Art Therapy

Today, I had the opportunity to join with Maggie (an art therapist) while she worked with one of our students. 

It was such a valuable and fascinating learning experience. I was a bit nervous - I didn't want to say the wrong thing! I needn't have worried. 

1. Feelings scale 1-10 with colours to represent the feelings. We drew the scale together. We discussed how we were feeling at that moment. Maggie emphasised that all the emotions are ok and important. We talked about where we were sitting on the scale when we woke up in the morning. Maggie talked about what she noticed her body doing (eyes feeling heavy) when describing where she was on the scale. 

2. Emotions cards. Maggie talked about emotions using cards from Inside Out 2 (the movie). She explained that, like the primary colours, base emotions can get mixed to create new emotions. For example, anxiety can be a mix of fear, anger and sadness. The base emotions are joy, anger, sadness, disgust and fear. Maggie asked our student if he wanted to put together some cards to show what base emotions might combine to make 'anxiety.' 

3. Acting out emotions. We each took turns to act out one of the emotions cards and guess which emotion was being acted. This was a competitive game, with the first person to guess, getting to keep the emotion card. 

4. Ball and drum. Maggie tapped a drum slowly, making a beat. When she hit the drum, our student and I had to pass a ball between each other. The beat became faster and slower. This was pracatising matching our energy. 

5. Trampoline. Using a piece of lycra, we created a trampoline to bounce a beanbag up and down. This develops team work and helps us match our energy. We counted the number of bounces we could do together and tried to beat our score. 

Notes: Maggie made sure every activity was a choice using words like, "Would you like to say where you are on the feelings chart?? Would you like to have a turn or pass it to someone else???" 

Maggie uses the word 'sensations' before she uses the word 'emotions.' Our body shows us sensations and students can learn to recognise and name these (e.g. a yucky feeling in our tummy). The next step is to know that sensations reveal emotions and we have a wide range of emotions However, to associate the emotions with the sensations in our bodies, the students need to be in a calm state, not heightened / anxious / worried.  

Maggie talked to me later about two students 'matching' each other's energy. Student A has very high energy, and Student B has low energy. And together they can complement each other. 

She also taught me about the 'window of tolerance.'  Everyday experiences which we can handle come within our 'window of tolerance'. We can handle these through breathing, self care etc. Extreme events (a death, crisis etc) come outside our window of tolerance and we need to recognise that these things are beyond what we would normally cope with. 

When events are outside the window of tolerance, people can go hyper (display those feelings in overt ways such as screaming, hitting, crying, etc) or go hypo (internalise those feelings in such ways as self-blame, and even self harm). We can enlarge our widow of tolerance Sometimes this is about sitting with the discomfort of different emotions and learning to be ok with them. Sometimes we can learn strategies. Some of the kids at our school have small windows of tolerance and it is helpful to recognise that.