Art Making for Clinician Self Care and Processing Therapeutic Relationships

Art making is not just for clients! Creative expression is a great self-care strategy for managing and preventing burn out, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue. Art making can also be a great tool for exploring our professional identity as clinicians, processing counter-transference, gaining a deeper understanding of our relationships with clients, and deciphering where our own feelings and experiences may be influencing our perspective on our clinical work. In this training, you will get hands-on experience with art making activities for self-care and for processing our relationships with clients, and professional identity.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify and describe the difference between Art Therapy and Therapeutic Art Making.

• Identify and describe the difference between burn out, compassion stress, compassion fatigue, and vicarious trauma.

• Identify which art media and styles are best for your different emotional states and desired effects.

• Learn and experience one arts activity for identifying a challenging client and processing your response and countertransference with this individual and therefore gain a deeper understanding of this individual and your therapeutic relationship.

• Learn and experience 3 arts activities that you can do on your own that can serve as self-care strategies, coping tools, and processing tools to prevent and manage burnt out, compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma.