Jacquelyne Morison writes about Hypnotic Art Therapy in Holistic Health Magazine

Discover Hypnotic Art Therapy

Jacquelyne Morison explains why Hypnotic Art Therapy can facilitate self-healing….

Art therapy allows us to represent our feelings on paper with a trained therapist. It’s a way of tapping into the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind houses our distress, but it is also home to our creative powers. Hypnotic Art Therapy enhances the art therapy process with relaxation and visualisation techniques to facilitate self-healing.

How does Hypnotic Art Therapy work?

A typical session begins by stimulating the imagination before you’ll be invited to depict your feelings on a sheet of paper. Then you would talk in detail about your picture to reach any underlying distress. 

You’re encouraged to focus on your emotions rather than intellectual logic. Hypnotic Art Therapy helps access troubles at the very core and then resolve your distress with your own personal creativity. Most of us have dreamt of a solution to a problem, or brainstormed a creative solution and Hypnotic Art Therapy offers a similar pathway. 

Many of us feel a bit daunted by the prospect of drawing but with Hypnotic Art Therapy a lack of skill is actually an asset because drawing defies logic. You’ll never be judged on your artistic ability, so it’s easy to relax and apply yourself fully to your therapy. 

Hypnotic Art Therapy in practice

Say you are anxious or prone to panic attacks. You may think about your problem too intellectually and thus never really consider the true source of your dilemma. Now if you could imagine your anxiety or panic as something which you could express on paper you might come up with something surprising. The feeling of surprise means you’ve reached into the unconscious mind. 

Let’s look at some examples:

This picture was drawn by a client who had a beetle phobia. As you can see, his drawing is quite realistic and he was able to talk about his fears directly. This allowed us to investigate the source of his phobic manifestation. In the later stages of the therapeutic process, a series of drawings allowed the client to depict his progress by becoming less afraid of his fear-source, the beetles. For him, the hypnotic art therapy acted as an aversion process. 

This client wanted to illustrate her feeling of being in hell when anxiety sets in. She found great solace from depicting her feelings graphically and in understanding their emotional impact in greater depth. Hypnotic Art Therapy allowed her to discover the originating cause of her disorder and deal with the intermingled anger and frustration her anxiety brought with it.

This piece is by a client who addressed her panic attacks in even more abstract terms. This drawing appears meaningless until the client explained her underlying thinking. This picture shows the distress which the client felt her solar plexus was suffering when she experienced a panic attack. This drawing opened the floodgates for the client to explore her emotive malaise in the therapeutic context.

Hypnotic Art Therapy, therefore, can help us deal with deep-seated emotional issues and fears in a supportive, relaxed environment. 

This article from Holistic Health Magazine can be found at: https://www.holistichealthmag.com/viewable-magazine/.