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Art Therapy! TLE and beyond
Wed, 09/08/2010 - 11:05Has anyone tried Art Therapy before? Or considered it?
I am really excited, I have just started.
My Mums side of my family is really creative - every single one of them paints, in one form or another. I have always liked art, but didn't pursue anything with it after I left school. Many, many moons ago.
Since I have TLE and have a rather drastic mood disorder that goes with it, I decided to look up Art Therapy. Luckily - the only person I could find, was all of a 10 minute drive from my house! yay for me!
Our first session was just talking. I talked non stop for 1 hour and 20 minutes. ha! And today we got in to the some art stuff.
We have decided I want to do this with a view of being able to actually learn creative and artistic techniqes, what mediums I like .. so on and so forth. And then, while going through that - learning all about my inner demonds and so on and so forth! (Im so excited! ha!)
Today we did my first bit of art, if you can call it that! My practice of 'art' goes as far as doodles when I am on the phone. My main doodle is a flower. So she got me to start with the flower. Next - she said for me just to be still, not think about it, and see what comes to mind. And all of a sudden these three little dots and a wavy line popped in to my mind. It was cool! So I did that.
We didn't have much time to go through the dots and wavy line (because I was running late!), but we are going to talk about it next week. She basically said, my dots and line were 'perfect' because it came from my subconsiousness and its relative to something. What its relative to, we don't know - but we will explore it.
She told me, one of her Art Therapist friends was working with a patient who had cancer. The lady did a doodle/scribble type of thing. She couldn't figure out what it was or what it meant. They were turning it upside down, looking at it from all different angles, talking about it - she couldn't figure it out - and then she said 'oh my gosh - its my tumor!'. She had seen her tumor on scans. And that is what she had drawn, without even knowing it at the time.
So I am super excited about Art Therapy now! I think its going to be fantastic.
I think I am going to have to highly recommend it to you all! In particular, those with TLE and the emotional eliment. I also thought it might be something really really valuable for kiddies with E.