The creative artistic training with an emphasis on art-therapy at the Sorbonne University Paris Descartes, offered me a deep reflection on the questions that link the effects, the creative process and the effects in a supportive and caring relationship between the therapist and the client.
This training allows for three fundamental contexts of application: the educational, social and health fields. The common core of this training houses four specialties (music, theater, dance and plastic arts) that will be developed through the main knowledge of psychopathology, aesthetics, history of art and history of art therapy as well as the creative process in the different stages of the life.
Workshops proposals
Workshops for children and teenagers
When a child or young person has some kind of challenge, difficulty, or situation that prevents the correct development of their personality, it is important not only to take the situation as a reference but also the whole of the child.
Their family environment, school, their friends… Because it is from this “Everything” that personal work and the ability to recognize their strengths can begin.
The work done in an art therapy workshop is created to allow the construction of its uniqueness and its affirmation in its environment. Accept their possibilities, recognize their emotions, and allow them to consolidate capacities.
The art therapy workshop will focus on the creative process that allows the manifestation of emotions, sensations, and new forms of appropriation of a situation. The final result will not be the main objective of the workshop, as a fine arts workshop can be.
Workshops for adults
One of my main motivations for offering the workshops to adults was my desire to remind people of the importance of keeping the “inner child” awake. Each experience forges us and, sometimes without realizing it, extinguishes or sets aside resources that were once present during our childhood.
This workshop invites people to reconnect with the possibility of working and creating without prejudice. Taking part in an art therapy workshop does not require prior artistic knowledge. It is about coming with the desire to undertake a journey with oneself and being guided in discovering means of communication and expression of each person, using various artistic tools.
Our world moves at a sometimes too abrupt speed and takes us in a dynamic without paying attention to our Being and environment.
This space will be designed to provide a moment of relaxation, listening to yourself, imagination, forgiveness (if necessary), discussion, and openness with yourself and with others.
The workshops can be individual or group, depending on the objectives established during a first interview. This art-therapeutic tool can also reinforce personal work already started with another health professional.
Workshops for the elderly
The power of expression through art allows the stimulation of cognitive, sensory, and motor skills.
Art-therapy offers well-being that is intrinsically linked to the moment of creation.
The workshop reduces stress, increases self-confidence, and creates a new channel of expression for mental, physical, or psychological pain.
The elderly is the holder of a new form of communication and contact with their environment and with themselves. We manage to inhabit our physical and mental bodies, providing new forms of creativity.
Gestures can be refined and also used as a means of expression. Possibilities for cognitive stimulation are generated through work on his own personal experience, what I usually call: “The Golden Book”.
Family workshops
A healthy relationship nurtured by dialogue and trust between parents and children is essential to promote the child’s development and psycho-emotional development. When difficulties arise (academic, behavioral, or otherwise), it is generally advisable to provide comprehensive support to the child.
The parent-child dyad is an approach that allows for lasting intervention, as parents, in turn, will have tools that can be implemented within the family.
This support can be added to psychological or parental care that has already been established in the family nucleus.
The difficulties that the child manifests may be linked to alien situations, or not, to the parents and that compromise parenthood and family dynamics. The workshop serves as a tertiary space to observe, without the need to communicate verbally, the complexity of family dynamics and the conflicts that may exist there.
Thus, we will have two spaces: the creative space and the meeting space promoting a more harmonious bond and relationship.
- Meeting space: any form of interaction between the participants, verbal or physical, the art-therapist is the guarantor to observe and accompany the difficulties manifested. The art-therapist encourages parents and children, helps each other, and listens to others’ proposals, solving the problems perceived during creation together. These workshops create a fascinating “mirror” where all participants have a helping and strengthening role. We are more interested in our fellow man and therefore more empathetic.
- Creative space: fine arts add an element of communication that reconnects with the adult’s inner child. Participants will be able to rediscover themselves around the game and the transition space. The parents’ own history can be reflected in the family dynamics and emotional support given. The place that creation occupies is that of a transitional space between the day and the bond built during the workshop between the participants and the art-therapist.