Expressive Arts Therapy: Outside Client Report
(Fall, 1998)
What I've Learned
This was a fascinating experience for me to explore these issues
from a therapist's perspective. It taught me a lot about my own skills and
limitations. I'm learning that sometimes I get more into the process than
the client (such as when I inadvertently pushed the use of the watercolor
pencils because I thought they were really fun to work with) and have to
pay closer attention to this to keep in check. I think I did do a very
good job of not allowing my own personal issues to have much effect on the
sessions. Having separated myself by choice from my own family almost a
decade ago gives me a different perspective on issues involving
reconciliation with family members. I'm fairly certain that that had
almost no impact whatsoever on how I conducted the sessions, and I didn't
let myself get too entagled with my own emotions in the process of helping
the client process his issues.
However, I did find myself falling into ego trips at times, and
this is probably one of my biggest issues as a counselor. I like being
extremely good at the things I do. So I may sometimes get caught up in the
moment when I feel like I'm doing a good job and not allow myself the time
to be asking myself what I could be doing better, or be as open to
criticism during the times when I feel I'm on a sort of high while working
with clients. This is something that came up for me once or twice during
the sessions, because I absolutely love this sort of work, so I have to
learn to separate the love of it from the process, otherwise the client
could get lost in the shuffle. Similarly, I very much enjoy the aesthetics
of much of what I see during the processing, and I have to be very careful
not to say a word about that. Several times when the client was
criticising his own drawings, I almost jumped in to tell him how much I
liked it, but was present enough not to do so, because it would have been
distracting to the process. But it was difficult for me to refrain from
commenting, so that's something else I need to be sure that I address
within myself.
My other major self-criticism is that as of yet, I think I need to
spend more time working on guided visualizations and figuring out how best
to present them. It's not something that feels natural to me, and
sometimes it feels quite awkward. I'm not sure exactly what I plan to do
about this, except that I think I will just keep practicing them until I
feel more comfortable with it.
Process-wise, however, this is feeling very natural to me. When it
comes to analyzing the actual contents of the images, I feel like I have a
lot of strengths, and a good ability to formulate interesting and engaging
questions about the images presented without judging or evaluating them.
This part of it feels very right to me. The underside of that is, of
course, that I need to continue to push myself to self-critique and look
for external criticism as well to make sure I'm not just enjoying the rush
of the process without realizing that I might be making a serious mistake
due to that whole ego thing.
All in all, this has been a very positive experience for me.
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