What happens when creative arts become part of psychological therapy?
This is one of the questions at the heart of Arts for the Blues, a creative arts-based group intervention developed through research at Edge Hill and Salford Universities. The programme was originally developed to offer an alternative approach for people experiencing depression, low mood and anxiety, including people accessing primary mental health services.
I have been involved with Arts for the Blues in several different ways. I have worked as a therapist, delivering sessions for health professionals and doctors in training; I now also work as a supervisor; and I have facilitated professional development as a trainer for qualified therapists.
Being involved in these different roles has given me an opportunity to experience the model from several perspectives — as a practitioner using it in the room, as a supervisor supporting therapists to reflect on their practice, and as a trainer helping practitioners develop their confidence in creative approaches.
It has also contributed to my continuing interest in the relationship between creative practice, embodiment and psychotherapy.
What is Arts for the Blues?
Arts for the Blues brings creative arts and psychological therapy together within a structured group intervention.
The programme was developed as an evidence-based approach for people experiencing depression, low mood and anxiety. It draws on different creative modalities, including movement, music, visual art, drama and storytelling.
The intention isn’t simply to provide people with enjoyable creative activities.
Creative processes can offer different ways of approaching thoughts, feelings and experiences. Instead of always talking about something, we may be able to explore it through doing, sensing, imagining, making and responding.
For some people, this can make therapeutic work more accessible.
It can also create possibilities that aren’t always available through conversation alone.
Creativity is more than an activity
The word creative can sometimes make people think that therapy is going to involve producing something artistic or that they need to be good at art.
That isn’t how I understand creative psychotherapy.
The important thing isn’t the quality of what someone creates. It is the experience of creating, responding and discovering.
A movement doesn’t have to be beautiful. A drawing doesn’t have to represent anything recognisable. A piece of music doesn’t have to be performed well.
The creative process can provide a way of exploring experience without having to get everything “right”.
Sometimes something that is difficult to put into words can emerge through an image, a movement, a rhythm or a story. At other times, creativity can provide enough distance to approach something that would feel too difficult to address directly.
For me, this is one of the strengths of creative psychotherapy: it gives us more than one way of knowing.
The body has a place in psychological therapy
As a Dance Movement Psychotherapist, I am particularly interested in what happens when the body and movement are included in psychological work.
Our emotional lives are embodied.
We experience anxiety through changes in breathing, muscle tension, restlessness or a desire to withdraw. Sadness can affect our energy and posture. Pleasure can change the way we move and relate to the world around us.
Yet traditional psychological language can sometimes separate emotional experience from bodily experience.
Movement can offer another way in.
It can help us notice what is happening in the body, experiment with different ways of responding, and explore experiences that may not yet have a clear verbal form.
Arts for the Blues isn’t simply Dance Movement Psychotherapy under another name. It is a broader creative psychotherapy approach. But my involvement with it has given me another opportunity to explore the potential of bringing embodied experience into therapeutic work.
Working with health professionals and doctors in training
My early involvement with Arts for the Blues included delivering sessions for health professionals and doctors in training.
This raised some interesting questions about what happens when people who spend much of their working lives caring for others are given an opportunity to engage creatively with their own experience.
Healthcare professionals work within environments that can demand sustained attention, emotional resilience and responsibility. There can be very little space to step outside the professional role and notice what is happening internally.
Creative therapeutic work can offer a different kind of space.
This isn’t simply about relaxation or taking time away from work. It can provide an opportunity to explore feelings, relationships, identity and ways of responding to difficulty.
There is something significant about being able to put aside the expectation that we should already know the answer, and instead become curious about what emerges.
Supervision: supporting creative practice
My involvement with Arts for the Blues has since developed to include supervision.
Supervision offers a different perspective again.
When therapists work creatively, they may encounter experiences that raise particular questions. What does it mean to follow a client’s movement? How much structure is helpful? When should a therapist introduce a creative process and when is it better simply to stay alongside what is already happening? How do we distinguish therapeutic exploration from an activity that is simply enjoyable?
These aren’t questions with a single correct answer.
They require reflection, clinical judgement and attention to the therapeutic relationship.
Supervision provides a space to slow down and think about these questions. It can also help therapists notice their own responses — what they are drawn towards, what they find uncomfortable, where they feel uncertain and how their own assumptions might influence the work.
For me, this is an important part of developing embodied and creative practice. We don’t become confident therapists simply by learning more techniques. We develop through reflection, experience, supervision and an increasing capacity to stay curious.
Training therapists to work creatively
I have also worked as a trainer, facilitating professional development for qualified therapists.
This has reinforced something I have learned repeatedly through my own practice: creative therapy isn’t primarily about having a collection of exercises to use with clients.
It is about developing a different way of listening and responding.
A therapist might introduce a movement, image or piece of music, but they cannot know in advance exactly what it will mean to the person they are working with.
The creative process may lead somewhere unexpected.
That can feel uncomfortable. There can be a temptation to try to control the process or to interpret too quickly.
Instead, creative therapeutic work asks us to tolerate a degree of uncertainty.
We can provide structure and safety without needing to determine the outcome.
This is something I recognise strongly from Dance Movement Psychotherapy, where the therapist works with movement as it emerges within the therapeutic relationship rather than treating it as a code to be deciphered.
Evidence and creativity
One of the things I particularly value about Arts for the Blues is its attempt to bring creative practice and research evidence into conversation.
There can sometimes be an assumption that creative approaches are somehow less rigorous than conventional psychological therapies.
I don’t think creativity and rigour are opposites.
The important questions are whether an intervention has a clear therapeutic rationale, whether it has been thoughtfully developed, whether it can be evaluated, and what the evidence tells us about its use.
At the same time, research cannot answer every question about what happens in a therapeutic relationship.
Outcome measures can tell us whether something has changed. They cannot always tell us exactly what that change felt like, why it mattered, or what happened between therapist and client to make it possible.
I think we need both perspectives.
What Arts for the Blues has taught me
Being involved with Arts for the Blues across therapy, supervision and training has strengthened my interest in the overlap between different therapeutic approaches.
My own professional background is in Dance Movement Psychotherapy, but I don’t see therapeutic modalities as completely separate territories.
There are interesting connections between creative psychotherapy, embodied and somatic approaches, movement practices and talking therapies.
They may use different language and have developed within different professional traditions, but they can sometimes be addressing remarkably similar human experiences.
How do we become aware of what is happening within us?
How do we develop different ways of responding?
How do we make sense of difficult experiences?
How do we experience ourselves in relationship with other people?
And how can therapy support greater flexibility, connection and choice?
I am interested in exploring those overlaps while still respecting the differences between approaches.
For me, the point isn’t to suggest that all therapies are essentially the same. It is to become curious about what they might have to learn from one another.
Continuing to explore
Arts for the Blues is one part of a much wider journey through research, practice, supervision and teaching.
What continues to interest me is what happens when we allow these different areas to inform one another.
Research can help us ask whether an approach is effective and for whom. Practice reminds us of the complexity and individuality of people’s experiences. Supervision creates space to reflect on what happens in the therapeutic relationship. Training allows ideas to be shared, questioned and developed.
None of these perspectives is complete on its own.
Perhaps that is why I remain particularly interested in the spaces between them.
Creative and embodied psychotherapy invites us to look beyond the assumption that psychological experience exists only in the realm of thoughts and words. It invites us to consider movement, sensation, imagination, relationship and creativity as part of how human beings experience and make sense of their lives.
That conversation is one I expect to continue exploring through my practice, teaching, supervision, research and writing.