Creative Counselling

Yes doodling can reveal more than you think!

Art therapy is a tool I can use to help clients interpret, express, and resolve their emotions and thoughts. Clients can work with art to explore their emotions, understand conflicts or feelings that are causing them distress, and use art to help them find resolutions to those issues. Ask me about the Line, Circle or River exercise! See below.

They will enable you to explore family dynamics with clients in a unique and powerful way.

A tool to initiate discussion and reflection around feelings. The cards span a whole range of emotions- angry, happy, depressed, excited, confused- and can be used to get people talking about feelings in a fun and non-judgemental way.

42 cards offer a fun and interactive card deck to make sense of moods and feelings. An invaluable tool to help clients process their emotions, encourage open conversations, and unlock anxieties and worries. This tool can also help increase confidence and self-esteem and expand emotional intelligence.

Offers a fun and accessible way to help clients identify and explore moods and emotions. Each card encourages questions for self-exploration plus an affirmation for positive thinking. Whether to help manage difficult moods, approach relationships more skilfully, become more sensitive to the needs of others, or simply be able to communicate and listen effectively.
Using the cards can help encourage clients to be confident in who they are, expand their emotional intelligence, and help them move forward in a positive way.

This involves selecting or choosing postcards that speak to the individual. These postcards show images of people, objects or animals that can help tell a story or share how you feel in a different way. Ever heard the saying ‘a picture can say a 1000 words?

These tools can be really useful and yield profound results. Sometimes, the emotional core of an issue is hard to reach and our intellect prevents us from getting to the core of the matter. The use of stones can help overcome intellectual defence mechanisms. Shifting the focus from interaction with the therapist, the client may be asked to choose stones to represent significant people connected with the issue or to represent thoughts and feelings. I would then gently ask questions about this and explore the client's feelings and emotions from an event or experience they have had. This can be very powerful indeed!

Similar to stones the focus can be projected onto the shells rather than the therapy session. The shells can represent people, events, and emotions, and can be used creatively to explore the client’s challenges or feelings.

Can help guide clients peel back the layers of their life, exploring their many parts at different ages and stages of life and offers an opportunity for the client to express their feelings in a creative way. This could also be called inner child work - exploring down through the layers, the different aspects of self, childhood and family, power dynamics, traumatic events and much much more.

Some clients can be very talented poets, but struggle to talk, so bringing in a poem they have written can be very useful to explore in the therapy room. Or you might even find you have a new talent for writing poems, who knows!

This isn’t for everyone, but some people find it very helpful. Visualising themselves achieving a goal, visualising themselves being confident or visualising and safe/healing place can all be very instrumental in the therapeutic process. Seeing it on paper can help the visualisation to become real.

Vision boards are a collection of images or objects arranged in a way to help you manifest your goals or vision. Vision boards are highly versatile. You can use them to manifest your personal goals or create a visual representation of a personal vision statement. Regularly viewing your vision board reinforces positive thinking and reminds you of your aspirations, boosting motivation and focus.

Your story does matter. There are a lot of creative ways in which writing can be a powerful tool. For example, I might ask you to write your story in the third person, or pick an animal and write a story with a beginning, middle and end – you would be surprised what can appear!

(I hope to have a mini sand tray soon!) Each object/stone is placed in the sand by the client. Usually, this is done in silence and the therapist waits while the client goes through their process thoughtfully. When the choosing and placing of the objects is finished, the client and therapist can accurately see the problem in a different way. Relationships between the objects/stones whatever they signify may provide surprising insights as can the choice of the objects/stones themselves.

Sometimes we need a safe environment to practice being assertive at work, approaching a family member or friend about a difficult subject, or practicing socialising. Role play in therapy room can be a really safe way of doing this. This can also be known as ‘Two chair therapy’ Technique where an individual engages in a dialogue with an absent person or part of themselves, represented by an empty chair. This method serves a core purpose: to facilitate self-awareness and resolve internal conflicts or unfinished business.