What beautiful dreams do you have for your work as a therapist? What do you hope to give the world in a way that only you can? How many steps away are you from making these things come true?

What does it mean to live a life of self-sacrifice when you’re a therapist? It means the systems you’ve been exposed to throughout the decades of your existence might have rewarded you for tending to the needs of others and disregarding your own.

The result? Anxiety, overwhelm, depression, imposter syndrome, stress, and burnout. Sometimes you forget to come up for air.

Art therapy isn’t monolithic; art therapy is the name of a profession, and within that profession lie many different types. So let’s find out what type of art therapy is right for you! That way you can compare apples to apples—instead of comparing apples to oranges—when you’re shopping for an art therapist.

Most people have at least some idea of what a therapist does. They listen, they support, and they help others calm the seas of life so they can enjoy smooth sailing and journey ahead toward their dreams. Unfortunately, not nearly as many people understand what an art therapist does.

If you’re wondering what art therapy is and how it works, you’re in good company. The profession was organized in the United States in 1969, but it continues to be a minority in the larger sea of mental health professions. That doesn’t mean it lacks research and robustness–and it doesn’t mean art therapy lacks the ability to help you reach your goals!

What’s the link between burnout, imposter syndrome, and clients who seem stuck? Well, this is a trick question, because the link is actually a missing link—creativity! Not as in drawing and painting, but as in a kind of mental activity that allows the process of psychotherapy to flourish.

If creativity is the missing link between the life you have and the life you’d love, you might be looking for creative mental activity in all the wrong places. Are you prone to collecting continuing ed certificates to try to revive your professional self, prove that you’re a real Austin therapist, and jumpstart therapy efforts that seem to have stalled out? You’re not alone—therapists all over are collecting continuing ed certificates for these reasons and wondering if this is as good as it gets.

The answer is that it can get a lot better! But the process of getting from here to there is going to take a little game of connect the dots. And creative mental activity can help you make those connections.

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?