Janet Courtney – Expressive Therapies – Healing Trauma Through Play, Art, Movement & Storytelling

Janet Courtney – Expressive Therapies – Healing Trauma Through Play, Art, Movement & Storytelling

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The Right-Brain—Home of the Expressive Self

• Advances in neuroscience
• Integrating rational and emotional brain processes in trauma
• The Expressive Therapy edge to heal trauma
• Engage the sensory self: touch, visual, listening, smell
• The therapeutic alliance—creating a foundation of empathetic compassion, safety, and trust

Assessing & Healing Trauma through Drawing Art Processes

• Tapping into right brain processes—the drawing speaks louder than words
• Overcome resistance and build safety and trust
• Draw upon the resiliency of humor
• Assessment individual and of family resiliency and strengths toward treatment planning and intervention

Healing Trauma through Song, Movement, & Dance

• Promote mind-body awareness and overcome resistance
• Cultivate interpersonal connections and a sense of safety & trust
• Release trauma, cultivate mind-body awareness through a sense of a “felt-self”
• Build a sense of self-worth through interpersonal connection with others by being “heard”

Releasing & Healing Traumatic Experience through Clay

• Promote a sense of identity and self- worth
• Create a sense of safety, boundaries & containment
• Cultivate mindful attention and multi-sensory awareness
• Release unexpressed emotional and somatic trauma (anger, frustration, depression, grief, loss, loneliness, confusion)

Therapeutic Storytelling to Reframe the Trauma Narrative

• Growing self-confidence through tapping the “Storyteller Within”
• Release unexpressed trauma through raw writing
• Create therapeutic stories for children and adolescents through the Child Interview
• Storytelling Grid ~ (building blocks of creating therapeutic stories):
• Build skills of self-regulation, resiliency, and reframe the trauma story

Nature as Co-therapist in Overcoming Trauma

• Create healing metaphors from nature
• Learn simple ways to bridge nature into the therapy room
• Overcoming trauma through “stepping stones to resiliency”
• Build self-regeneration and heal trauma through nature-based rituals of healing
• Cultivating mindfulness in nature—plan a nature therapy field trip

Ethical and Clinical Considerations

• Ethics of expressive therapy interventions
• Informed consent
• Countertransferences
• Issues related to touch and boundaries
• Create client action plans to bridge therapy work into daily-life experiences

About Author:

Janet A. Courtney, PhD, LCSW, is founder of FirstPlay Therapy® and an adjunct professor at Barry University School of Social Work, Miami Shores, FL. She is a Registered Play Therapy- Supervisor, TEDx speaker, a StoryPlay® facilitator, and is past President of the Florida Association for Play Therapy.