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Handout: How I see myself
I have spent many years working with groups in a therapeutic setting and the last 17 years have been mostly psycho-educational. The manner that I facilitate groups in this process starts with a lot of direction (ed), as the clients/patients open to sharing so do the boundaries (meaning less direction). Below is an image of a handout I have used. One day a client mentioned that how others see him is totally different than how he sees himself. So, I added another part (asking folks to write on the back of the page): “how do you think others see you positively/negatively.
At the end of groups, I often ask what was it like doing this activity (useful, annoying, stupid, ect). Folks nearly always reported for this handout that it was useful. The addition of how others see us opened a whole new conversation about the perceptions of others.
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Coloring Page Goddess Bastet
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“Up/Down” Bipolar Disorder
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Coloring Page Balinese Cat
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Art used to connect with dementia patients
Something happened when Brant Kingman handed his mother a colored pencil.
In the three years since Polly Penney, 87, was diagnosed with dementia, she had lost much of her short-term memory and some of her language. So she would ask Kingman the same question again, then again. Out of “absolute out-of-my-mind frustration,” Kingman, an artist, decided to try drawing together.
Penney grew quiet. Her shoulders loosened. “It silenced her so we could sit together,” Kingman said. “And then every now and then, lucid thoughts would appear to her.”Almost unintentionally, he tapped into a national trend: using art as therapy for people with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. There are now art workshops for Alzheimer’s patients. Painting, poetry and pottery classes are tailored to dementia’s tics. Giving Voice Chorus, a pair of Twin Cities choirs for people with dementia, has created a tool kit so other cities might start their own.
Neurological disorders that attack memory and verbal communication can spare creativity, some research shows. In special cases, Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia can even kick artistic ability into overdrive, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. If the disease attacks circuits on one side of the brain, he said, it might spark an interest or ability in the other side.
“It’s all about the geography,” said Miller, director of the university’s Memory and Aging Center. “It’s where the disease hits that is a determinant of what is lost — but sometimes what is gained.”
Partly because it offers another way to communicate, art therapy is “going to become, more and more, a regular part of how we look after people,” he said. MORE HERE
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Coloring Page Bloodhound
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A Journey Through the Mind of an Artist | Dustin Yellin | TED Talks
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Coloring Page Goddess Arianrhod
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VA arts program exhibit
Recently visitors to Microsoft’s flagship Manhattan store got a glimpse into the world of the American Veteran. Through the Eyes of a Veteran—a digital showcase and panel discussion held in December—represented the exhibit of the same name still currently on display at Snug Harbor Cultural Center, in Staten Island.
The Snug Harbor exhibit, features the works of about 75 Veteran artists originating from the Creative Arts Program at the VA New York Harbor Health Care System’s Brooklyn Campus.
Beryl Brenner, VA’s creative arts therapist for the creative arts program, and Snug Harbor’s director of performing arts, Larry Anderson, curated the exhibit.
Brenner, who has been introducing Veterans to the arts for 38 years—with 26 of those spent at VA—said the show at Snug Harbor “is a composite of years and years of work from the other shows they’ve done.”
Through the Eyes of a Veteran expresses a range of themes—from battling PTSD, to the different aspects of military environments both stateside and deployed—and also looks at Veterans through the lens of their individual portraits. MORE HERE
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Coloring Page Borzoi Dog
CreativeTherapyTools 