How Art Therapy Can Nix the Big Anxiety Lies
Anxiety can be a beast, dominating your thoughts, emotions and body. You may be feeling keyed up, criticizing yourself or holding all this tension in your neck and shoulders. You crave connection with others, yet don’t know why you’re get so upset with your friends or loved ones. All this fear and unease robs you of time and the patterns become entrenched. Anxiety has its own negative language that feels so real and persuasive, but it’s just sneaking in like a fox taking over your den and pretending it has your back! Art therapy helps to actively move through this deception.
Let’s look at these big anxiety lies. “Multitasking is your friend;” which means, keep doing everything all at once with no break and you’ll pass out tonight from pure exhaustion. Worry may say, “okay, let’s go through that argument you had with so and so, 3 years ago, again and again;” and then puts up the front that if we ruminate over and over, surely we can forgive ourselves. Perfection may tell us, “I can and should do this all by myself;” because I must be stupid and weak to ask for help. Anxiety asks us to go put on our daily mask and then we crumble day by day wondering who the “real me” is under all this stress.
Making art with an art therapist helps to shush the negative self-talk. Anxiety holds onto us when the worry gets locked deep in the mind. When you draw images of your internal language, the paper holds a visual imprint of the lies. You’ve heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words?” Yes, images help to express the truth and help you understand the source of the pain that anxiety is “trying” to help with. With an art therapist, you can be guided to release this internal dialogue, understand what anxiety is saying and how worry is impacting you. Then, we do the good work of resourcing and emdr; where you can challenge these thoughts and find helpful ways to overcome this sneaky anxiety fox.
Are you ready to chase out your anxiety fox? I’m here to help guide you to your real truths and rhythms and shake away those anxious vibes. Feel free to reach out for a free consult.
You can also learn more about the work I do on the Meet Andrea page.
Sending you calm and clarity,
Andrea Sutrick, ATR-BC, LMHC