If you’ve decided to work with an art therapist in Austin, great! This will be a creative journey ahead, one that lets you repair and rejuvenate through physical and nonverbal means. An appropriately trained and credentialed art therapist will support you by providing individualized services to help you reach your goals and literally create a better outcome for yourself.

Have you ever wished you could fly away from those behaviors, those feelings, those thoughts that have been weighing you down? You’ve done your best to manage them on your own, but life seems so fragmented right now.

You respect yourself enough to seek professional support in creating a meaningful whole out of the disconnected pieces of your life. And so you’ve decided to find a therapist.

So you’ve made an appointment with an art therapist, or maybe you’re thinking of contacting one to see if they can help you with those things you can’t seem to put into words—those shadowy impressions that escape your efforts to describe them. But they bother you and are affecting the way you think, feel, and behave. Help seems like a good idea, and talk therapy might not cut it.

You know that any therapy, whether it’s art or talk, has to start at the beginning. The therapist needs to get to know you a little. And then the therapist will use techniques.

If you were to observe an art therapy session, you would see only what’s available to the naked eye. Chances are you’d completely miss the magic, instead zeroing in on verbal exchanges and what might seem like a random set of recommendations from the art therapist—requests for the client to engage with certain art materials or in certain art methods.

Then you’d see more verbal exchanges at some point, and you’d notice that the client was either emotionally moved or intellectually stimulated by the whole experience. What happened? What did you miss?

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Anthony Hartcher of the me&my health up podcast, and he was very excited to talk to an art therapist! He’d never met one before, and he asked a lot of questions that a lot of people have in their minds when it comes to this embodied, experiential, implicit, and integrative form of psychotherapy (that means it takes precedence over verbal ways of knowing and weaves together aspects of our lives that can’t be described or summarized in words).

He essentially wanted to know “what is art therapy and how does it help people find their way through struggle and conflict?” Skip to the end of this article to listen to the podcast interview and hear the answer!

There’s more than meets the eye to being an art therapist. Lots of people secretly want to crawl into the headspace of mental health professionals to find out how their minds work when life goes dark, so if that’s you, you’re part of a much larger crowd than you realize.

Mental health professionals have their act together, right? Mental health professionals never succumb to the effects of societal tragedies like the school shooting in Uvalde, right? I provide art therapy in Austin and can help you understand what life is like from the angle of someone who supports others through their darkest hours.

It’s true: visual images trigger brain activity more quickly than words can. So you’ve decided that working with your own images in art therapy might be the way to help you move beyond anxiety, depression, stress, grief, overwhelm, trauma, and burnout…but now that you’re interested in reaching out to an Austin art therapist, you find yourself wondering what really goes on in art therapy sessions. How does the time get spent?

Will it be constant toggling between creating and then talking about what you’ve created, so the art is just a can opener for words? Is the art therapist going to look at your images and tell you what’s wrong with you? Are you going to be using art as a way to distract yourself from your troubles?

You deserve to know how you’ll spend your time during Austin art therapy sessions! Preparing your mind for the sessions ahead will help ease you into the experience and recognize the pattern of processes that are there to guide you to emotional well-being and resilience.

Get the scoop! Art therapy is not the drippy, soft, sugary version of mental health treatment you might have heard it is. Take a closer look at the facts and decide for yourself if contacting an art therapist in Austin is what’s needed to help you transform the pictures in your head that have been put there by anxiety, depression, stress, trauma, grief, and burnout.

As someone who provides art therapy in Austin, I’ve heard all kinds of strange takes on what people think art therapy is and how it can or can’t help. That means I’ve had to do a good deal of myth-busting in my time. Before you entertain any more of those fairy tales yourself, you might want to read on if you’re sitting on the fence about working with an art therapist to help you through anxiety, depression, stress, grief, trauma, or burnout.

A lot of people wonder what actually happens in art therapy, so it makes sense that you’d be asking the same question if you’re thinking of working with an art therapist to help you transform your anxiety, depression, stress, grief, trauma, or burnout. First of all, make sure you’re looking for someone who’s been authorized by the state of Texas to represent themselves as an art therapist. Next, prepare to be welcomed by an open-minded professional who knows how to put you at ease while you become familiar with your own creative potential for turning your blues into the colors of a sunrise!