Page 86 - ART FORM AND MENTAL HEALTH - Ingrid Pénzes

Table 2: Balance: Feeling and thought. (T= Therapist, AP= Art Product)
Category Feeling
Illustration by quote and frequently used words
T5 (Client 4): “It is made very fast so I won- der if this client made this from a feeling or a memory? Does this client pay attention to how it felt to make this product? Does the client recognize to be in the “fast lane” often? So it is about feeling. I imagine this was made by a more disinhibited expres- sive person. It seems the client lost grip on itself a bit.”
Being overwhelmed, feeling, lost in emo- tions, affective, not in control of emotions, uncontrolled, under regulation of emotions
T2 (Client 1): “The need to control, shape raised from an idea, it is planned, thought- ful, restrained.”
Ratio, cognitive, controlling emotions, need for predictability and structure, con- trolled, from the head, not feeling, analyti- cal, thoughtful, over regulation of emotion, frantic, neurotic, planned.
Description
Feeling refers to affects and emotions and the ability to allow experi- ence and express these.
Feeling can be dif- ferentiated between “impulsive expression” (physically acting on feeling) and “emotional expression” (allowing and experiencing feeling).
Thought refers to cogni- tions and cognitive pro- cesses that are related to cognitive control.
Thought
With regard to feeling, all therapists mentioned emotion regulation and nearly all therapists focused on the client’s potential to regulate emotions. Art therapists extracted cues about feelings and emotions from the art products. Sometimes they referred to positive emotions (happy, lively), more often to negative emotions (anger, sadness, fear). It was as if they scanned the art product for cues with regard to the content of the emotion as well as the intensity of expression. Art therapists differentiated between clients who tended to express impulsively, i.e. physical acted on feeling, and clients that tended to express emotional, i.e. allowing and experiencing feeling.
Therapists 5: “Well, here [art product 4] it is about expressing feeling by using variation in color and movement and it seems to be about a memory or a story, whereas here [art product 5] it seems to be just about expressing emotions in an impulsive, more physical manner.”
84 | Chapter 4