ArtWorks! Art Therapy: Enhance Creativity & Personal Development

1. Course Introduction: welcome to this awesome art therapy course. My name is Pamela Malkoff Hayes. I'm so so glad you're joining us. The main goal of this entire course is to engage your brain and creative and uncensored ways. I want you to learn how to use art and art materials as a new language to tell your story. Or maybe you wanna learn to change your story and create a new story for yourself, one that benefits you more. I'm going to show you how to use markers and crayons and paints as a way to change your story. But most importantly, I want you to have fun while you're learning this. I want you to have fun while you're engaged in alternative methods to to solve the problems that are going on in your life right now. To reduce your anxiety, Teoh give you more energy to make your relationships better. And by the end of this course, you are going to be able to clearly understand and even tell others how and why art therapy is so effective and seriously, it blows my mind how powerful this technique is. You're gonna be able to use the art as a way to confront and even address the fears that air stopping you from being the type of person that you want to be the person that you are meant to be. I'm going to teach you with silly little art techniques how to confront those fears and turn them around and make them work to your benefit. You're also gonna learn effective communication skills to enhance and better the relationships that are in your life and toe. Understand yourself on a deeper level. Before we get into all that, let me give you a little snapshot into my life. You know, professionally. I am a registered and board certified art therapist, and I've been working in this field for almost 30 years, which seriously blows my mind that I've been doing this this long because I still love my job. I can't believe that I get paid for making art and bringing art supplies to other people and having them make art. And we have fun doing it. In fact, you know, I've been in this field so long, I was one of the first art therapist to even take the board certification exam. And that is why I'm so excited to be teaching this course to you. I was introduced to our therapy way back in high school. I had an awesome art teacher, Mr Hoffman, and he took us to a gallery show of people who suffered from migraine headaches. And these were paintings that people had done about their migraine headaches. I was blown away. I'm looking at exploding heads, paintings of dripping skulls, and I thought, Who thought to do that? Who thought to paint your physical pain? And I just thought, that's brilliant. But I filed it away and I went off to art school. I thought I was gonna be a graphic designer, But I got to New York City and all I wanted to do was paint. I finished art school and I realized, OK, now I have a fine arts degree. What am I gonna do with that? I don't want to be in our teacher. I'm not really good enough artists to make a living off of my own art, and all of a sudden high school came back and that gallery show came back and I said, That's what I want to dio. I want to be an art therapist and and I found I found this calendar of art that was made by Children who were in a psychiatric hospital. And I literally turn that calendar over. And there was a phone number on the back, and this is before the Internet, So I had to do some work. I called that phone number on the back, and I said, I want to do what you dio How do I get there? And so she led me through the process, I found that there were actually graduate schools that offered degrees in art therapy. So here I am, almost 30 years later, an art therapist. I'm a teacher. I'm a lecturer. I've worked in private practice, but over the course of all those years, I've worked with almost every population. I've worked with every age group, pretty much every setting you can think of. I've been in schools and hospitals. I've been in residential care and foster care. I even worked at a woman's prison. But I do a lot more besides just my job. I'm also a mother. I have two daughters. I am a daughter and a sibling. I'm a wife. I'm even an ex wife. I'm a friend. I try to have a lot of different interests. I've been a runner since I was in fifth grade. I've just recently started road biking. For years I did martial arts. In fact, I have a second degree black belt. I am an artist myself. I still carry my sketchbook around with me. You know, I've been carrying a sketchbook around with May since I was in middle school. So wherever I go, I always have something to do. Whether I'm sitting in an airport, er at the beach, I will pull my sketchbook out and doodle. Now that you know who I am and you have a snapshot of me in my life, I'm going to show you in the next lecture how to get the most out of this course. 2. How To Get The Most From This Course: I want to make sure that you're going to get the most you can out of this course. So let me give you a couple of tips for best practices for completing this course and really getting everything out of it that you want. All right. So number one, I want you to complete each section as a full lesson. So watch the whole session completed their short. It's easy. Make sure that you watch the videos in sequence because they're gonna build one upon the other. And so if you skip around, you're really gonna miss out on what came before. We're going to do a lot of art exercises throughout these videos. So I want you tohave your art supplies ready and available, and let me give you a list of supplies that you Congar oh, out and easily purchase. You can go to, say, CBS or Target and get any of these really basic supplies. Here's what you're gonna need markers, crayons or colored pencil. So something where you're gonna have a variety of color options. You're also gonna want a really basic set of watercolor paints. And I'm just talking about those Crayola little circles. You can get again at CVS, and it comes with the paintbrush already. It's totally appropriate to use the white paper that you pull right out of your printer so that 8.5 by 11 paper is going to be perfect for you and also and want you if you don't already have it. A permanent black marker. So Sharpie makes a really good one. Those are your basic art supplies you're gonna need. I might ask you to use some colored paper, So if you have any construction paper on hand, Perfect. If you don't, you can always rip out a page from a magazine or catalog. So just a piece of paper that's gonna have some color on it. Another tip that I want you to really take to heart is do the exercises in a moment where you're open and excited about participating. And if you're not in that head space, maybe pause the video and come back to it when you are, or maybe even just take a couple breaths and tell yourself, Okay, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna participate in I'm gonna put effort into it. It's important to be open minded and teachable. When you're doing this. A lot of times, especially as high functioning adults, we I feel like we have to be perfect or we're not going to try it. So this is probably something you haven't done recently. Maybe you haven't painted or picked up Cran since you were in middle school. So be open to being teachable and let go of the expectations. You know, we all have that critical voice in our heads that's telling us that we're not good enough or someone else's is better or it just doesn't look right. Try to take that critical voice and put it on the back burner. We're never going to get it out of our hands, but try not to listen to it. The most important thing I want you to get out of this course is have fun. Enjoy it. This is about you. This is your time. You're going to be learning about you. You're gonna be improving you and have fun doing it. You know, throughout life we get frustrated and these aren't exercises. Our great opportunity toe learn to tolerate frustration without acting out, throwing our hands up and stomping out of the room, so stick with it. And almost always, I find that people are much more satisfied when they stick with it all the way through the process than if they give up halfway through. I understand this idea that easy is learned. What do I mean by that? Let me tell you, Ah, lot of times I'll be sitting next to my client