Art Therapy

An art therapy rehab program is a common part of addiction treatment. With art therapy, you get to enjoy a higher level of comfort, putting distance between yourself and your current struggles, addiction, or experiences. In many cases having that distance makes it much easier to talk about what you’ve gone through or what you are feeling in the present. Art therapy gives you a safe space where you can focus on expressing yourself creatively. 

You don’t necessarily need to immediately open up with emotional issues and discuss what you’ve gone through, what you have cells, and how your trauma, addiction, or abuse has affected you. Instead, you can use different art therapy programs to process these emotions in an alternative way. For example, art therapy can help you confront levels of low self-esteem brought about by addiction when you find a medium that helps you express yourself. When you find a medium you like and invest your creative energies into it, whether it’s painting, clay, coloring, or something else, you take back more control and build self-esteem slowly and steadily. 

• Art therapy can make you forget about all your problems and think about things totally unrelated to your addiction.
• Art therapy can be very enjoyable even if you have no experience as an artist, and it can lift your spirits when you are struggling the most. 
• Keeping your mind on things like art can be inspiring. 
• Art therapy is an excellent way to remind you that you are still alive, a person, and you have strength, creativity, and control within you. 

Art therapy in South Florida can take many forms. Art therapy might include drawing with colored pencils, painting, coloring, pottery, or card making. Playing around with finger paint and modeling clay can help physically release the pent-up tension you might hold in your body. It also helps to connect you to your deeper feelings.

In some smaller studies, artists might teach group classes for individual classes where you get to choose whether you want to color, draw, paint, or use some other medium. It doesn’t take artistic talent either. Most people in these smaller studies claimed they had no artistic talent whatsoever, and yet they were all able to find a way to express themselves using different artistic materials. Through this process, the materials help reduce stress and pain and improve the quality of life.

Today you can find coloring books with prints and patterns that are designed specifically to help people with things like anxiety. People struggling with things like anxiety can work with repetitive patterns to break their panic cycle through art therapy in South Florida.

Specific art therapy treatment projects help with different symptoms or struggles. If you are dealing with stress, anxiety, or depression, you can try things like the torn paper collage. This is really beneficial for people in recovery who feel like the stress in their lives is out of their control, and they have issues like an addiction that is in charge of daily feelings and actions. This technique lets you take charge using art materials. You take any group of paper you have, like construction paper, scrap paper, colored newspaper, and start to tear or cut shapes that appeal to you, like tiles. This helps to create a mosaic effect. 

Then you let the pieces fall randomly or play around with their positions until you have an image you like, either abstract or a textured collage. You get to be in charge of the entire process, which helps you enjoy the process of tearing or cutting the pages and then creating an image. There’s no striving for perfection, no right or wrong answer; it’s a world you have complete control over, showing you that not everything in your life is outside your control, no matter how much it might seem like it.