Planning quality time together
How do you plan family vacations? When I hear that question, I think of travel. Whether it’s to the next city or state, the experience will most likely involve some form of the arts. The expressive arts are deep-rooted to our family, culture, and entertainment. Music, dance, theater, poetry, and visual arts enhance the quality time we spend together.
As a creative individual, I have planned some “stay-cations” in the past. These were inventions of necessity. It’s interesting how many daily experiences are expressions of our needs. While I enjoy traveling, it’s more important to want to come home. Family expressive arts are about discovering yourself with your loved ones. This experience is a spark for playfulness and meaningful communication.
Discovering yourself with others
Learning about one another by creating together with an art therapist can be rewarding. Participants may appreciate the opportunity to change if negative emotions or behaviors have become a pattern. Children may be mesmerized by seeing their parents engage in something outside the context of everyday events. I have felt honored each and every time I witness a family’s courageous, authentic work together.
Connecting outside your home
Have you noticed how when you live together, you may start to take one another for granted? Everyone is on autopilot, and you get into your routines. These habits stem from necessity to function efficiently on a daily basis. We all are prone to falling into these habits.
A family-focused intervention using the arts is a vivid and powerful opportunity to reset for the summer in a fun way. This is a short-term experience with the goals of seeing your loved ones in a different way and feeling deeply seen by them too. The subtlety of the reveal is in your control.
Expressive Arts for communication
How do you express yourself? Everyone has creative strengths and outlets that may not involve traditional arts and crafts supplies. You don’t have to be an artist to benefit from the rewards of family art therapy. The creative strengths you already possess will support you along this process/journey.
When I invite you to create, you will discover an inner experience guiding you. Perhaps no one has witnessed this before because the song in your head is silent and the mark making is random. It’s such a safe outlet. Along with writing, movement, and use of your imagination, the expressive arts invite you to share on a deeper level.
Connect with your natural rhythm
When we connect with our natural rhythm, it is like tuning an instrument. Music is a powerful glue which begins with our heartbeat. When see ourselves in art, reflect a deep essence to one another, and find authentic movements to embody the words or pictures created just moments before. Do you live to improve yourself and your life? What is at the root of the behaviors that are asking for help? This invitation to speak with emotion, to abstract what is concrete, reinforces choice and an inner sense of peace.
Family is where the HEART is
A commitment to family art therapy only lasts an hour, but the commitment to yourself and your loved ones has no limit. The time spent here is an internal vacation that lends itself to lifelong memories or perhaps a place to leave behind what is no longer serving you. The art product, whether a poem, drawing, sculpture, audio, or video, is concrete. This allows for a clear way to sort, purge, and let go. It can become a keepsake or something that you all decide to leave behind.
At Art of the Matter, expressive arts therapy is completely transparent. We are seasoned facilitators who respect your family’s unique expressions through the arts. Using positive psychology to embrace short-term interventions, we assist you in enlivening your humanity. This means mom, dad, parent, brother, sister, and sibling are considered as individuals within and separate from the family unit. Family expressive arts therapy may be the most cost-effective, mini vacation for you.
With respect for traditional and non-traditional families
Whether you are a non-traditional family bonded by an ideology or a traditional family, you define the limits of your social map. There are times when extended family is very relevant, as well as those who we have lost that are still in our memories. Even years after a death, the loved one continues to be present. Family Expressive Arts is an option for you. It’s an accessible way to get grandma or grandpa out. Or perhaps during a transition when a child or grandchild is going to college or preschool.
Our doors are open to support you and your family. Contact us today!
-Amber Dalzell, LCPC, ATR-BC, ATCS
Owner and Director of Art of the Matter
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