The year was 2007 and I had freshly graduated from UNC. The world was my oyster as the recession of 2008 had not yet hit. I was hoping for a career in art therapy.
Luckily for me the North Carolina Art Therapy Institute was right around the corner headquartered in the triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). I was welcomed into a job shadowing experience in a shelter for women and children escaping domestic violence.
Eye-opening, is the only way to describe what I experienced. The chaos of communal living, crying children, shell-shocked mothers, locked doors and windows. Desperation. Need for healing. Could group art therapy heal the wounds of these families?
Art therapy officially started in 1942 and is attributed to a British artist, Adrian Hill. Hill was recovering from tuberculosis and found art-making a beneficial form of recovery. He proposed it’s use to other patients and it grew from there. Occupational therapy was formally founded in 1917 when Eleanor Clarke Slagle started the first OT training program. But, OT was informed by the arts and crafts movement where folks focused on purposeful crafting in response to the age of industrialism in which repetitive meaningless work was the norm. Such purposeful behaviors...or “occupations” started popping up in hospitals as a form of recovery.
What I’m trying to say is Art Therapy and Occupational Therapy have similar roots (crafts + hospitals) and have since diverged as professions become more specialized. To the untrained eye, an art therapy session and an OT session may both involve an art-making process. However, the focus of the art therapist is on the therapeutic relationship, building trust, healing traumas, and unconscious decisions throughout the art process (is my understanding!!!). An OT focuses on the steps used in the task, attention, fine motor skills, modifications, etc. I can only imagine therapy notes between the two disciplines would look vastly different.
I’m writing this because I want occupational therapists to embrace their creative roots. My ongoing identity crisis is “OT?” or “artist?” Can I be both? My hope is to embrace the creativity innate in the profession of OT. Tapping into my own creativity during the design of a group OT session, plus invigorating creativity in the recipient of the services. These are my current aims. As I start my own community-based practice I will seek to push myself to promote the artistry within OT.
And yes, I did see growth, connection, and even healing within my art therapy job shadowing experience. I felt bonded with the children and can only hope that our time together was useful and peaceful. I felt so grateful to my art therapist mentor who showed me kindness and spent valuable time teaching me.
I pursued OT instead of art therapy. I moved back to the triangle area in 2015. I looked up Ilene, my art therapist mentor, to thank her and see what she was up to. I was shocked and saddened to see that she had since passed away. This blog post is dedicated to her and the legacy she has left for Art Therapy, the NCATI, and the Durham community.