and maybe I'm drawing or painting with them and they'll look over and they'll say, You make it look so easy And I say, But you know, I have been drawing and painting all my life and anybody who puts that much time into anything, it's going to come easy to them. But it wasn't easy in the beginning. So for those of you who would say I'm not creative, I can barely draw a stick person. This is actually the course for you, Okay? Because you are going to learn how to be creative. What is creativity, anyway? You know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what is creativity. I found a great quote from Sting. He said this during one of his 10 talks, where he said, creativity is the ability to take a risk, the risk of being ridiculed, the risk of not being perfect, right? So think about that. It's not about doing something perfectly. I tell my clients the art that we make together, we're not going to sell it. We're not gonna hang it up in the move. So get over that just being willing to be creative. So when people tell me I'm not very good, I say to them, You don't have to be good. You just have to be willing. The other thing that I want you to know about this courses you conduce this multiple times . You know, you can take this course and go through the whole thing and then a year from now, do it again and it's gonna be different each time you go through it based on your own current life situations, because you change and your understanding changes and you learn each time you do it. I often times encourage my clients to do the same art exercise three months later or a year later and see how different they are, see what a different place they are in their lives. So we're going to jump right in and get started. Now that you know how to get the most out of this course, we're gonna do a really fun And I promise, easy activity. So grab up a piece of white paper. Ah, black marker and a red marker. That's all you're gonna need. I will see you in the next video. 3. "Namaste Figure" Learning Exercise: Hey, guys, welcome to the very first exercise. Let's get started. With your paper horizontally placed, you're going to draw a circle right at the top of the paper, then a straight line coming down from the center of the circle. Now I'm gonna have you switched to your red pen and you're gonna draw Ah, heart right at the bottom of that line. Switch back to your black pen and you're going to draw a simple triangle from the bottom of the circle. And now you're gonna draw a sideways eight or infinity sign at the bottom of the red heart and now a tiny little heart at the bottom of the triangle. Are you starting to see the figure developed? We're going to give the figure now a face by just making a simple vertical line for the nose to small horizontal lines for the eyes and then one horizontal line for the mouth and that's it. You're done. I call this the nomis day figure. It's simple, but it just looks so sweet. And it looks like you've really created something calming and soothing. Nomis Day means that I honor you and I'm grateful for you and I want you to know that I am grateful that you're here with me today. I'll see you in the next lecture. 4. Chapter Two: Introduction: we are going to talk about anxiety. Do you have anxiety? I know you do. We all have anxiety, and it seems to be out of control lately in this section. Our goal is to learn how to use the art to reduce that anxiety. Now, this could be your anxiety. Or maybe you even want to learn how to help someone else reduced their anxiety. If you're worried about your kid or your brother or your friend, so once you learn these techniques, you can share them with other people, too. It's also important to reduce our anxiety because we know that having too much anxiety can cause medical issues, oftentimes causing problems at home or work because it really interferes with our relationships. It even reduces our quality of life if our anxiety gets too far out of control. We stopped doing the things we used to love to dio. So I want to help get ahold of that anxiety so that you can get back into your life. I'm not gonna promise you that I'm going to get rid of your anxiety because I think that is unrealistic. You know, we all have anxiety. Maybe you just had anxiety starting this course or making a commitment to it. But either way, I'm going to show you how to reduce the anxiety or even this is interesting. Used the anxiety to push you to a new level. By the end of this section, you will be able to use art on your own as a self care tool. We have a lot of coping skills that we use. Some of them are good, and some of them are not so good. This will be a positive self care tool that you can add to your bag of tricks. So before we move on to the next section, I just want you to gather up a piece of white paper and a black pen. That's all you're going to need see in the next section. 5. Getting Lost In The Process: There are a lot of different ways that we can use the art to reduce your anxiety. So we're gonna really take a look at a number of different ways. The 1st 1 is just simply getting lost in the process, doing something outside of your regular routine, something that you don't regularly do. You have to stay more focused. You have to be, ah, lot more mindful. And there's several ways to use the art to do that. One of them would be simply just painting stripes back and forth on a piece of paper. Now, in Section two, we learned about changing our brain waves and that as we slow down our brain waves, we go into this almost meditative state, and we can do that with the artwork. Imagine that you've got some paints and you're just simply painting stripes back. And four, When I have people do this, I suggest that they use just purple or blue or green, and those air your cool, soothing color. So those are the colors that are gonna calm you down, and they're going to slow down those brainwaves. They're gonna help you get into that meditative state. The other thing that's happening during this process is that as you're painting stripes horizontally back and forth, your eyes air scanning back and forth. So we're having this bilateral brain connection left brain, right brain left brain, right brain, and it calmed us down. It soothes us, so it's a simple way to really just get lost in the process. Usually, when I'm working with someone, I'm with them for a good hour at a time. And when they really lost in that process, they're surprised how quickly the times gone by. Another way that you can get lost in the process is by learning a new skill. I'll have my clients create these little beaded lizards, and it's a simple, repetitive pattern that they have to dio, and they have to really stay focused. They have to understand the pattern. They have to follow directions. Oftentimes there is a learning curve for tolerating frustration, too, because they'll make mistakes and then they have to take the beads apart and then put him back together. But they're really focused on the process because their brain isn't the mode of learning. And when you're learning something new, you are very much engaged in the activity that you're doing. And when I find that when you complete a project like this, you feel good about it, you're like, Wow, I didn't know I could make this. And so you kind of have a win. And when you have a win, you feel empowered. And when you feel empowered, you reduce your anxiety so you see how that all comes back. Once they finish the lizard, I have them use this as an anxiety tool that they can carry around with them. They can use it as a fidget tool to play with. They want. They can use it as a massage tool. Or oftentimes, I'll teach them to go through and count the different colored beads and take breaths in between. So I might say, Count all the orange beads and breathe with each count. So it's another distraction tool you can carry with you to help you reduce your anxiety. 