Positive Art Therapy Theory and Practice

Integrating Positive Psychology with Art Therapy

Rebecca Ann Wilkinson, Gioia Chilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317438991
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Positive Art Therapy Theory and Practice outlines a clear, systematic approach for combining positive psychology with art therapy's capacity to mobilize client strengths; induce engagement, flow and positive emotions; transform perceptions; build healing relationships and empowering narratives; and illuminate life purpose and meaning. Woven throughout are clinical illustrations, state-of-the-art research, discussion questions, and reflections on how therapists can apply this approach to their work with clients, and their personal and professional development. The book also includes a comprehensive list of more than 80 positive art therapy directives, a robust glossary, and lists of strengths and values. Written in an inviting and amusing style, this manual is both entertaining and practical—an invaluable tool for any practitioner looking to apply the most current theory and research on positive psychology and art therapy to their clinical practice.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

When we teach art therapy graduate students about positive psychology, we often start by having them make artwork about “what a happy and fulfilled life includes for you.” We suggest that before you proceed any further, you might do the same—consider what a happy life means to you? What would you be doing and where would you be? Who would be there with you? How would you be feeling? You might refer back to this image occasionally as we examine the world of happiness, wellbeing, and art therapy.

And now we welcome you to the community of folks who, like us, are excited by the possibilities of combining art therapy with the science of positive psychology. Positive psychology, most broadly defined, is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions. Built upon existing foundations of mental health theory and practice devoted to relieving suffering and overcoming hardship, positive psychology expands our capacity to thrive in the face of adversity and fulfill our highest potential. Positive art therapy unites the unique benefits of art therapy with positive psychology’s mission: to promote individual and global wellbeing by nurturing what is good and functioning in our lives.

We, the authors of this book, are two art therapists who found that this approach has had an invigorating and renewing effect not only in our clinical work but also in all aspects of our personal and professional lives. It has underscored our profound appreciation and love for art therapy while simultaneously opening our eyes to new ways that our field can be conceived of and practiced.

We think art therapy and positive psychology have a lot to offer each other. In the past, we have thought of the connection between art therapy and positive psychology as the intersection of two worlds. We also like the metaphor of a blossoming friendship. So, in the following pages, we are going to introduce you to our pal positive psychology and explain how it has infused and brightened everything we do as art therapists. We will acquaint you with different facets of this multi-dimensional friend and explore the unique ways that art therapy can contribute to the relationship.

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We coined this dynamic synergy, at its simplest, “positive art therapy” (Chilton & Wilkinson, 2009). We believe that not only will art therapists benefit from delving into this exciting new approach, but that positive psychologists, when they learn about how art therapy so naturally and effectively promotes wellbeing, will also be inspired to do the same. We also hope that, by articulating more precisely how art therapy affects wellbeing, the book will serve as a celebration of the exceptional power of this work. And finally, we are excited to share this approach with you because we hope that, as it did for us, learning about the complementary nature of positive psychology and art therapy will also invigorate your practice and make you happier!

First, though, let us introduce ourselves. We first met as graduate students in 1991 at the George Washington University Graduate Art Therapy Program after finding a passion in the crossover between art and psychology. After two years of stellar training and mentorship by art therapists such as Edith Kramer, Audrey DiMaria, Carol Cox, and Katherine Williams, we began our careers at St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC, for people with mental illness. There we became and have remained close friends, even though our work and our lives have taken us on very different paths.

Gioia worked for five years in St. Elizabeth’s long-term wards and forensic units with people struggling with chronic mental illness, poverty, and racism. She thrived at “St. E’s” in the Creative Arts Therapies Department—a community of art therapists, dance movement therapists, music therapists, bibliotherapists, and psychodramatists—gaining a deep appreciation for the breadth of the creative process to bring dignity, hope, and healing to those on the edge of society.

Gioia went on to work with children and adolescents with emotional disabilities in the juvenile justice and foster care systems. She also collaborated with the Potomac Art Therapy Association, the local chapter of art therapists, holding educational workshops and community events across the city. While taking time off in the early 2000s to raise her children, she discovered that she still wanted to stay connected to the art therapy world. She became active with the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) helping to organize their annual conferences, tapping into the realization that for her, art therapy was more than a job, it was a life calling.

