Therapy through the arts

Chronic or not, pain is very often linked to feelings that could not be expressed during an event that traumatised us.

Drawing the physical tensions felt in our body makes it possible: 1) to access implicit memories stored in the amygdala, which are not accessible in the hippocampus; 2) to let our unconscious express itself beyond words, and not only verbally as in conventional psychotherapy; 3) to grasp for ourselves the deeply subjective element that affected us, and which asks to be heard.

Thus, where medicine usurps the voice of the body and lets us avoid sometimes arduous self-questioning, somatic art therapy invites us to listen to what lives within us, and to release the energies blocked in a moment of survival, so as to recover our breath, our fluidity, our balance.

Unique in Europe, this 42-hour training for helping professionals will be led by Johanne Hamel, DPsy, art therapist and psychologist who founded the French-language Master's in art therapy in Quebec.