Unearth Our Engaging Art Therapy Services

Creative Art Therapy for Emotional Healing in Williamsburg, VA

Art therapy is a clinical practice that uses image and object making as a route to feelings that talking hasn’t reached. For example, clients may draw, paint, sculpt, or build a collage. However, art therapy is not an art class, and it is not a craft hour. Instead, it is therapy. Clinicians with master’s or doctoral training in both counseling and art provide it. In each session, the artwork becomes a second language for things a person can’t yet put into sentences.

In fact, that second language is the whole point. Grief, trauma, and shame are notoriously hard to narrate. Often, they predate the words a person would need to describe them. A drawing, however, sidesteps that problem. First, it gives the feeling a shape. Next, it places that shape at arm’s length, where you can look at it. Finally, it gives you and your therapist something concrete to think about together.

You Do Not Need to Be Able to Draw

Almost everyone raises this concern first, and the answer is genuinely no. We expect no artistic experience, and we evaluate no skill. Likewise, we never judge anything you make in session as art. In fact, some of the most productive sessions produce work the client would describe as terrible. That’s because the result doesn’t matter. Instead, what matters is the process of making and the conversation about what you made.

Who Art Therapy Helps

Clinicians use art therapy across the lifespan with children, adolescents, adults, and older adults. In particular, it can help with:

• Depression and low mood — externalizing a state that resists description
• Anxiety — the making itself regulates, even before you speak a word
• Trauma and PTSD — approaching difficult material indirectly, at a pace the client controls
• Grief and loss — giving form to an absence
• Low self-esteem — building evidence of capability, session by session
• Children who won’t talk in therapy — for a seven-year-old, discussing feelings for fifty minutes is an unreasonable request; drawing, on the other hand, is not

What a Session Looks Like

Sessions run roughly an hour. To begin, your therapist may suggest a direction, such as a theme, a material, or an open prompt. Alternatively, they may leave the session unstructured, depending on what you’re working on that week. Next, you make something. Afterward, you and your therapist talk about what emerged: what you chose, what surprised you, and what you avoided. We provide all materials. In addition, the work you make is yours to keep and take with you when you finish. Meanwhile, we are happy to store artwork in progress.

Our Art Therapists

Our art therapists hold master’s or doctoral training in both art therapy and counseling. Moreover, they hold credentials and registration through the Art Therapy Credentials Board, the national credentialing body for art therapists in the United States.