity (Metzl & Morrell, 2008). At such times, there is a need to engage in creative processes such as art or drama for persons who have been traumatized to gain a fresh perspective on life and themselves. Awareness of self is a quality associated with age. It usually increases in older adults (Erikson, 1968; Jung, 1933). This ability to come more into contact with the various dimensions of life can be promoted and highlighted through the use of the arts in counseling. The visual, auditory, or other sensory stimuli used in sessions give clients a way to experience themselves, whatever their circumstances, differently in an atmosphere in which spontaneity and risk-taking are encouraged within limits. Clients are able to exhibit and practice novel and adaptive behaviors. Thus, clients gain confidence and ability through sessions, and the arts assist them to become continuously (Allport, 1955). A sixth reason for including the arts in helping, such as counseling, involves concreteness. In using the arts, a client is able to conceptualize and duplicate beneficial activities. For example, if writing poetry is found to be therapeutic, clients are instructed to use this method and medium when needed (Mazza, 2017). By doing so, they lay out a historical trail so that they can see, feel, and realize more fully what they have accomplished through hard work and inspiration. Such a process allows their memories to live again and may lead to other achievements.
Creative Reflection
Think of a time when you were positively influenced by participating in one of the arts. It may have been playing an instrument, acting out a part in a play, painting a picture, dancing, taking a picture, going for a jog or walk, or arranging flowers. What did you notice about your participation that made you feel or act differently? How unique or universal do you think your experience is compared to others who may have accidentally or purposefully engaged in an arts activity and found themselves better in the end because of it?
Insight is another potential outcome from, and the seventh reason for, the use of the arts and artistic methods in counseling. Two types of insight are most likely to result. The first is primarily that of the participants in counseling, that is, the counselor and client. In this type of insight, one or both of these individuals comes to see a situation in a different light than when counseling began. For example, clients may see their situation as hopeless but not serious or as serious but not hopeless (Watzlawick, 1983). This type of focus makes a difference, for it is what people perceive that largely determines their degree of mental health or alienation (Ellis, 1988). In the second type of insight, mental health professionals in associations—for example, the American Counseling Association—gain new awareness into how they need to develop collectively. For example, they may recognize “that art often leads to science” and that balance is needed between scientific and artistic endeavors if the profession is to avoid becoming mechanical (Seligman, 1985, p. 3).
An eighth reason for using the arts in counseling centers involves socialization and cooperation. D. W. Johnson and Johnson (2017) compiled an extensive amount
