Art Therapy for Anxiety
You wish you could stop worrying about everything.
Anxiety can feel like it follows you around all day. You feel the tension in your body and feel consumed by anxious thoughts. You can’t stop the racing thoughts or worries about anything and everything, even though you’ve tried. You’re tired of life feeling out of control.
Maybe you feel like everything you do has to be perfect, and you feel like you can’t keep up. Your mind tells you that you should be able to be perfect... to make your work, relationship, house, appearance, etc. be the best. It’s a never-ending, stressful to-do list.
“I just want to feel calm and in control.”
You want someone to believe you and to take your anxiety seriously. This thing is controlling your life and you know you need help. Most of all, you want to stop feeling so worried, overwhelmed, and on edge. How amazing would it be to feel confident in navigating the anxious thoughts? To know what you truly need to feel more grounded in your day-to-day life?
How does art therapy help with anxiety?
Whether you have experience with art or not, art therapy can support your anxiety treatment in a few ways:
it provides additional insight into your anxious thoughts, where they come from, and what you need
it helps you express emotions underneath the anxiety
it’s a way to practice mindfulness and grounding
it allows you to tackle the perfectionism and fear of failure that you may experience in other parts of your life
Art therapy sometimes brings up anxiety. It’s totally normal. This may seem counterintuitive when you want to feel less anxious, but oftentimes we need exposure to that anxiety in a space where we have the support of the therapist in order to work through it. Art therapy is a way to finally dig into the anxiety and learn how to deal with all the “what ifs”.
Worried that you’re not good at art? Don’t worry (ha! the irony...), you don’t have to be a “good artist” to benefit from art therapy. This is a judgement-free space. All I ask is that you try.
What about OCD?
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and anxiety are like cousins. They have many similarities but subtle differences. Sometimes, part of the journey in art therapy for anxiety is figuring out if OCD is part of your experience. We do this to make sure we’re approaching treatment in the most effective way.
Treatment for OCD typically includes Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy, which may or may not be the case for other presentations of anxiety. Just in case you’re wondering, yes, we can do ERP through art therapy. Sometimes exposures will need to happen without art making, but the art process can be a useful tool in completing exposures.