Natalia Gomez Carlier Psychologist & Art Psychotherapist MAAT, ATR-BC
Integration is often used as a desired outcome of therapy. We are meant to become more integrated as a result of therapy. But what does this mean to have integration or to be integrated? And how can art therapy help in this process? These questions have been taking up a lot of space in my life lately, and they have become the center of my studies.
Integration is a natural process, as we naturally tend towards integration and health. This inherent tendency should reassure us and give us hope in our healing process. However, we also deal with chaos and fragmentation every day. Anytime we experience something that makes us feel unsafe or incapable of managing, we create a fragment. Every time we disconnect from our body to not feel, we create another fragment. When we become too distracted or too familiar with our lives, we also create these fragments. These little pieces of ourselves then go live in the shadow, and they impact our mood and behavior without us knowing or understanding.
So, there is this inner interplay between integration and fragmentation. As we go through life, we will face many challenges and hardships. It’s the nature of life. However, we can invite integration to offset the fragmentation that results from facing challenges and obstacles. Art psychotherapy is an excellent way to invite integration, and here is why:
Art psychotherapy is an integrative profession. Blending art and psychotherapy inherently extends an invitation toward integration, which is what makes art psychotherapy such a powerful and effective tool for supporting the integration process.
In art psychotherapy, we work with symbols, which are themselves the integration of different things. For instance, an image of a heart can convey many messages, and symbols can have different and even coded messages, as we send a white heart emoji to a special friend or a purple heart to another. So, one image and one symbol can contain many and abundant meanings. Working with symbols as we do in art psychotherapy is a powerful way to engage with our lives as it is experienced through image and sensation.
Many seasoned art psychotherapists suggest that integration happens through art making. It is at that moment when we engage in the artistic and creative process that we use the forces of integration, activating ideas of wholeness, balance, and harmony. As we engage with the diverse and varied art materials, we invite a harmonious integration of body, mind, and spirit. This process, facilitated by art, is truly inspiring and intriguing.
Art has the unique power to hold the tension of the opposites, as well as paradox and contradiction. This means that life, like art, can be both beautiful and ugly, both light and shadow, both female and male, both happy and sad. By holding these polarities, art helps us integrate them. In blending colors, creating a good composition, or connecting different images in a collage, we are working directly with integration. This unique role of art in therapy is truly enlightening and helps us appreciate the power of art in our lives.
We can also add a perspective of attending to what is occurring in our interpersonal neurobiology, or our brain, and how it responds to our relationships. From this perspective, there’s also a belief that the brain has a natural drive towards becoming whole or self-organized. An integrated brain is capable of receiving information from interpersonal experiences and use memories to make good decisions in our day-to-day lives. An integrated brain can regulate emotions and manage levels of arousal or activation in our body, helping us find stability between tiredness and activation.
Some even think about integration from an ecosystem perspective and suggest that as we develop a healthy mind and an integrated personality, we can have a better relationship with our planet and the Earth. However, it is the unresolved grief, trauma, neglect, and abuse that leads to disintegration, and we need to counteract this with interconnectivity with others and activities and perspectives that’ll help us become more integrated and more whole. However, we must go through these integrated parts, feel them, and heal them before we can reach integration. We must take care of all the little fragments that have been produced through our lives and gently invite them into our whole sense of self. And this is what art psychotherapy does for you.
Commentaires