“I watch the boat as it moves away towards the horizon. A cold, tight fear grips my belly. I have the sensation of being upside down. Nausea. Tears flow freely down my cheeks. A familiar instinct wants me to jump forward, to hold on and not lose sight of the boat. There is a voice in the background. Soft and gentle. The words aren't important. It is the sound of the voice that calms me. Now I know what it feels like to be held. The cells along my back calm down. They can feel the chair supporting me. I'm in a cradle. Safe. The boat disappears from sight in the mist. I wave weakly and feel the fear turn to excitement, the tears to laughter and I turn in the direction of the voice, meet her eyes and smile. I say: “I thought I could say 'yes' only when I had learned to say 'no' but, here, the time had come to say goodbye to the old, because I had said 'yes' to the new. I had felt it and embraced it. It was just knowing that you are here with me, that in this space and time you would hold me and that no matter what happened, you would not allow it to overwhelm me. Only thanks to this, was I able to let go and say goodbye."

 

"The little girl sits to my right on a high stool. She is about 6 years old and in front of her there is a large wooden box full of clay: the "clay field", a sensorimotor art therapy technique. With both hands she is holding a bulky sponge soaked in water and is slowly and firmly pushing it over the surface of the clay, smoothing it. She turns to me, “Take a sponge too. You do it too. Together we can do it. Together."

 

The first passage describes a moment of my personal therapy with a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a moment in which I let go of an old body scheme. The scheme had been dysfunctional but had allowed me to feel protected against life experiences that had taught me that assault and threat would inevitably and unpredictably arrive where I least expected it to. As I began to trust my new space of safety, the need to pre-emptively attack the other to preclude danger disappeared and my therapist invites me to push the boat away: a symbolic point of no return to my previous behavioral patterns.

 

The second passage describes a moment in my private practice in which, as a sensorimotor art therapist, I assist a little girl at work in the clay field as she prepares herself to contact her emotions buried beneath the surface of the clay. She has good reason to have locked herself out of her body for the past two years; it's a place that has become too painful to venture into alone. Here she is preparing herself, exploring the surface of the clay, as if it were the surface of her skin, and it is important that we do it together, impossible to do it alone. "

 

The text above is an extract from my chapter "Why art therapy with traumatized children?" published in the book "Art therapy with children: the creative process as a tool for growth, support and care" (Carocci). In this chapter, I explore how psychodynamic and sensorimotor art therapy together with Somatic Experiencing can be used to process the following aspects of trauma:

 

The relationship: the authority that failed to protect us ​

 

Impotence: the choice we never had ​

 

Anger: the defense that we experienced as helplessness

 

Shame coupled with anger: trapped in a learning of self-ineffectiveness ​

 

The conflict: restoring harmony 

 

The personal narrative: examples of 3 narratives in the 3 different modalities of the creative process

The cognitive-symbolic narrative: processing feelings of guilt

The perceptual-affective narrative: processing separation

The sensory-kinesthetic narrative: processing fear

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The chapter concludes with the following paragraph:

"Healing trauma means restoring safety: safety in the body and safety in our relationship with the outside world. Artistic materials in the art-therapeutic process become a subject in their own right that responds to the person who uses them and enters into a dialogue with them; in Deuser's terminology (2020), they can represent both "me " and "not-me". In order to allow this transition to occur safely and effectively, the gradualness of the process is fundamental. The sensorial and metaphorical aspects of the interaction, based around shapes and forms, protect the child from requests to access potentially retraumatising explicit memories (Rothschild, 2021).  As each new emotion, learnt belief or body scheme emerges to be transformed in this long process, the art therapy setting offers a range of sensations, qualities, possibilities and methodologies that allow each individual to choose their own path and their own solution: a choice that was denied them during the traumatic event."​​​​