the Crafts Report: Medicine for the soul

As occupational therapy seems to be moving away from using crafts, expressive arts therapy has incorporated crafts into its mix along with dance, music, drama and writing.

Both Whalen and Thompson studied with Geoffrey Scott-Alexander, the creator of Glass Lake Studio and its program in expressive arts therapy. Scott-Alexander, a registered expressive arts therapist and a former potter, is also one of the founding members of the North American Network of Expressive Arts Therapy Training Centers, and has taught expressive arts in Nepal, Sweden, Israel, Spain, Denmark, and Canada, as well as the United States. He likes expressive arts because it is a very body-centered approach that “allows an aligning of all of the self, a congruity of the inner and outer selves.”

Expressive arts, according to the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association, emphasize an interdisciplinary approach to creative endeavor and acknowledge arts’ capacity to respond to human suffering.

Thompson saw this affirmed last fall in an occupational therapy course she was teaching at Russell Sage College in New York. She was scheduled to give a three-hour lecture on Sept. 12, 2001, for her first class of Psycho-social Assessment and Intervention.

“I wondered how I was going to do this. I couldn’t give the planned lecture — I needed to address what had happened [the day before] — for the students and for me.”

Falling back on her expressive arts therapy training, Thompson took with her to class a large roll of paper, and different painting and drawing implements and encouraged the students to paint whatever they were feeling or whatever image they wanted to create. After 45 minutes, the class broke up into groups of three to talk about the image they had created, and to write poems and narrative responses to their images. At the end of the class, everyone felt supported and part of a community. Thompson then had the images framed, creating an exhibit with the art and poetry. She took four occupational therapy students to The Association for Death Education and Counseling annual conference in Portland, Ore., and set up the exhibit — each image on an easel with its poem.

“Attendees viewed the exhibit and later came to me and responded that as a result of the exhibit they were doing further processing about the event,” says Thompson. “There have been outgrowths that were not anticipated.”

Another student of Scott-Alexander’s, Diane Szabo, believes that the benefit of the arts in healing is that “you can start from any expressive point without verbal cues.”

Often in the midst of pain and grief, words are insufficient or limiting. Szabo, whose background is in weaving, knows this from her experience with victims of domestic abuse. “[Weaving] is another way to voice how they feel without going into painful details.”

She uses the process of weaving to help her clients gain perspective on their families and situations. “I have a potpourri of fibers that I let people chose from for the warps,” she says. “They are to pick fibers to reflect how they saw their family as a child, and then other fibers to represent their adult point of view. We explore each strand that they choose. One man chose barbed wire and baling twine to represent his mother.”

After the warp threads have been chosen and reflected on, the weaving begins. This time, the wefts represent events of their lives. “I show clients how to let things hang out and loose, if they were feeling at loose ends or how to scrunch up and tighten things if they were feeling tight and dark,” says Szabo. “In the process they remember things they had forgotten. Something about the visual image helps them see the family situation and the history and where they are.”

Holly Heyman, another student of Scott-Alexander’s, often incorporates dance and movement with clay in her work with seniors, ALS patients, mental health patients and domestic abuse survivors. One creative experience she uses for therapy is to have people in her groups pair up with someone else. Then, in total silence, in a 5- to 10-minute time period, the pair is to create a creature from clay. After the time is up, the pair decides what the creature is, gives it a name, and decides what powers it has. Then they introduce it to the group.

When she works with seniors, who often participate in her groups for the interaction and social connection, she gets them into their bodies first with some movement, self-massage, and then massaging each other’s shoulders. Next she gives them Play-Doh and encourages them just to play with it. “The point is for them to regain the surprise and spontaneity of life. The beauty of the art experience is in not knowing what is going to happen,” says Heyman. “One woman, after September 11, made an image that she said was an Arab woman weeping.”

Heyman, who turned to clay when she began studying with Scott-Alexander, is working on a series of figures called “Attitudes of Devotion” inspired by devotional postures from the Bahai tradition. Keeping a journal while working on the figures helped her understand her own creative process.
“The work is so powerful,” she says, “the way one art form brings in an image or theme and then you can move into another art form to deepen it.”

If you’re not interested in pursuing certification as an occupational or expressive arts therapist, you can still use your craft to help and heal others. Whalen encourages craftspeople to volunteer at hospitals, hospices and homes for the elderly, who are always looking for artists to come in and work with their populations.

Eleanor Wiley, a former speech pathologist and California beadmaker, used her new craft to work with cancer patients and the elderly. Then she turned her beadwork into making prayer beads that honored all faiths and spiritual traditions. Wiley began teaching her creation to groups around the world, traveling to the Balkans teaching young people how to make prayer beads. “I offered them a basket of beads of all shapes and color and sizes to choose from. One young person in a group of Macedonian and Albanian youth, observed how the beads were like people,” says Wiley. “One of the boys said he would give his beads to his grandmother to help her with her fear. He told me she sits with them all the time.”

Wiley also teaches how to make prayer beads to cancer patients, the elderly, people recovering from addiction, and even to public school students. “Although, in the schools I call them gratitude beads,” she laughs. “I have almost no technical skills. What I teach is not beading. What I teach is to trust yourself, your intuition. You can’t make a mistake. What you make is wonderful.”