6. Learning A New Skill: we're going to continue talking about learning a new skill. And this time we're gonna add on to it how to be teachable so that you can increase your self esteem and really feel like you have a win and you can reduce that anxiety. Oftentimes, we get really set in our own ways, and we tend to want to resist any kind of change even when we know that change is good for us, because we like having control over situations. And we don't always know how to be flexible when plans changed. So this next section is really about being open to new experiences, being open to sort of facing those fears of change and learning how to embrace being teachable. When we learn something new, we feel proud. We feel like, Wow, I actually conduce this and that's a win for us. It empowers us, and with that empowerment, we reduce our anxiety and our stress. Learning a new skill through the art making can really give you an opportunity to practice embracing this idea of being teachable. The idea that we don't have to be perfect. So are you ready? Now? It's your turn, Remember, in this next section I want you to be open, to be teachable, to try new things. Have your black pen and your piece of white paper ready, see in the next section. 7. "Zen Tangle" Learning Exercise: all right. Our next exercise is Caldas Entangle what you want to do before we start This exercise is go to Google or Pinterest and download some examples of Zen tangle patterns so you can have those as a reference because it's really great to have some suggestions on different patterns. All you need is a thin black marker and a little thicker black marker. I'm going to start with the thick black marker. I'm using a Sharpie pen here, and I'm going to draw a small square and then just divide that square into random, different shapes, totally up to you how you want to divide that up. But the point here is that each section is gonna have a stiff print, repetitive pattern, and if you really allow yourself to slow down and stay focused, it could become very meditative. So doing something over and over again in a repetitive pattern put you into that sort of meditative state. See how that feels? Your patterns can be really simple, just a wavy line, or they could be more complicated. You can add more details to each pattern. The point is, there's no right or wrong way here, but As long as you slow yourself down and take your time, you're gonna really become very focused. Nothing. Difficulty here when you finish one section, you're gonna move on to the next section with a completely different pattern. There's some really great books about Zen pattern ORs entangle that you can order or by at art supply stores. And I, like toe have those as references to make suggestions on different types of patterns, cause sometimes my mind sort of goes blank on What? What should I draw? And I really like having suggestible instructions in front of me. You can use the thicker black marker to color in areas and the thinner black marker to make more details. - Now I'm going to move on to the next section with a whole new, different type of pattern. I often times like to put on some music while I do. This sort of takes me into a whole other world. I'm in my own space, and my own had very focused. - What I really like about the Zen tangle is by the time I'm getting really either bored or annoyed with the pattern I chose, I'm done with that section and I'm onto a new pattern or section keeps my mind busy focused, not thinking about all the things I have to get done in my day. I'm gonna be quiet now so you can focus on your Zen tangle. - If you really enjoying this process and you think you're gonna dio Moore's entangle on your spare time, I would suggest, like, really investing in some really nice pens because it makes the experience that much better . And black pens air not expensive. This is something that I can actually dio on an airplane when I've got five hours ahead of me and nothing to dio nowhere to go, and it will really keep me focused and calm for so long. It's also something you can do when you're feeling really anxious. It really keeps you in the moment. You have to stay focused. You have to be present and if you're concerned about it, really looking good. What I do is I try to balance one section with heavier, darker lines and the section next to it with lighter lines. So one section with the darker lines might be colored in areas and then another section next to it might not have any colored in areas. You can also experiment with this and try using different colors in each section. Or what I found looks really fabulous is Ah, whole black and white one. But one section is done with a colored pen that really tends to pop, so I suggest trying all kinds of different patterns and really experiment with it. It also does not have to be square. We just started with a square today because that's simple, but the outline could be anything. You can outline your hand and divided into different sections and make different patterns. Or he can have the shape of a cat. Whatever seems appealing to you, this one's all about you, so really focus and enjoy it. Sometimes as I'm doing this, I'll create a pattern, and then it'll trigger memory for me. And I might know what that memory is or not. And I remember one time I started drawing a pattern and I realized that it was the pattern that was on my bedspread when I was a little kid. So you never know what's going to come up when you're doing these drawings or what memories or for thoughts are going to be provoked by the drawings. One of the patterns, they're kind of looks like zebra stripes. So remember thinking about going to the zoo with when my kids were little. So it gives you this opportunity to, like, really sit and have some time with your own thoughts in your own memories. You've seen a lot of those adult coloring books, and this is basically you making your own coloring book. You don't have to color in the lines. You don't have to play by anybody's rules. This is you creating your own coloring book your own patterns. - As you get close to the end, you start to see it come together and inevitably, if you have taken your time, if you have slowed yourself down and not rush through this, it's just a really aesthetically pleasing piece that you end up with. And that's really satisfying and feels good to make a piece of art that looks good. I hope you guys really enjoyed that process, and I hope that you use this on your own and and do it again and again when you feel that you need some time to be present with yourself. 8. Chapter Three: Introduction: our goal in this section is toe learn how to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, cause honestly, guys, we're not going to get rid of them. Were always gonna have sadness, anger, even fear and physical pain. But what do we do with that? How do we learn to tolerate it without sort of shutting down or going into our own cave or lashing out at people you know in therapy? For those of you have been in therapy, you're often told you have to learn to feel your feelings. I agree with those therapists who are telling you to feel those feelings, because if you don't and you're stuffing those feelings down or you're avoiding those feelings, they have a tendency to come out in pretty horrible ways. By the end of this section, you will actually have some tangible techniques in order to express those feelings, to actually feel those feelings and then let them go or even transform them into something else. You shouldn't be afraid of negative feelings. I find, you know, without negative feelings, you don't have good feelings, too. Without negative feelings, there's no growth, there's no change, so don't be afraid of them. So for this section, you're gonna need to gather up those same materials white paper markers, colored pencils or crayons. If you happen to have some colored paper around, that would be great to bring Teoh. So if you have some construction paper, bring that. If you don't rip a couple pages out of a magazine, just something that's gonna have some color on it, see in the next section. 