Expressive Arts Therapy: Outside Client Report

(Fall, 1998)

Session 2

I started the second session asking Jim if his relationship with his father had an impact on other relationships in his life, telling him that he didn't have to rush to an answer, and could think about it for himself for awhile, but before I was done, he affirmed in the extreme positive that yes, indeed, it had a very profound impact on all his relationships with other men.

Specifically, he found it very difficult to form any sort of serious bond with any man who was more than ten years older than himself. This time, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the present rather than the past, and specifically on the various relationships in his life. So this time I asked him to visualize people in his life and his relationships with them and to draw out some sort of map representing those relationships.

relationship map The results were fascinating. The very first figure he drew was that of his brother, and the very last one was that of himself, whom he later explained had added almost as an afterthought.

In processing the image, we noticed that all of his biological family prior to his marriage were surrounded with barbed wire, and shown with harsh colors. Geographically, the only direct connections to the client were to his wife and daughter. Colorwise, his more positive relationship were all shown in blues and greens, and even though his direct physical connections were only to women, his hand appeared to be reaching out to several images which I discovered were representative of several older men in his life with whom he'd had more positive (but never long-lasting) relationships.

One in particular was a man with whom he'd worked, who was alcoholic and had various other physical problems. He thought this relationship mimiced the one with his father to some degree: a man to whom he looked up, and wanted to view as a friend, but who due to various ailments couldn't properly respond. I noticed and mentioned that while this man was drawn in blues and greens like other more positive relationships, it still had a border around it, which we determined represented walls, but were not as severe as the barbed wire surrounding his brother.

We discovered that this had a specific meaning, which was that his relationship with this man was a substitute for a father relationship, but not one which was quite as damaging or dangerous as his relationship with his father, which was demonstrated in the image above.

The relationship with the brother was represented similary, surrounded by barbed wire, a teardrop inside a box. (His brother was also significantly older than himself, also suffering from various forms of serious mental illness).

As part of the transformation, I thought it would be good for him to focus on a specific individual from the map, of his choosing, and show not what he thought the relationship currently was, but what he would like it to become. So, moving from the general to the specific, he chose to do a new drawing, this time representing himself and his relationship with his brother, focusing on how he'd like it to be.

I led him through a brief meditation in which I asked him to focus in on a specific individual who was represented in the map and notice if a specific part of his body responds in some fashion to his feelings on that individual, and to ask it if it has an image to present to him.

holding the brother When we were done, he drew the image shown on the right. He drew himself as a hand, yet again, but this time the hand was a glowing bright yellow. His brother, instead, was represented by blues and greens, which had previously been associated with the more positive relationships.

During processing, I learned that he drew his brother as a set of misaligned blocks. He was thinking specifically of an image he'd seen before in an ad for a professional Rolfer which showed a person's skeleton as misaligned and confused by separating it into individual blocks. Thus, his brother was represented similarly, but instead of it being about a physical situation, it was a psychological one. His brother has a myriad of psychological problems, even more serious than those of his father, but not the physical ailments. He decided that he'd like some sort of more positive relationship with his brother (his current one is virtually non-existant) but still wasn't clear on whether or not he'd be able to do anything about it.

We did, however, discover a great many parallels between the relationship he had with his brother and that with his father, and this provided groundwork for our final session, moving back into the father relationship, and bringing the client into the mode of owning his own issues.
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