The Creative Arts in Counseling

Samuel T. Gladding

• Publisher: American Counseling Association
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119291954
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This latest edition of The Creative Arts in Counseling is a powerful, evidence-based examination of how creative expression can be used in counseling with clients of various ages and backgrounds. It explores the clinical application of all of the major creative arts, including music, dance/movement, imagery, visual arts, writing/literature, drama, play and humor, and—new to this edition—animal-assisted therapy, therapeutic horticulture, and nature/wilderness experiences. The history, rationale, and theory behind each art form are discussed, in addition to its clinical benefits and uses in counseling settings. Each chapter contains a variety of practical exercises that clinicians, instructors, and students can incorporate immediately into their work, as well as "creative reflections" for personal and professional self-evaluation. The final chapter summarizes the 126 exercises that appear throughout the text so that readers can quickly access exercises that meet their needs.

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Chapter 1
History of, Rationale for, and Benefits of Using the Arts in Counseling

Journey

I am taken back by your words

to your history and the mystery of being human

in an all-too-often robotic world.

I hear your pain

and see the pictures you paint

so cautiously and vividly.

The world you draw is a kaleidoscope

ever changing, ever new, encircling and fragile.

Moving past the time and through the shadows

you look for hope beyond the groups you knew as a child.

I want to say, “I'm here. Trust the process,”

but the artwork is your own.

So I withdraw and watch you work

while occasionally offering you feedback

and images of the possible.

—Gladding, 1990b, p. 142

Counseling is a profession that focuses on making human experience constructive, meaningful, and enjoyable both on a preventive and on a remedial level. It is like art in its emphasis on expressiveness, structure, and uniqueness. It is also creative in its originality and its outcomes. Both are novel, practical, and significant.

This book is on the uses of the creative arts in counseling. The creative arts are frequently referred to as the expressive arts (Atkins et al., 2003). They are defined here as art forms, ranging from those that are primarily auditory or written (e.g., music, drama, and literature) to those that are predominantly visual (e.g., painting, mime, dance, and movement). Many overlaps exist between these broad categories. In most cases two or more art forms are combined in a counseling context, such as literature and drama or dance and music. These combinations work because “music, art, dance/movement, drama therapy, psychodrama, and poetry therapy have a strong common bond” (Summer, 1997, p. 80).

As a group, the creative arts enhance and enliven the lives of everyone they touch (Neilsen et al., 2016). Cultivation of the arts outside of counseling settings is enriching for people in all walks of life because it sensitizes them to beauty, helps heal them physically and mentally, and creates within them a greater awareness of possibilities (Jourard & Landsman, 1980). The arts help patients and clients by increasing self-esteem, increasing motor coordination and body control, providing relaxation, teaching coping skills, decreasing acting out behaviors, and developing awareness of emotions or underlying issues (H. Kennedy, Reed, & Wamboldt, 2014). “It can be said that . . . creative endeavors offer multidisciplinary ways to give voice to the human internal experience and to act as catalysts for learning about the self and the world at large” (Bradley, Whiting, Hendricks, Parr, & Jones, 2008, p. 44).

In counseling, the creative arts help to make clients more sensitive to themselves and often encourage them to invest in therapeutic processes that can help them grow and develop even further (A. Kennedy, 2008). As such actions occur, participants may give more form to their thoughts, behaviors, and feelings and become empowered. Aside from formal counseling sessions, “acts of artistic expression, in and of themselves, carry their own healing” (MacKay, 1989, p. 300). Involvement with the arts helps individuals recover from traumatic experiences and the stress of daily living. Thus, whether encountering the creative arts inside or outside of counseling, individuals who are involved with them usually benefit in multiple ways.

The possibilities encased of specific creative arts in counseling, singularly and together, are covered in various ways in this book. The processes and outcomes of using the arts in a therapeutic manner are addressed as they are related to specific client populations. Just as becoming a painter takes talent, sensitivity, courage, and years of devotion, a similar process is at work in counseling: The actual practice differs from knowledge of theory (Cavanagh, 1982). Csikszentmihalyi (1996) hypothesized that it takes at least 10 years for a person to be in a field before being able to master it. Thus, the 10-year rule for bringing talent to fruition seems to apply to artists, counselors, or anyone in refining their talent. Therefore, although the ingredients necessary to enrich counseling through using the arts are emphasized here, the effective implementation of these skills and processes will only come with practice on the part of the counselor—you!

The Nature of Creativity

When the creative arts in counseling are examined as an entity, it is crucial to initially explore the nature of creativity. This examination is prudent for two reasons. First, by knowing something about the nature of creativity, counselors may understand and better appreciate creative processes. Second, counseling, as mentioned previously, is by its nature a creative endeavor. Although the arts have much potential to help counselors in assisting clients, they are limited in what they can do unless counselors know how to use them creatively.