9. Recognizing Pain and Loss as an Opportunity for Change: I want to share a case with a client that I had several years ago will call her Rebecca. Rebecca came in. She was having a lot of migraine headaches, and the physical pain was causing her a good deal of depression. Rebecca and I did a lot of drawing and painting together as a way to distract her from the pain. Something to do so she could get through those mind grains so she didn't have to take a much medication after she got comfortable with me and she got comfortable with the art process. I had her do something that don't a little bit deeper into her subconscious. First I asked her to draw her pain, her physical pain and the way I opened up that exercise was, I said to her, I want you to use lines, shapes and colors and draw your pains. You know, Rebecca had been to, ah, lot of doctors over many years that she'd been experiencing migraine headaches and often times. You know, you probably know if you experience chronic pain that doctors will ask you, How is your pain? Describe your pain, they'll say. Is it throbbing, or is it sharp? and on a scale from 1 to 10. What is your pain? How intense is it? So, over the course of many years, Rebecca had described her pain many, many times. But when I asked her to draw her pain, she's now using a different language to describe her pain, so that might get her to somewhere different. So in this drawing you could see that she drew a face first with blue crayon, and then all of the color is on one side of the face. In fact, when my clients are making the artwork, I usually just sit and observe them. So I know the process that Rebecca went through in creating this drawing. First she drew the face with the blue crayon, and you can tell even by looking at this that she just really lightly very sketching with the blue Cran to draw the face. And then she picked up a red crown and holding that crayon very tightly and pressing hard and even scrunching up her face and holding her breath while she's drawing, she drew red dripping out of the eyes, and then she drew those black, jagged lines, so I would then tell Robeco What I observed. I observed her very lightly, drawing this pardon mawr pressure while she was drawing the black and red. I might ask her, When in your life do you feel this way and when in your life do you feel that way? I also would ask her to describe the drawing, too, because the words and the language that she's going to use to describe the drawing are gonna be different words than she uses when she's describing her pain over and over again to the doctors. But sometimes when we're looking at someone's drawing, we might see something else in it that maybe they didn't intend. And honestly, I didn't even notice this while she was drawing it. But when I took it to put it away in her file later, I was holding the drawing upside down, and all of a sudden it looked really, really vaginal to May, and I was like, Whoa, this woman drew a giant vagina in this picture. What the heck does that mean? So I brought it back to her. That's an interesting thing about the artwork. You can come back to it and you can say I have another question about this, and I actually came back to her and I said, You know, this looks kind of vaginal to me. Does that have any meaning to you? And she got very embarrassed and she's like, No, I didn't intend to draw that at all And I said, But that's the thing is the subconscious will come out in your drawing. Do you think it has any meaning to you? And she said, I don't think so. Um, maybe. And she paused. And then she said, Yeah, yeah, does. And you know what? It turns out that Rebecca had been sexually abused, and she hadn't ever talked to me about it for sure. And we had met maybe 567 times already. She had never talked to anybody else about it, either. It turned out, so that opened up a whole Pandora's box of us dealing with the sexual abuse. And guess what? Once we dealt with the sexual abuse, the migraine headaches started to decrease in both intensity and frequency. Now let's go back to that original session that I had with Rebecca for a second. Whatever. I ask somebody to draw their pain, be it physical or emotional. I'm not going to just open up all that pain and just leave them that raw and vulnerable. So usually I save some time for them to do something that's gonna close, thumb up or make them feel good or contain them. So in that same session, I asked Rebecca to draw the opposite of this. And this is what she drew. You can see in this drawing that she drew a person. Actually, there's three people in this drawing. When I asked her, she said they were moving in a forward direction. She said that this is her. This is her growing from a young child to an adult. And some of the things that I noticed in this drawing were that on the left side, where the small child is, there's very dark, heavy clouds, and it feels very ominous. But on the right side, where the adult is, the clouds air much lighter. There's even a blue cloud, and the figure is surrounded by yellow paint, which represents, Rebecca told me, light and energy. Also this figure on the right side, the adult figure is touching the tree that's behind her, so she's engaged in her environment, whereas if you look back to the left where the child is, she's very isolated and alone and not touching any other colors so often times in the work that I do with the art, I'll ask people to draw the problem and then draw the solution. It doesn't even matter what the how do you get from one place to the other is. But when they can recognize the solution and know that they have that power inside of them , it's pretty amazing. They feel better. I have clients who will come into my office in physical pain and they'll leave and we'll be like, No, just doing the artwork made me feel better. Any time that I'm confronted with a difficulty or painful situation, I often ask myself, What lesson? A my being asked to learn today. Now that's not easy to stop yourself and not get overwhelmed and ask yourself to really step back and say, you know, how can I learn from this difficult situation? If we can do that, we can understand ourselves on a deeper level because we are greatly influenced by old stories in our lives. No, as Rebecca was showing us as a child. Maybe she was alone. And as she told us she was abused, and as an adult, she still carried that pain with her. You know, in the present moment we might feel pain, anger, sadness, frustration, disappointment, regret. You name it. But we need to learn to recognize that this pain is not what's happening right now. It's old stories from our past. Your mind might insist that the pain you feel is caused by what's happening right now, but you are more likely to be reacting to things that have happened to you in your past. What happened to you in your past is not happening. Now. It's over. It's past. It's done. That pain, however, is still happening to you because you haven't dealt with it. You haven't learned. Teoh. Let's go back to that. Feel your feelings. Actually, drawing that pain is a way of feeling that feeling and sitting in that emotion and to get it out. Your Externalizing it, you're releasing it 10. Challenging Yourself: Now we're gonna talk about challenging yourself. We all say that there's things we can't dio or we're not good at. My new response to that is yet. So you know, recently I just learned to surf and and you guys, if you want to see my first surfing experience, I'll send you a link on the downloadable Pdf for that, too. But, you know, we can say I don't serve, but it's not that I can't surf. It's just that I haven't done it yet. Here's a little aside, my daughter, When she was little, she used to get mad at me when I would engage in joke with waiters at restaurants and she would say to me, Mom, not everybody is your best friend and my answer to her was yet. So what I'd like to do in this lecture is help you face your fears and change again. Those stories that you say you can't do or you aren't good at and accept the challenges that come your way. I'm asking you to do something outside of your comfort zone because outside of your comfort zone guys, that's where the fun happens. An example of learning something new challenging yourself. Stepping outside of your comfort zone is learning to paint all often times in an art therapy project. Take people step by step in a painting, right? And so often they'll say to me note, There's no way I can make that painting, and by the end, they have because it's just paint a brown line here, make a yellow circle there, and if somebody teaches you how to do it, you learn. I don't know if you've ever done this, but I love going to those paint nights. There's wine and canvas. There's paint night that they have Mall over. Look for it on Groupon, but literally. It's a group of people who get together in the evening and they learn to paint and everybody walks out with a completed painting. And what I love about that kind of process is everybody's is different. Everybody's is unique based on how much effort they put into it or what mood they were in. In this next section, I'm gonna pull out our director, Julian, and make him do a step by step drawing and take him outside of his comfort zone. He likes being behind the camera, but we're gonna pull them out and see what he could dio So see it in the next section 11. "Changing Perspective" Learning Exercise: for this exercise, you're going to start with the downloadable Pdf. That's a sentence completion for your feeling. Poem. I want you to choose a feeling that you've been struggling with lately. What is something that just Whoa, it doesn't feel good. And I want you to choose a color to represent that feeling, whatever it is. So I'm having Julian do this feeling poem. He's starting off with frustration, and he decided that purple is the color of frustration. Now, what you're gonna do next is you're going to go through the next seven lines and you're gonna fill out all the things that frustration is and you're going to go through every one of your senses. So you're gonna tell me what frustration tastes like and what frustration smells like. And maybe you're not using the word frustration. Maybe you're using the word anger or or sadness or loss. Maybe the feeling you're struggling with right now is disappointment or uncertainty. Whatever it ISS, I want you to go through all the different senses. What is it smell like? What is it? Tastes like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? You're gonna write it in the color that you chose. And finally you're going to write Where does it come from? I'll give you some time to fill out your sentence completion. Think about it. Really acknowledge that negative feeling that you've been thinking about our or living with ? Where does it come from? - For the second half of the poem, I want you to decide what is the complete opposite of that negative feeling. So it's gonna be different for everybody. And you know what? If you really can't decide what the opposite is, it is not cheating. Teoh, look it up and find out what is an antonym for that word. Julian is going to decide what is the opposite of frustration. He's come to the conclusion that the opposite is joy and wonder. So he's gonna write that down. But I'm making him keep the same color that he started with. He probably wants to switch to a new color, as you probably do, too. But I'm going to force you to keep the same color. So your instructions are come up with the opposite feeling and a more positive feeling. But keep the same color and then you're gonna go through all of your senses again with that new positive feeling and the same color. So you're going to write that joy and wonder tastes like and what does it feel like? And was this sound like And what is it taste like? What does it smell like, really experience that new feeling? Some people have told me that their negative feeling that come easier the descriptions of the negative feelings come easier to them. And other people have told me that the descriptions of the more positive feelings are much easier to determine what they smell like and tastes like and sound like. And it really, again, all depends on where you are in your world and what your mindset is. Finally, you're going to write with that new feeling where it comes from. Where does that new feeling come from? When you've completed your poem, I want you to just put it aside for a moment. You don't need it for this second part, so kind of put it out of your vision and I want you to grab a blank piece of paper, and your instructions here are to draw anything you want to draw. I mean, anything. It doesn't have to be related to what you just wrote in your poem. So you know, you putting that out of your mind and you can draw anything you want, and this is important to you can use any colors you want. You are not limited to that original color that you wrote your poem in. You can use that color in your drawing, or you can choose to not use it because you're so tired of using it for the poem. So the Onley instructions here are to draw anything you want using as many colors as you choose. Let yourself focus. Let yourself enjoy that process. I bet you wanted to change colors in when you were writing the poem for the new feeling, as most people do. Most people want to change colors, but I didn't let you because I mean now I actually have a reason for doing it. But you have the opportunity to use that color in your drawing if you want Teoh. So I didn't let you use it when you wanted to, but maybe you can make the decision to use it now. Take a long as you want with this drawing when you're done, ask yourself. Is this drawing has anything to do with the poem that you wrote before he did the drawing? Are they connected in any way? Oftentimes people will say it represents the second half the half beer. Part of their poem does yours, even if it doesn't. I hope you enjoyed that process. 12. Feedback for "Changing Perspective": So, Julian? Yes. That was kind of intense, wasn't it? Yeah. Okay, So what? Um what I'd like you to dio is read the whole thing out loud, okay? And when you're reading it out loud, I want you, Teoh, say the feeling each time instead of saying this is or it is because each time you say it, it gives it power. Right? Okay. Um all right, so I chose the feelings. So the question the first question of the top is choose a feeling with which you have recently been struggling, and that feeling I chose was frustration. We're gonna say frustration a lot here in the next 10 seconds. There's a lot of frustration. It's just a normal feeling that that happens when we choose to be alive. So, um, the very first part of this ISAT a poem. Yeah. Okay, so, um, frustration is purple. Okay? Frustration. Tastes like sand. This is kind of a nice poem. I like frustration. Smells like dirt. Frustration Sounds like hissing and frustration. Looks like vines. Frustration feels like spiky restriction. And lastly, frustration comes from problems. I didn't get very creative on that. Frustration comes from problems, So that's that's where it comes from. That scene on this is about sort of whatever pops in your head for all right, continue so to the joy. And yeah, so then the next step waas, I want you to choose whatever the opposite of frustration is right, Whatever the opposite Cause for one person frustration the opposite might be satisfaction for somebody else. It might be calm for you. What did you choose is the opposite. So for my exact opposite of frustration, I chose I chose joy and wonder OK, and I purposely made you keep the same color. Okay, Most people don't like that. People hate that. People are frustrated by that, right? And more frustrating because the intent is usually Yockey feeling yucky color and then good feeling, nice color so they want to switch over. But I purposely had you keep the same color and we'll talk about why in just a minute, Okay? So go ahead and read the second half. Okay, so the second half so onto the joy and wonder relieving frustration behind for a minute. All right, so the opposite feeling joy and wonder is purple joy and wonder tastes like the sun joy and wonder smells like oranges, joy and wonder sounds like angels singing joy and Wonder looks like golden rays of lights, Joy and Wonder feels like the sun's warmth and lastly, joy and wonder comes from within with a little happy faces. Eso as you were going through that, what was your experience of writing that? I mean, you really had to sit in the frustrate in right? And you I mean, this is viscerally experiencing frustration, tasting it, smelling it. Ah, hearing it. What was that life free. Could you feel that bubbling up? Totally. Yeah. I mean the frustration. It's like when I had It's like, OK, what his frustration tastes like. It's kind of like it's like Sandy nous, you know what I mean? And so yeah, it's just, you know, when you're when you're thinking of that uncomfortable thing that you that I okay, when I was thinking of the Inca little thing that I don't like, it was giving me that icky. I don't want to be here feeling, and there a lot of resistance came up to this because no one wants toe have sand in their mouth or taster or hear hissing these air things that were repulsed by and that we exactly . And so I was like writing. And, you know, I'm trying to, like, you know, do this exercise with feeling the frustration but all you know, feeling thes, icky things in. Yeah, it's amazing that just simply you realize how much you visit. So I for me, I was realizing my resistance towards frustration, which is a big part of life. It is. It is. And you know, a lot of times, if you go to therapy, a lot of times you'll hear in. Therapists say you've got to feel your feelings, Julian. You gotta feel your feelings. You can't ignore your feet, and but we don't know how how. How do I feel? My feelings And this is an amazing way to, like, sit in the frustration. And really, I just really feel how uncomfortable it is and how much you want to resist it, right? Okay, so then you switched over Teoh. The the opposite. The joy, the joy and wonder. Right? But you were left with using the same color. So what was your What was your experience of that? Did you find that you wanted Teoh, Resist that. Did you find you were still a little frustrated with right? I think that right off the bat there it was kind of Ah, pattern interrupt. You know what I mean? I wanted to go from Okay. Icky, yucky purple. Let's in the past. Let's put that away And then, Ah, let's go to this nice new color and start fresh for joy and wonder. Probably a like a light turquoise or light, baby, Blue ish. Kind of kind of similar to the shirt, actually. Enjoy bringing. Yeah, kind of like a more brighter because the purple is almost like a darker to me. Yeah. Yeah. So it was. So when you gave me those instructions of having used the same color initially was a pattern interrupt in my brain. Said, you know, there was that resistance of what the heck? I don't want to do it like this. These is exactly so. But you were able to get through it even though you wanted to do it a different Exactly. It became fun because it was like, OK, this is a challenge. I want to accept this challenge. Okay. And, um why do you think that I have. You do the different, the same color, different feelings. What do you think the intention is? Same color, different feelings. You know, for me, it's kind of about acceptance. You know, Not everything is this perfectly boxed and packaged thing that's ready for you to have in life in life is kind of this paradox. And, you know, sometimes ugly is beautiful and beautiful is ugly, and we don't always have the choice of what simple color we want to use on this simple exercise. You know what I mean? So way don't always get what we want. And so I was. And what your, um, your go to response was I want a new color that you weren't able to do that. So you were able to shift. You were able to be flexible, which is so important in such a important skill to learn in life, right? Because a lot of times what we hear people say is I don't do it that way or I don't want I'm not that person. I don't I don't do that. So if you want to change your patterns, you gotta work on doing things differently, right? Exactly. So so it forces you to do that. But it also, um, gives you this opportunity to Teoh. Look at your own choices. Lou decided Purple was a Nikki Keller. You made that decision. You have the decision, Teoh. Either ignore the word purple and, you know, just carry on or to decide that purple has some qualities that you like. Very true, right? So there's two sides to the same coin. I had had someone doing this once. A client of mine was doing this once and he I think his feeling was just discussed. Right? And he said he chose the ugliest, yellowish brown ist. He said it was like bile, right? Yeah, like people who can. He was writing with it. And then when he switched over to the positive thing, which was acceptance, it's a He looked at the crayon. He was using a crown, and it was gold if the color was gold. And he's like I didn't even know. So sometimes you're holding a piece of golden. You don't even know very well right now. You then switch the The next thing we did was I said, put the poem away, right? We'll put a poem boy And I said now brought anything you want, right? Right. And you did not use purple. I did not use purple is state. You looks like usual. Though you also did not use any turquoise or blue which would have wanted to switch to cause a lot of times I do find that people will use the color they wanted to use in a poem in their drawing. Right. Because you can't always get what you want from the source. You want it? Maybe you can get it from another place, or you can give it to yourself. Right? Um but what did you drop eso I drew the sun. I think we're seeing I am surprised I didn't drop three sons use three colors. I did use three colors, So boom. There it is. Yeah, I drew it. I just felt like, um yeah, maybe you know how to do with the end of this That joy and wonder Feels like the sun's warmth and joined. Wondered Looks like golden light rays. And so that's kind of what I drew. This is my version of the sun and this picture. It kind of makes me a smile. happy when I look at it and it's you again because of the shooting star. Yeah, on usually, Even though I say, put your poem away, You can draw anything you want. It doesn't have to be about the poem. Usually it does have some reflection on the poem because that's where your head is. You can't just turn that off. And and usually the drawing represents the second half of the poem, the nicer feeling, because that's where I've left you. It would be terrible if I had You start with the good feeling and end with the bad feeling , and then you make a drawing about the bad feeling and then you're stuck there. So you don't want to do that. So this this whole process is about you being able to sit in those uncomfortable feelings and then have the tools. Teoh, turn it around. You definitely know. It was really a really interesting exercise, and yeah, I mean, just that pattern interruptive continuing to have the same color. You know, if you guys really pay attention to how you felt while you were doing this, uh, exercise because I was listening to my body and listening to my own reaction in my own. You know, resistance to such a simple little exercise with such a simple little color. But it actually has the power to really show you a lot about yourself that either you haven't put yourself in the situation to discover, or maybe you're not open to it. But when you're in this creative mindset, you know, for me is really interesting and really kind of eye opening. So I think you guys, I hope you guys really enjoy this one to just build on what you're saying. You wanna maybe pay attention, toe where in your body you feel the nice feeling and where you're feeling. The icky feeling recognized some patterns there, so I have a question. So let's say when someone is doing this exercise and they have some icky feelings kind of coming up, and that can be overwhelming. It's really frustrating. What's something that they can do, maybe incorporate into their schedule or that routine, or you know how they can kind of use this exercise to kind of balance out? Well, that's one of the reasons I heavy do. The drawing afterwards is that release is that focuses that letting go. So if there is something that's feeling overwhelming, you know, and even if it goes back to this original feeling of frustration or whatever it is you're feeling, what I often encourage is looked through your positive, Um And what are the things that you're smelling? Tasting? Hearing? Can you incorporate those into your life a little bit more like you had joy and wonder Smells like oranges. Can you have the scent of orange is right? Or just put oranges on your hands so you can smell it through the day. What is the sound that you like? Uses? Yeah, So make sure you have those things. And I like that. Yeah. So this this second half almost becomes a user manual or an instruction step by step. How do I make X Y and Z happy? Well, I have ready taste, smell, sound, Look, feels Where does it come from? It's almost like you answer your own questions of Okay. Like, how can I make my day a little bit more joyful? I like that. I'm going to keep this one 13. Facing Your Fears: Let's talk about facing our fears. We all have fears and fears get in the way of us living our lives. And some of us have the fear of success, and some of us have the fear of failure. Sometimes it's the same fear. We have fears of being in pain. We have fear of rejection, and for many of us we have that fear of not being