Rebecca’s love of wide-open spaces took her to the Arizona desert where she continued to work with adults in inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care. On many of the psychiatric units in which she worked, she was asked to develop art therapy programs which included generating all of the documentation for monitoring patient progress and contributing to treatment planning. Participating so fully in all aspects of patient care—not just the delivery of art therapy (which was almost always gratifying), but also in the evaluation and diagnosis of psychiatric illness was often disturbing for her. Not because of the patients, whom she loved, but because of the pervasively pathology-based lens through which they were seen. Even back then, long before she was introduced to the field of positive psychology, she could see that something was amiss both with the way patients were viewed—and how they viewed themselves—and with the assumptions that governed the delivery of their care.

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In 2005, Rebecca moved to Costa Rica for a couple of years with her husband. During that time, Gioia, at home nursing her second child, discovered the Artist’s Happiness Challenge, an online course being offered by art therapist Lani Gerity (2009). The class was designed to explore ideas about happiness and wellbeing, chock-full of exercises derived from the field of positive psychology and modified with an art therapy twist. Lani’s course seemed like a great way that we could “play” together even though we were in two different countries! At the time, we had no idea how much that whimsical interlude would reveal to us about ourselves and how it would change the course of lives.

For example, Gioia, who had resumed working part-time at what she thought of as the perfect job—getting well-paid for doing art therapy with children with emotional disabilities in a public school—was bored and restless. And Rebecca—who was by most measures living in paradise—was miserable. As we started to look at our beliefs about happiness, we realized that our assumptions were often superficial and ineffective. And as we experienced positive changes from the exercises we were doing, it became clear to us that this was something we wanted to bring not only to our clients but to other art therapists as well.

In 2007, after having made changes in our lives as a result of what we were learning—Gioia finding work that invigorated and challenged her more, and Rebecca and her husband returning to the DC area to be near family—we proposed a class, “The Art of Happiness,” to our alma mater, GW’s graduate art therapy program. At that time, we did not realize that positive psychology was at such a tipping point.

In 2009, we joined the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) (www.ippanetwork.org), which facilitates collaboration among psychology researchers, economists, social policy makers, educators, students, and practitioners of positive psychology across academic disciplines and around the world. While attending the First IPPA Congress in Philadelphia, we ran into Tarquam McKenna, an art therapy colleague from St. Elizabeth’s, who had returned to his home in Sydney and was now editor of the Australian and New Zealand Arts Therapies Association (ANZATA) journal. He invited us to write an article describing the impact that positive psychology might have on the field of art therapy.

That summer we outlined a model for positive art therapy that integrated positive psychology principles with art therapy practice, positive art therapy research, and training (Chilton & Wilkinson, 2009). We also began conducting workshops showing art therapists how to incorporate these concepts into their work. In addition, it became clear that this material also had significance in their personal lives—blending positive psychology principles with art interventions increased their wellbeing, vitality, and engagement.

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At around the same time, we were also invited by hospital administrators and mental health agencies to bring our trainings to other “frontline providers”— professionals in high-stress roles such as caregivers, medical staff, and other mental health providers—to help them manage stress, prevent burnout, and stay connected with the values and passion that initially moved them to join their field.

We also began to receive referrals from other organizations, e.g., the Government Accountability Office (not surprising—we were in DC) and the Office of the Capitol, and private corporations such as Genentech, Microsoft, and Full Picture (an international marketing company). In 2010, we advanced our mission to help reduce stress and burnout and increase wellbeing by forming Creative Wellbeing Workshops (CWW). CWW provides guidance, training, continuing education, and consultation on how to create sustainable happiness and wellbeing.

Shortly thereafter Gioia, who has the strengths of curiosity and love of learning, recognized that in order for her life to be most fulfilling, she needed to pursue endeavors which would challenge her in new and different ways. She decided to explore the intersection of positive psychology and art therapy through formal academic research. Serendipitously, a doctoral program in Creative Arts Therapies at Drexel University was launched, where she was able to explore positive art therapy through artistic inquiry and arts-based research—both of which fit her creativity and passion for artmaking with others. Gioia’s research focused on positive emotions and art therapy (which we will explore in more detail in Chapter 5, “Positive Emotions and Emotion Regulation”). After graduating, she felt drawn to resume clinical work and found what was for her the perfect art therapy position—working at a drug and alcohol addiction center with a strength-based treatment philosophy and a deep appreciation for the value of the creative arts therapies.

In the meantime, Rebecca balanced what felt like competing values—her love of her family, most of whom were living on the East Coast, and her love of the Arizona desert where her husband’s family lives. In order to sustain these geographical challenges while fulfilling her mission to help herself and others experience more happiness and wellbeing, she continues to provide workshops and teach on positive art therapy with Gioia on the East Coast for half of the month and serves as a visiting art therapy specialist and wellness counselor the other two weeks at Miraval Resort in Arizona, a mindfulness-based retreat center and wellness spa.

Regardless of other pursuits and commitments, our dedication to articulating and sharing with others the crossover between positive psychology and art therapy has persisted. We would not have guessed that interest in it would also resonate as much and for as long as it has in the art therapy world. Presentations on positive art therapy (led by us and others who are expanding this realm of inquiry) are heavily attended at national art therapy conferences and we are consistently asked to provide trainings on this topic for local and regional art therapy associations. Chapters on art therapy and positive psychology were included in Rubin’s Approaches to Art Therapy (Chilton & Wilkinson, 2016) and The Wiley Handbook of Art (Isis, 2015).

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As the relevance and value of combining positive psychology and art therapy continues to be recognized, the academic discourse is growing rapidly. Gioia published her research on art therapy and positive emotions (Chilton et al., 2015; Chilton, Gerber, Councill, & Dreyer, 2015). Art therapy and hope theory has been explored by Scheinberg (2012) and Johnson and Sullivan-Marx (2006). Art therapists are also adding to the research literature in the area of flow (Burkewitz, 2014; Chilton, 2013; Hovick, 2014; Lee, 2009; Voytilla, 2006), character strengths (Riddle & riddle [sic], 2007), meaning (Darewych, 2014), positive assessment (Betts, 2012) and positive ethics (Hinz, 2011). Research into art therapy’s overall impact on wellbeing is also growing (Puig, Lee, Goodwin, & Sherrard, 2006; Stuckey & Nobel, 2010; Donald, 2008; Radel, 2015).

Just as the research into topics relevant to positive psychology is exponentially growing, so too will exploration and discourse related to positive art therapy continue to emerge. In addition, credit belongs to many others whose work is not only related but extremely relevant. This includes but is not limited to Laurie Rappaport’s work on focusing, Mimi Farrelly-Hansen’s and Patricia Isis’s work on mindfulness, Michael Franklin’s work on empathy and the transpersonal approach, Noah Hass-Cohen and Johanna Czamanski-Cohen’s work on the body-mind connection, Pat Allen and Shaun McNiff’s work on spirituality and arts-based research, not to mention the many contributions of others inside and out of the field who have added to the literature on the contribution of the arts in fostering resilience and contributing to individual, communal, and global welfare.

In the decade since we playfully experimented with Lani’s Happiness Challenge, we have painstakingly challenged ourselves and each other to apply a positive psychology perspective to our work and to practice with the tools we have learned. As a result, it has completely altered our approach not just to engaging with clients and the people we encounter in our professional roles—workshop participants, clients, co-workers, students, colleagues, corporate sponsors, etc.—but to working with each other as co-facilitators, business partners, and friends. It has also greatly enhanced our relationships with our family members and loved ones, and helped us to better manage challenges and capitalize on opportunities that come our way.

To be sure, this isn’t always easy; however, through doing so we have reaped many of the benefits that this approach promises. This includes feeling more enthusiastic and hopeful about our work; finding sustainability in it even when it is frustrating and stressful; having a clearer sense of our strengths and weaknesses and recognizing the strengths of others more; being more mindful and appreciative of our experiences, ourselves and others; acknowledging and being more accepting of our own and others’ vulnerabilities; developing more resilience in the face of hardships and losses; getting and staying more connected to our vision, mission, and values; feeling better in general, and having more fun! Last but not least, we also feel much better equipped to he...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Positive Art Therapy Theory and Practice
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword: A New Era in Art Therapy—Dr. Shaun Mcniff
• Foreword: Art Therapy, Inherently Positive—  Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A History of Positive Psychology
• 3 Happiness and Wellbeing
• 4 Positive Art Therapy Emerges
• Interlude: The Positive Art Therapy Manifesto
• 5 Positive Emotions and Emotion Regulation
• 6 Creativity
• 7 Flow
• 8 Strengths
• 9 Relationships
• 10 Meaning and Purpose
• 11 Meaning-Making and Perception
• 12 Accomplishment
• 13 Professional Applications and Future Directions
• Appendix A: Positive Art Therapy Directives
• Appendix B: Glossary
• Appendix C: List of Strengths
• Appendix D: List of Values
• Bibliography
• Index