Creativity is an overused word that is sometimes talked about without being defined. It is a lot like kissing in that it is so “intrinsically interesting and satisfying that few bother to critically examine it” (Thoresen, 1969, p. 264). A central feature of creativity is divergent thinking, which is thinking in a broad, flexible, exploratory, tentative, inductive, and non-data-based way that is oriented toward the development of possibilities. Divergent thinking includes fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration in thought as well (Carson, 1999). Creativity and divergent thinking are associated with coping abilities, good mental health, resiliency, and couple/family functionality and happiness (Cohen, 2000; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Pink, 2006). According to Sternberg and Lubart (1996, p. 677), as an overall process, creativity involves “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original or unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful or meets task constraints).” It is positively related to spontaneity and negatively related to impulsivity (Kipper, Green, & Prorak, 2010).

In counseling and other helping professions, creativity combined with the arts frequently results in (a) the production of a tangible product that gives a client insight, such as a piece of writing or a painting, or (b) a process that the clinician formulates, such as a new way of conducting counseling that leads to client change. Creativity is a worldwide phenomenon that knows no bounds with regard to ethnicity, culture, gender, age, or other real or imagined barriers that separate people from each other (Koestler, 1964; Lubart, 1999). In addition, creativity can be preventative as well as remedial. Duffey (2015), a major advocate for the use of creativity in counseling (CIC), a term she devised, stated: “Creativity is as fundamental to counseling practice as the therapeutic relationship. In the best sense, the therapeutic relationship ignites creative problem solving, understanding, flexibility, and adaptability. In turn, this shared creativity deepens the counseling relationship.”

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Creative Reflection

Many people find ideas coming to them at specific times of the day, such as early morning, or when they are engaged in certain activities, such as taking a shower. Think of when ideas are most likely to come to you. Keep a daily chart for a week of new ideas and the times in which they come. What does this activity tell you about yourself and what you need to be most mindful of in “finding time” to be creative?

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Overall, creativity is a nonsequential experience that involves two parts: originality and functionality. A distinction can and should be made between “little-c creativity,” that is, “everyday problem solving and the ability to adapt to change,” and “Big-C creativity,” that is, “when a person solves a problem or creates an object that has a major impact on how other people think, feel, and live their lives” (Kersting, 2003, p. 40). Big-C creativity is much rarer than little-c creativity. An example of Big-C creativity is formulation of counseling theories such as those devised by Sigmund Freud and Carl Rogers (Gladding, 2008). However, individual counseling mostly involves little-c creativity as counselors work with clients to find more productive and constructive ways of living. Regardless of whether it is Big-C or little-c, both types of creativity involve a six-step process (Witmer, 1985):

1. Preparation, during which enough data and background information are gathered to make a new response.
2. Incubation, in which the mind is allowed to wander away from a task or problem.
3. Ideation, in which ideas are generated but not judged, a type of divergent thinking.
4. Illumination, in which there is a breakthrough in a person's thinking, a kind of enlightenment.
5. Evaluation, during which convergent and critical thinking occur. A part of evaluation is fine-tuning and refining thoughts or behaviors that have not been thoroughly considered.
6. Verification/production, during which an original idea becomes a new or refined product or action. In this last step, a person's life changes forever because it is impossible to see or be in the world again as before.

Although these general aspects about creativity are pertinent to counseling, the profession itself, through its theories, has even more specific ways of viewing creativity (Gladding, 1995). For example, the psychoanalytic viewpoint is that creativity is a positive defense mechanism, known as sublimation. From a gestalt perspective, however, creativity is an integrative process in which people become more congruent with themselves and their environments and thus try new behaviors. Imagery theorists, however, argue that creativity is a matter of envisioning mental pictures and implementing these pictures in reality.

Regardless of how it is seen, creativity is valued in society and in the culture of counseling. Through creativity, new, exciting, and productive ways of working, living, and healing are formulated and implemented with individuals, couples, and families (Carson & Becker, 2003).

History of the Creative Arts in the Helping Professions

Having explained the vital aspects of what creativity is and what the creative arts are, we can now examine in an informed manner the ways in which the creative arts have affected counseling. Many of the creative arts, such as drama, music, and dance, have had long and distinguished associations with healing and mental health services (Corsini, 2001; Westhenen & Fritz, 2014). Almost all art forms have been used since ancient times to help prevent distress and remediate internal and external strife. Some of their most notable contributions to mental health services are chronicled here according to broad time periods.

Ancient Cultures and the Arts

Ancient civilizations valued the creative arts for what they believed were their healing properties as well as their aesthetic properties (Atkins et al., 2003). For example, the ancient ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Chapter 1: History of, Rationale for, and Benefits of Using the Arts in Counseling
• Chapter 2: Music and Counseling
• Chapter 3: Dance and Movement in Counseling
• Chapter 4: Imagery and Counseling
• Chapter 5: Visual Arts and Counseling
• Chapter 6: Writing and Literature in Counseling
• Chapter 7: Drama and Counseling
• Chapter 8: Play and Humor in Counseling
• Chapter 9: Animal-Assisted Therapy in Counseling, Therapeutic Horticulture, and Wilderness/Nature Therapy
• Chapter 10: Trends in Counseling and the Creative Arts
• Chapter 11: Creative Arts Exercises
• References
• Subject Index
• Name Index
• Technical Support
• End User License Agreement