Expressive Arts as Healing Engagement – Cathy Malchiodi

Outline

Demonstrate arts-based approaches to enhance and deepen empathy, compassion, and interpersonal connection in our clients and ourselves. 

• Participants will learn a variety of approaches; for example, dyadic drawing to enhance connection, compassion and empathy and mindful drawing of emotions to translate into gesture 

Use a bottom-up model for applying the expressive arts to facilitate the body’s natural resources for transformation and healing. 

• Participants will learn how to apply the Expressive Therapies Continuum, a bottom-up arts-based model for clinical work 

Incorporate improvisation, dramatic enactment, gesture, bilateral movement, art making, and play as foundational practices to facilitate social engagement. 

• Participants will learn through experiential work how all of these media can be combined as an integrative approach to promoting health and well-being in clients 

Provide action-oriented methods that “get past talk” to help clients co-regulate with others. 

• Participants will experience non-verbal methods such as drawing, gesture, movement and dramatic enactment as ways to co-regulate therapist and client, as well as group engagement in psychotherapy settings 

Explore meaningful sensory-based communications to facilitate client engagement and improve treatment outcomes. 

• Participants will engage in actual arts expression to understand the theoretical constructs of social engagement, polyvagal theory and non-verbal communication to effect change 

Use play, improvisation, musicality, and movement in a clinical setting. 

• Participants will experience non-verbal methods such as drawing, gesture, movement and dramatic enactment as ways to co-regulate therapist and client, as well as group engagement in psychotherapy settings