Attachment Informed Art Therapy is an innovative art therapy approach that provides the therapist with the theories and applications to work with all populations with troubled or abusive relationships. This book will provide art therapists and mental health professionals with a solid visible and empirically-grounded conceptual framework. It will be useful to professionals who use attachment theory in clinical work, and will make an excellent single source for therapists working with populations of all ages from birth to death. John Bowlby's findings and other leading research in the attachment field, form the foundation of the theories behind Lucille Proulx, MA, ATR, RCAT the Attachment Informed Art Therapy interventions.
This book vividly shows how creative arts and play therapy can help children recover from experiences of disrupted or insecure attachment. Leading practitioners explore the impact of early relationship difficulties on children's emotions and behavior. Rich case material brings to life a range of therapeutic approaches that utilize art, music, movement, drama, creative writing, and play. The volume covers ways to address attachment issues with individuals of different ages, as well as their caregivers. Chapters clearly explain the various techniques and present applications for specific populations, including complex trauma survivors.
Using clay in therapy taps into the most fundamental of human experiences - touch. This book is a comprehensive step-by-step training manual that covers all aspects of 'Work at the Clay Field', a sensorimotor-based art therapy technique. The book discusses the setting and processes of the approach, provides an overview of the core stages of Gestalt Formation and the Nine Situations model within this context, and demonstrates how this unique focus on the sense of touch and the movement of the hands is particularly effective for trauma healing in adults and children. The intense tactile experience of working with clay allows the therapist to work through early attachment issues, developmental setbacks and traumatic events with the client in a primarily nonverbal way using a body-focused approach. The kinaesthetic motor action of the hands combined with sensory perception can lead to a profound sense of resolution with lasting therapeutic benefits. With photographs and informative case studies throughout, this book will be a valuable resource for art therapists and mental health professionals, and will also be of interest to complementary therapists and bodyworkers.
Proulx explores many aspects of dyad art therapy including attachment relationship theories, roles in dyad interventions, the importance of the tactile experience and ways in which dyad art therapy can be used. This original book will be invaluable to mental health professionals and to parents wishing to enrich interactions with their children.
Attachment-Informed Grief Therapy bridges the fields of attachment studies and thanatology, uniting theory, research, and practice to enrich our understanding of how and why people grieve and how we can help the bereaved. In its pages, clinicians and students will gain a new understanding of the etiology of complicated grief and its treatment and will become better equipped to formulate accurate and specific case conceptualization and treatment plans. The authors also illustrate the ways in which the therapeutic relationship is a crucially important—though largely unrecognized—element in grief therapy, and offer guidelines for an attachment informed view of the therapeutic relationship that can serve as the foundation of all grief therapy.
Art Therapy Practices for Resilient Youth highlights the paradigm shift to treating children and adolescents as "at-promise" rather than "at-risk." By utilizing a strength-based model that moves in opposition to pathology, this volume presents a client-allied modality wherein youth are given the opportunity to express emotions that can be difficult to convey using words. Working internationally with diverse groups of young people grappling with various forms of trauma, 30 contributing therapists share their processes, informed by current understandings of neurobiology, attachment theory, and developmental psychology. In addition to guiding principles and real-world examples, also included are practical directives, strategies, and applications. Together, this compilation highlights the promise of healing through the creative arts in the face of oppression.
Exploring the nature of trauma and how best to deal with it is not only a timely task, it is a necessary one. While COVID, isolation, and social unrest don’t necessarily cause trauma—trauma is about how one reacts to a thing, not the thing in itself—the fact is that these days many of us are dealing with some sort of trauma. How can we heal? Perhaps through a therapy known as EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Cowritten by Michael Baldwin, a patient who experienced transformative relief from trauma through EMDR therapy, and Dr. Deborah Korn, a therapist (though not Baldwin’s therapist) who explains exactly how and why EMDR works, Every Memory Deserves Respect brings the good news of EMDR to countless readers who may not even know of it but would greatly benefit from using it. We learn the origins of EMDR and of its effectiveness in treating those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder; how a session works; questions to ask a therapist before beginning. But we also learn a great deal about trauma—how it can refer to any experience, big or little, that is overwhelming, triggers strong negative emotions, and involves a sense of powerlessness or intense vulnerability; how it’s stored in our memories, and our bodies, waiting to be triggered; and how EMDR resolves it. Every Memory Deserves Respect is a warm, accessible, and helpful book, in part because of its innovative use of full-page photographs paired with a statement, definition, or affirmation. And that, combined with its mix of personal story and trusted authority, makes this an unusually effective introduction to a complicated and important subject.
Winner of the 2010 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship! This book builds a key clinical bridge between attachment theory and psychoanalysis, deploying Holmes' unique capacity to weld empirical evidence, psychoanalytic theory and consulting room experience into a coherent and convincing whole. Starting from the theory–practice gap in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the book demonstrates how attachment theory can help practitioners better understand what they intuitively do in the consulting room, how this benefits clients, and informs evidence-based practice. Divided into two sections, theory and practice, Exploring in Security discusses the concept of mentalising and considers three components of effective therapy – the therapeutic relationship, meaning making and change promotion – from both attachment and psychoanalytic perspectives. The second part of the book applies attachment theory to a number of clinical situations including: working with borderline clients suicide and deliberate self-harm sex and sexuality dreams ending therapy. Throughout the book theoretical discussion is vividly illustrated with clinical material, personal experience and examples from literature and film, making this an accessible yet authoritative text for psychotherapy practitioners at all levels, including psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, mental health nurses and counsellors.
"Psychological trauma can be a life-changing experience that affects multiple facets of health and well-being. The nature of trauma is to impact the mind and body in unpredictable and multidimensional ways. It can be a highly subjective that is difficult or even impossible to explain with words. It also can impact the body in highly individualized ways and result in complex symptoms that affect memory, social engagement, and quality of life. While many people overcome trauma with resilience and without long term effects, many do not. Trauma's impact often requires approaches that address the sensory-based experiences many survivors report. The expressive arts therapy-the purposeful application of art, music, dance/movement, dramatic enactment, creative writing and imaginative play-are largely non-verbal ways of self-expression of feelings and perceptions. More importantly, they are action-oriented and tap implicit, embodied experiences of trauma that can defy expression through verbal therapy or logic. Based on current evidence-based and emerging brain-body practices, there are eight key reasons for including expressive arts in trauma intervention, covered in this book: (1) letting the senses tell the story; (2) self-soothing mind and body; (3) engaging the body; (4) enhancing nonverbal communication; (5) recovering self-efficacy; (6) rescripting the trauma story; (7) making meaning; and (8) restoring aliveness"--
Nonverbal interactions are applied to trauma treatment for more effective results. The model of treatment developed here is grounded in the physical, psychological, and cognitive reactions children have to traumatic experiences and the consequences of those experiences. The approach to treatment utilizes the integrative capacity of the brain to create a self, foster insight, and produce change. Treatment strategies are based on cutting-edge understanding of neurobiology, the development of the brain, and the storage and retrieval of traumatic memory. Case vignettes illustrate specific examples of the reactions of children, families, and teens to acute and repeated exposure to traumatic events. Also presented is the most recent knowledge of the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in development and therapy. Right brain communication, and how to recognize the non-verbal symbolic and unconscious, affective processes will be explained, along with examples of how the therapist can utilize art making, media, tools, and self to engage in a two-person biology.
