How Interactive Therapy Helps Kids & Families with Emotional & Behavioral Issues
Art therapy is the therapeutic use of art making for those who have experienced mental illness, trauma, or other challenges. It is often a primary form of therapy with children who are recovering from physical or sexual assault, verbal abuse and/or neglect. Through art creation, they can learn about themselves and others, they can learn to cope with symptoms, stress, traumatic experiences, enhance cognitive abilities and enjoy the life-affirming pleasures of art making.
Drawings can help the art therapist understand concerns and issues that cannot be expressed verbally. The therapist's role in art therapy is to get the child to talk about their art in a narrative way to help externalize their thoughts, experiences and feelings. The therapist must pay attention to things such as the theme of the piece of art, sequence, size, pressure used to draw the picture, strokes and details of the pictures.
Play therapy refers to a method of psychotherapy with children in which a therapist uses a child's fantasies and the symbolic meanings of his or her play as a medium for understanding and communication with the child.
The aim of play therapy is to decrease those behavioral and emotional difficulties that interfere significantly with a child's normal functioning. Less obvious goals include improved verbal expression, ability for self-observation, improved impulse control, more adaptive ways of coping with anxiety and frustration, and improved capacity to trust and to relate to others.
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