enough for other people. I find that recently anxiety is getting more and more intense, and a lot of that is because of the fears that we're letting get out of control. You know, I just want to take a little side note here and say There's a big difference between fears and phobias. You know? The difference is that phobias we know are irrational. Okay, so we could say, Yeah, I know it's irrational. Teoh be afraid of spiders because most spiders that we come across are harmless but fear of being abandoned or fear of not being enough for someone those air hard to get past. Have you guys ever heard of the phobia, Jim? No phobia. That is an abnormal and persistent fear of get this nudity that sufferers of this phobia experience undue anxiety, Even though they realize this is an irrational fear, they might worry about seeing other people naked or themselves being naked or both. So that's a good example of an irrational fear. However, that's not what we're talking about here. Let's talk about the fears that persistently come into our lives, the fears that for many of you might even cause panic attacks. Okay, guys, follow me down the small rabbit hole for a second. I want to just talk about one of the pioneers in the field off studying fear. That's Dr Claire Weekes. Way back in 1969. I was two years old, so you can do the math and figure out how old I am. She wrote a book called Help and Hope for Your Nerves Number. When we called it nervous breakdowns before it was called Panic, she talked about breaking down fear into two different types of fear. First fear, she said, is our normal physical or physiological responses to ah perceived threat in our environment . So someone cuts off soften traffic and we think we're going to get in an accident. So we have that rush of adrenaline and are breathing gets shallow. And maybe we get sweaty. And so all of that response is your normal physical response to stress. Because that first year second fear, she says, our thoughts about what's going on in our body, which to tend to make things that much worse. So if someone cuts me off in traffic and my heart starts racing because I think I'm in danger, then my thought could go. Oh, my heart's racing. I'm having a panic attack and then you despise viral out of control What I want to show you here is how I often times will have my clients laying out their panic attack in a drawing so they can see what it looks like. I call this the lifeline of your panic. You can see in this drying I had my client, Lisa, on the left side of the paper, right, numbers from the bottom to the top of 0 to 10 to show the intensity of her fear. Panic noticed that she did not draw zero. Whatever that means. I don't know. And then I had her take a marker and just with a line show, how quickly her panic goes up, how long it stays elevated and then how long it takes to come back down. So that's really sort of setting out the lifeline of the panic or the fear and how long it lasts. But now we don't want Teoh because I want Lisa to go in and tell me what's going on physical in her body, what's happening physiologically in her body as this panic comes on and how it gets worse. So I say to her, What is the very first thing that you feel in your body when you know panic is starting to set in? And she says, I have difficulty breathing, So I said, Okay, once you choose a color that would represent that feeling, a simple color and a simple shape And she said, It's a dark blue square. So I say, OK, Lisa, I want you to draw dark blue square on the line wherever you feel that unable to breathe feeling and so you could see that's right at the beginning of the panic, when I asked her, What else is she starting to feel? And she says that she her eyes got kind of cloudy, and she sees it feels this sort of foggy floating outside of herself feeling. And so I asked her to choose a color in a shape to represent that, and she says that would be a green cloud so you can see that she covers almost then entire line with those green cloud, so that feeling lasts for a long time. Other physical feelings that she identified is shaky, which she represented with the blue squiggle sort of cold sweats, which she represented with an ice cube with heat coming off of it. Racing Heart, which is a Purple Heart now notice in this picture notice where she puts the heart. Where does her heart start racing? Not until she's coming out of the panic, so that's interesting. Usually that's the first thing that people start to feel. And then, at the very end, she put question marks because she says, she starts to feel confused. And why is this happening to me now? I know and you know that's not a physical feeling, but she threw that in there. So we've addressed first fear now. Well, we wanna talk to her about is what are the thoughts that are going along with that first beer, and we want to help her change those thoughts as well. So we go back to the Blue Square where she's having trouble breathing. And I said, What is the thought that's going along with that? And she says, It's I can't breathe. I'm going to pass out okay? I have her write that down. I can't breathe. And then I say, What is the absolute opposite of? I can't breathe something that keeps you in the present moment. And she says, um, I am breathing. So yes, write that down. So see how we're working with changing her cognitive thoughts were going to go through all of those. Recognize what thoughts go along with the physical feeling and how we can change those thoughts. For instance, if she writes by that purple heart, my heart is racing. I'm having a heart attack. I'm gonna die. Maybe her opposite thought will be. My heart is beating. I am alive. Isn't it amazing how much information you can tell from this one drawing? We've covered her physiological responses. We covered her negative thought process. We've done some cognitive restructuring to replace those negative thoughts with positive thoughts that keep her in the moment, and the other thing that's going on during this process is she's able to externalize that fear onto a tiny little 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. So it's out of her. And one more thing. When she takes a step back and looks at this, she sees that her panic has an end. It comes to an end, and where does it end? It doesn't end in death or destruction or anything terrible. It ends with a little bit of confusion. Can you believe that? We covered all that in just one drawing. That's a lot to take in. 14. Gratitude vs. Complacency: in this section, We're gonna look at gratitude versus complacency. I believe that the polar opposite of complacency is gratitude. And I am going to show you how to turn your perspective of brown so you don't get complacent within your relationships. And I have a bonus video for you that you confined in the downloadable PdF, which is a link to a video I made. And it's kind of goofy and fun, but I think you'll enjoy it where I took one day of my life and I took one from the perspective of this was the worst day of my life and everything went wrong. And then the same exact day and I talked about this was the best day of my life and how everything worked out. So have a look at that video. I know you're going to enjoy it. The one thing that we have control over in our lives is our perspective. I find that people so badly want to control other people and they want to control outcomes . And we can't wait honestly, don't have control over that. But what we do have control over is what perspective we take in our world. and do we choose to look at the good, or do we choose to look at the bad? We've all heard the saying the glass could be half full or the glass can be half empty. And it's about your perspective. There's an amazing quote. I use it all the time and honestly, I don't know who said it. I looked it up and some places said it was Confucius and some places said it was the Dalai Lama. But the quote says Happiness is not having what you want. It's wanting what you have. What do you think I mean by that? What I'm saying is appreciating what we have in life and not longing for more and more. