Streamline Your Life: Expressive Arts and OT Boost Wellness
The health care system requires occupational therapists (OTs) to show productivity and produce results. That can raise stress levels for both clients and therapists. That’s why motivation is an important factor in alleviating burnout, reducing stress and compassion fatigue, and ensuring success. However, continuing education offers limited options.
Wellness workshops that focus on health promotion through expressive arts can be a cost-effective and effective solution. In addition, dedicating a portion of each session to meaningful experiential activities boosts the client’s motivation, which is essential for achieving desired outcomes decided by clients and therapists.
Taly Galor, an OT, and Galit Shezifi, an expressive arts therapist, encourage and empower clients to live healthy through a wellness workshop called “Streamline Your Life” in southern California. They created a diagram depicting the principles they follow. They invite other professionals to benefit from the guidelines.
Their workshop relies on five main concepts: volition, empowerment, environment, vision, and shift.
1. Volition is the motivation for both the facilitator and the client. This is not only the fuel for treatment, but it also enables creating a safe and nonjudgmental space. In the OT’s framework, client factors of values, beliefs, and spirituality represent a client’s perceptions, motivations, and related meaning that influence or are influenced by engagement in occupations. (American Occupational Therapy Association, 2014)
2. Empowerment is about focusing on the strength and inner resources of the client. That involves using the group’s support system to achieve the desired results and finding strategies for long-term success once the workshop ends.
3. Environment is using what is available to the client and helping the client rediscover interests and a support system. Under the Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA) concept of “low skills high sensitivity,” the arts modalities don’t require the client to have skill or previous experience. The focus is on the process, not on a finished product. That includes the use of visual arts, movement, drama, music, and writing. EXA sparks the use of one’s imagination through the art-making process. For instance, while working on motor skills with adolescents who appreciate music, the OT can ask participants to write lyrics to a favorite tune. That offers a great opportunity to work on strengthening the clients’ muscles while they engage in meaningful art making (music, in this case). As a result, the clients experience joy and vitality, and their motivation for making progress rises. The clients and the therapist collaborate to find viable solutions that can be applied to everyday life.
4. Vision enables the clients to connect with their desired results. It offers an opportunity for collaboration and understanding between the clients and the therapist. OTs support the clients by using EXA in order to reclaim control of their life. Moreover, the clients get to connect with their vision and find new ways for self-expression.
5. After the process of gaining power and using the strength and support OTs offer, there might be a shift of perception that empowers clients to face life’s challenges on their own.
Clients express the sufferings of humanity. The creative arts have an incredible ability to heal. (Levine, 1992)
“Streamline Your Life” — graphic representation of the main components of our work
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References:
American Occupational Therapy Association. (2014). Occupational therapy practice framework: Domain and process. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 68(Suppl. 1), S1–S48. http://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2014.682006
Levine, S. (1992). Poiesis: The language of psychology and the speech of the soul. London: Jessica Kingsley.
American Occupational Therapy Association. (2014). Occupational therapy practice framework: Domain and process. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 68(Suppl. 1), S1–S48. http://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2014.682006
Levine, S. (1992). Poiesis: The language of psychology and the speech of the soul. London: Jessica Kingsley.