Therapeutic Uses
For Personal Self-Reflection and Healing
This book is designed for adults, teens, and even older children interested in drawing as a means to practice mindfulness and enhance self-awareness. Many opportunities exist in the pages ahead for self-reflection, gaining insight, becoming more internally grounded, and healing through self-expression and self-examination. Each person will naturally interact with the material differently. That’s part of the fun!
Within Individual Psychotherapy
If you are a psychotherapist, this coloring book makes a wonderful resource and adjunct to psychotherapy. This holds true even if you don’t specialize in the expressive arts or feel especially creative yourself.
One possibility to move through the book is to choose a drawing that fits the theme of a session or a stage of your client’s life or therapy. Another possibility is to let your client decide which drawing he or she most needs or wants to complete. Clients can work on drawings between sessions, and then bring them in to discuss the process later with you. Expressive arts therapists and others who work directly with creativity may prefer clients to work on drawings in their presence while simultaneously discussing themes. Talk to your patient/client in order to decide together how best to proceed. Once a drawing is complete, you and your client/patients can extend the exploration in multiple ways.
Within Group Psychotherapy:
This coloring book makes an excellent resource for group psychotherapy, whether with adults, adolescents, or even children.
Possibilities include:
• Select one drawing and have all group members work on the same one simultaneously during a session. Meanwhile, talk focuses about the relevance of the theme as members draw;
• Begin with a theme for the group. Let each member individually find the drawing that best fits the theme.
• A good way to build group cohesion is for group members to start a different or even the same drawing, work on it for several minutes, and then switch drawings with other members to make collaborative creations.
• If the purpose of the group is mindfulness, then members can draw together in silence while practicing mindful drawing. Discussion would then be reserved for the end of the group only.
Therapeutic possibilities for how to use this book are endless. Please engage your own creativity as a therapist. After having conducted open-ended psychotherapy for more than 30 years, I am deeply convinced that living creatively, in the sense of approaching each new task with novelty in mind, is at the heart of keeping life fresh and interesting for each one of us, therapists and patients alike.
