Description
“Counseling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals” (D. M. Kaplan, Tarvydas, & Gladding, 2014, p. 366).
In accomplishing its goals, counseling is a creative process, and counselors focus on helping clients make developmentally appropriate choices and changes. Effective counselors are aware of the multidimensional nature of the profession and choose from a wide variety of interventions when working with diverse populations. As a group, the creative arts is a sometimes overlooked aspect of counseling that can promote the best within the helping arena (Neilsen, King, & Baker, 2016). By its very nature, the arts foster different ways of experiencing the world and are enriching, stimulating, and therapeutic in their own right. When used in clinical situations, creative arts can help counselors and clients gain unique and universal perspectives on problems and possibilities.
In this ifth edition of The Creative Arts in Counseling, I concentrate on how the creative arts can be used independently and complementarily to enhance the counseling process on primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. Speciically, the following creative arts are examined:
• Music
• Dance and movement
• Imagery
• Visual arts
• Literature and writing
• Drama and psychodrama
• Play and humor
• Animal-assisted therapy, horticulture, and wilderness therapy