The language of visual art - colors, shapes, lines, and images - speaks to us in ways that words cannot. Art Therapy is a modality that uses the nonverbal language of art for personal growth, insight, and transformation and is a means of connecting what is inside us - our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions - with outer realities and life experiences.

While the field of art therapy is relatively new, the idea that art making can be a form of therapy is very old, and art making is one of the most ancient forms of healing. The visual arts - drawing, paining, and sculpture - are powerful and effective forms of communication that have been used to convey humanity's collective history, ideas, feelings, dreams and aspirations. Art has always been used to chronicle and portray a wide range of emotions and experiences, from profound joy to the deepest sorrow, from triumph to trauma. Since the earliest recorded history, art has also served as a means of reparation, rehabilitation, and transformation and has been used to restore physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being.

Many people have found that art making can be soothing and stress reducing, a way to transcend troubling circumstances or life's problems. Others have experienced how imagery can help people to solve problems, release powerful or distressing emotions, and recover from traumatic losses or experiences and can alleviate pain or other physical symptoms.

Art is a potent and effective means of self-expression available to people of all ages and capabilities, that everyone can benefit from art's ability to repair and restore, and that art making as therapy can play a vital role in health, healing, and wholeness.

Cathy A. Malchiodi, ATR, LPCC