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't set goals in our lives, and we shouldn't move forward, and we shouldn't try to be better. But the appreciation and the gratitude is what changes our perspective. One more quote and then we'll move on. Dale Carnegie sort of took that quote and changed it to success is getting what you want, but happiness is wanting what you get, so think about that. With that in mind, let's stay focused wanting what you have in the next section, you're going to focus on your gratitude. Print out the tree from the downloadable Pdf, grab a black Sharpie marker and you're watercolor paints. This will be a fun exercise. I promise. I'll see in the next section. 15. "Gratitude Tree" Learning Exercise: our next exercise. I like to call the gratitude tree. So you have a downloadable pdf that you can print out this tree. I just simply drew this tree. But I've used it over and over again. You're gonna use a black Sharpie marker. You need a permanent marker for this because we're gonna water color paint over it, and we don't want it to smear. So in the trunk of the tree, you are going to write I am grateful for. And then in every one of those branches you're gonna fill up with all the things that you are grateful for. So first start off by writing I am grateful for in the trunk of the tree and then start filling up each branch with everything that you're grateful for. They can be really big things, Or they can be just my new, tiny daily things because the more things that we're grateful for, the more we appreciate the life for living to think about the things that make your life easier and just bring you joy and peace. You don't like WiFi? Are you grateful for WiFi? How about homis? I really like homis. You're grateful for homis or chapstick. I don't think I can get through my day without Chapstick. So I'm trying to give you examples of, you know, think, Think beyond. I'm grateful for my friends and my family and my home in my car, which you should be grateful for. But also, I want you to think about those smaller things that make your everyday life really satisfying. See if you can fill up every single one of those branches. I personally have done this exercise many times. And every time I have different things in the tree, I mean, I have some of the consistent things, like my friends and my family and my husband. But you can see in this one I put in museums and and a dishwasher. I'm I'm actually really grateful Toe have a dishwasher. Netflix come up that. So once you fill up all the branches with the things that you're grateful for now I want you to move to the bottom of the page and I want you to write in that section or in those sections, the things that really make you feel grounded, connected and rooted. So what are the things that really make you feel grounded, you're gonna write that in the ground. They could be the same things that you put in your tree that you're grateful for or they could be different things. It's okay to repeat yourself in this exercise you can see in this exercise I start off by having you just writing words, which is where most adults are really comfortable. Lot of adults are not comfortable with drawing or painting. Some having you start off with the writing portion will move into the colors and the painting in just a minute. The final place on this drawing that I want you to fill in is that circle that's behind the tree. Now you could see that as a son or as a moon, but in that section in that circle, I want you to write the things that make you well. The thing the things that guide you or the things that inspire you may be that your spirituality or maybe that's your religion or your higher power. What are the things that are bigger than you that really guide you and inspire you? And once you have filled in all of those different sections, I want you to take out your brand new set of watercolor paints and just start painting this picture in any way you want. Enjoy that process. There's something so nice about moving paint around on a piece of paper. What I like about watercolor paints is that you can paint one section and then let that dry , and then you can come back either with the same color or different color and paint over it , and you really create these layers of color that makes it look like it has some depth, and it might make it look like there's light shining on it from one direction. So play with water colors if you really have not used paints or watercolors since you were in middle school. Or maybe you've never painted really play with that experiment, see what the materials condo's. I also suggest trying different size paintbrushes. I had a mentor once, who said having the right tools makes all the difference. So really try different size paintbrushes and see which ones work better for you actually made this exercise up a couple of years ago, right around Thanksgiving time, and I was doing it with some of my patients, But then I actually decided to print out a bunch of them and take them to my Thanksgiving dinner and just put him out on the table. Uh, you know what? People were milling around before they sat down for Thanksgiving dinner and, uh, brought watercolor paints, and I brought markers and Kranz and I just wanted to see, like, who would be willing to indulge in this art project with me? It was fun. We really got to know each other on a different level, and and it started some amazing conversations with family members and friends that I don't think would have come up otherwise. So enjoy that process with other people you can print out as many of these is you want. And like I said, I've done it multiple times. So this is another project that you can try over and over again at different stages in your life. In this version, I just printed the tree out onto your regular paper that's in your printer. But if you want to experiment with different weights of paper, you can print it on different papers. Ah, you can see here the water color is sort of wrinkling the paper a little bit because this is pretty thin paper. So you can even try printing it out on two different types of paper. Whatever will fit near printer or you can even draw your own tree. You don't have to use this one. You can create your own tree if you get really into it. - So there it is, guys. That's your gratitude tree. This is a really feel good process. You get to write all the things you're grateful for, and then you get to paint it. I hope you enjoyed that. Sometimes the water color will sort of puddle on the paper. You congee. Just grab a tissue and start blotting those puddles up, and it creates a really interesting pattern to and and then go ahead and open up the tissue that you used to block the water colors and you'll have almost a tide. I effect 16. Course Congratulations and What's Next: So congratulations. You completed the whole course as promised. You actually learned how and why Art therapy is so effective. You've implemented the art therapy as an alternative manner to reduce stress toe. Understand yourself in your internal motivations to address fears that air stopping you from being the person that you're meant to be. And you even learned effective communication skills toe have better relationships in your life. You have just gained in this course my 30 years of experience. You've seen actual examples from my clients. I shared my art with you and you got to make some of your own art and experience how powerful it really can be. You might be asking yourself what next? Now that you're finished, what should I do now? I want you to continue along with this process. You don't have to stop. Get yourself a sketchbook and use it. Use it to right. Use it to draw, go back and do some of the exercises that I talked about and continue toe. Learn about yourself as well as use the art process as a coping skill for distraction and calming yourself down. When the world gets overwhelming. I would love for you guys to share the art exercises that you did during this course. And you could do that by posting it in the comments below. And that way I will see them and we can actually have an ongoing discussion about what you made in what? Your experience. What's so It doesn't have to end with the end of the course. In fact, we've got one more bonus video for you, which are all the outtakes and bloopers from me trying to make this amazing awesome course for you. I want to thank you for allowing me into your life so that I could share my passion with you. My name is Pamela Mel Cough Hayes, and I am an art therapist and I love what I dio. I hope you had fun.