Book Description

Ethically navigating self-disclosure between one’s art therapy practice and one’s arts practice can be complicated, confusing, and critically important. Within the credentialed discipline of art therapy, ethical considerations around how much of one's personal life and history to reveal in their arts practice can take on more significance than in more unregulated fields like fine art. In my graduate project, I am researching the complex experience, as an art therapist-in-training, of disclosing personal information in my arts practice. To research this, I’ve completed the Bowen family therapy directive: the family genogram. A family genogram is a family tree-like visual chart that is encoded with symbols and markers that denote the mental health and relational family history of a therapeutic client. In my family genogram, the markers include instances of suicide, sexual abuse, substance use disorder, and depression. For my graduate project, I used my family genogram and the information encoded within it, as a visual score to create a sonic family genogram. Abstracting the visual data of my family genogram into sound not only allowed me the opportunity to mitigate unethical personal disclosure, but also empowered me to amplify my emotional response to my experience of existing within a family navigating generational trauma. Though the ability to sonify my genogram equipped me with a framework and methodology to artistically articulate my experience and conceal certain personal truths, it did not in any way simplify or ease my reckoning with my personal and family history. In fact, the process was riddled with uncomfortable and destabilizing situations that revealed and emphasized to me the importance of therapeutic support and containment when engaging art therapy directives. The emotional toll inherent within this research was significant in that it allowed me to get a much more refined understanding of the many psychological rigors that art therapy clients endure on their healing journey. It gave me insight into how I can better contain, support and steward art therapy clients through the process of art therapy.