There Is No Need to Talk about This

The mystery of Art Therapy is demystified in this book as the author offers an illuminating glimpse into her therapy practice. The author is deeply immersed in her own creative process and the respect, delicacy, and understanding that she provides her clients shines through. The poems embrace the painful aspects of her clients' lives and show how by working skillfully and creatively with trauma, abuse and mental illness, her clients move forward into joy, well-being and wholeness. Her poetic reflections move us to appreciate how art can be used as an instrument of transformation by travelling through landscapes where words cannot go. "Art is unique in its ability to embrace and communicate complex, deep, and subtle aspects of emotional experience. And often the best way to reflect upon and understand these artistic processes is to respond to them with more, in the same medium or a different one. Karen Wallace convincingly does both in There Is No Need to Talk about This: Poetic Inquiry from the Art Therapy Studio. Artistic expressions and images are apt to be a few steps ahead of the analytic mind's way of sorting things out. As an art therapist, she responds to visual imagery and studio environment by writing poems. Aligned with how perception and sensibility work, this language arguably offers a fuller sense of multifaceted processes of arts therapy than conventional clinical narratives. Poems hold contradictions, pare down excess verbiage, distill seeds, and 'speak/The thoughts of humanness that mattered.' This book will help therapists and researchers gain a more complete comprehension of their work and do something creative and life enhancing with the feelings it generates in them - living the process themselves as the most reliable way to bring it to others." - Shaun McNiff is Lesley University's first University Professor and author of many books including Imagination in Action: Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression and Art as Research "Karen Wallace's There Is No Need to Talk about This: Poetic Inquiry from the Art Therapy Studio is a profoundly moving work, therapeutic, evocative, wise, tender, feeling. It is painfully evocative in its words and imagery. There are lessons here for any reader who has ever had to look deeply into the darkness that lurks beneath the traumas of daily life. Karen Wallace teaches all of how to heal, how to love, how to move forward with dignity, and courage." - Norman Denzin, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Editor of Qualitative Inquiry and International Review of Qualitative Research "Our son Connor has autism and he saw Karen Wallace for art therapy for several years as a teen. Once he said, 'Karen is the only one who understands me.' She worked through many issues with him and helped us as parents decode his obsession with monsters. This book provides a glimpse into the genuine caring that Karen Wallace feels for every client lucky enough to see her." - Kellie Garrett, ACC, MC, ICD.D, Speaker ~ Coach ~ Strategist

Inhalt

Introduction; What Is Art Therapy?; Talking about Art Therapy; Everyone Is an Artist; Why I Became an Art Therapist; When Play Is Therapy; Art Therapy and Trauma; Sharp Edges; Learning to Wait; Boys Will Be Boys; Can Turn on a Dime; Power Play; Drawing; Disclosures; Retraumatization; Playing in the Sand; "What Does Cyrus Say?"; Be Here Now; Trigger Happy; Transition Time; Tricks of the Mind; Safe Landing; A Devastating Miracle; Art Therapy and Dissociation; Coming Home to the Body; Promises; I Love It When You Laugh; Not Being Seen; Learning Restraint; Trained at Home; Prematurely Pushed; Chairs That I Have Known; Does It Matter?; The Fires He Sets; This Moment; Shame; Because; Art Therapy and Depression; My Client Has Depression; Abstract; Making the Darkness Go Away; She is Good at Drawing Faces; Sometimes It's the Art That Needs Healing; Homeward Bound; Old Beliefs; Lighting Candles; Teenagers; The Resistant Therapist; Mending; What the Picture Tells; Art Therapy and Autism; She Thinks She Is Sonic the Hedgehog; Are You Human?; Is That All She Does, Just Play?; Secret Bridges; The Same as Last Week, Only Different; A Free Day; If Birds Can Fly, Why Oh Why, Oh Why Can't I?; Art Therapy and Addiction; As Long as It Takes; The Right to Cut; Reaching Through the Layers; Afternoon Therapy; Staying in the Trenches; A Metaphor; What a Dangerous Bridge to Cross; On a Good Day; Edges of Knowing; It Wasn't Just; Not Enough; Art Therapy and Grief; Building Candy Castles; The Magic of Art; Dark Secrets; Fresh Beginning after Her Husband's Death; The Boy with the Beautiful Eyes; The Magic Cloth; Presence; Nests; Wanting Mom; A Make Over; The Sorrow of This Job; Missing; My Teacher; The Stories Not Told; Super Hero; Art Therapy Groups and Honouring the Mother; Being a Mother; Hedgerow Teacher; A Bad Mother; What Is My Problem?; Resiliency: Missing Pieces; At 50; Don't Talk, Just Listen; Making Aprons; Hands; Art Therapy Groups and Making Peace with Your Body;But I Am Fat ...; Paper Dolls; Snow White; You and Me; Body Maps; You Were Part of That Group; Body Blocked; Making Peace; Art Therapy Groups and the Artful Archetypal Journey; A Poem about the Archetypal Group; Archetypal Drama; Changing House; The Fool Archetype; We All Have the Right to Cast Spells; Those Who Know and Remember; The World Card; Art Therapy Groups and Claiming Your Ruby Red Slippers; Looking behind the Curtain; Ruby Red Slippers; Deconstructing the Yellow Brick Road; Laying Down in the Field of Poppies; Safe Journey; Group Art; Art Therapy Groups and Soul Garden; Recognizing Life; Prayer Flags; The Healing Touch of Nature; Seeds of Hope; Spirits; Moving through the Seasons; Art Therapy Groups and Dream Work; Recurring Dreams; Dream-Work; Home Room; You Are Telling Me Your Nightmare; Childhood Dream; You Are Dreaming; Dream Circle; Duck Dreams; Art Therapy Groups and Mindfulness; Being a Buddhist; Purity; It's Okay to Go in Circles; In-between; Witnessing; Meditating; Just Sitting; "Where's That Book?"; Does He Have Your Back?; Grace; Art Therapy Groups and a Place Like Home; Journey Home; Prairie Prayer; New Machines for the Same Old Practice; Forever Taking Leave; Your Time; Nothing Is Important; Brain Injury; Three Years Old; Grandma Brought You for Therapy; Shortcuts; Asking; Art Therapy and Power of Transformation; Broken Images; Revision; Where Are You Now?; Be Here Now; The Artistic Mind; Mending a Broken Heart; The Power of Projection; Everyday Magic; Clichés; The Foster System; Wanting out; Closing; References.