Myth #1: Art therapy is only for kids.
While art therapy is a very effective modality for children, it is also an extremely powerful form of mental health treatment for adults, combining both verbal and visual tools to help people of any age (and any level of intelligence, including people just like you and me) attain greater mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. It’s a way of engaging the imagination and sensory centers of the brain for problem solving the many different issues that we may face.
Myth #2: You have to be an artist to benefit from art therapy.
This is a very common misconception- art made in art therapy does not have to be “beautiful” or even “accurate”. Sure, some clients may benefit from learning to create accurate or beautiful images, but for most of us, that is not the point. There is never a wrong or right way to create, and the more you are able to “let go” and just allow things to emerge, the more you will learn about yourself, your needs, and the sooner you will make progress and move towards your goals for yourself.
Myth #3: If you do art therapy, you have to make art weekly.
While many of my young clients do choose to make art at every session, my adult clients often make art more sporadically. For these clients, engaging in the creative process as needed is an extremely powerful tool to further their therapeutic process and gain clarity for themselves and their needs.
Myth #4: Art therapy is best suited for people who are developmentally disabled, severely mentally ill, or brain injured and can’t express themselves verbally.
While it is true that art therapy is extremely healing for those populations that cannot easily express themselves verbally, it can also be extremely healing for high functioning people who have no problem whatsoever expressing themselves with words!
Myth #5: An art therapist will look at my art and see things that I do not want to reveal.
It is true that art can give some clues about how a person is feeling and functioning, but only the artist creating the art can ultimately say what their art work means. I never over-analyze a client’s art work-
their art work will serve a lot of purposes, including being a vehicle to support them in finding meaning and increasing their self-understanding. Any analyzing that will take place will happen as a collaborative effort between myself and my client based on your their own experiences and associations.
Myth #6: Art therapists are not “real therapists”.
Art therapists are graduate level clinicians trained in psychology, psychotherapy, and art. We complete internships and earn licenses in most states similar to other disciplines in the mental health field such as clinical social workers, psychologists, and mental health counselors, and we all require about a year or so of supervised training hours after graduation and need to pass a difficult licensing exam. We are also required to engage in continuing education to maintain our credentials. I am a nationally registered and board certified art therapist, and licensed by the state of NY. Unfortunately, there is not yet an art therapy license in the state of NJ, but NJ art therapists have been working tirelessly for many years with the Office of Consumer Affairs and elected officials to establish an official license.