Expressive Arts for Trauma and Mental Wellbeing
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
Let me start off by sharing a little bit of background into how I came across Expressive Arts. Growing up, I always loved creating. Whether it was arts and crafts, making up stories, or making up a silly dance, I was all for it. When I decided to go to school to become a mental health therapist, I knew that I wanted to bring some element of this creativity and sense of wonder into my practice and to my clients. Thus I found my way into the realm of Expressive Arts Therapy, and the research and science behind this model represents such a beautiful harmony of mind, body, and spirit.
Video Source: "The Right to Express Yourself" UNICEF Cartoons for Children's Rights (1998)The Neuroscience of Expression: How the Arts Heal
Have you ever felt something stirring inside you, maybe sadness, fear, anger, or grief, but struggled to find the words? That’s because emotional experience doesn’t begin in language. It begins in the body. Creative expression becomes a bridge between body and mind.
Expressive arts, also called creative arts or expressive therapies, include drawing, painting, sculpture, poetry, music, movement, and more. These practices engage multiple senses at once, helping you access parts of yourself that may not be reachable through words alone. Please keep in mind that there is absolutely no need to be “skilled” or “talented” in art, poetry, singing, or dancing to experience the benefits of expression. When we get in our heads about how “good” the product of our creation is, it actually closes us off from experiencing the healing qualities of expressive therapies, reminding us that it’s the process, not the product, that truly is the key to healing.
In traditional talk therapy, insight often moves from thought to feeling. Expressive arts therapy works differently since it engages both:
Bottom-up processing (body → emotion → thought) and
Top-down processing (thought → meaning → regulation)
Trauma and overwhelming stress are not always stored as neat narratives. They are stored as sensations, images, impulses, and fragmented emotional states.
Understanding Trauma
Trauma is an overwhelming experience that exceeds your capacity to process it at the time. What feels traumatic to one person may not be to another; trauma is deeply personal and is relative to the nervous system’s available resources in that moment.
When trauma occurs, typically the body mobilizes for survival: sensory and emotional systems intensify, and the thinking brain (language, logic, narrative) often goes offline.
The result is that trauma is stored as somatic (bodily) memory rather than a coherent story. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk famously explains that trauma is held in the body. To heal it, we must engage the systems where it lives.
The Expressive Therapies Continuum
To experience the benefits of expressive arts, you don’t need to fully understand the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC), as it can be a bit overwhelming and confusing at first glance. However, learning about/visualizing this continuum can be helpful to envision how expressive arts utilizes the “bottom-up” approach. The ETC offers a framework for understanding how art-making supports healing across different levels of processing. The ETC includes interconnected levels:
Kinesthetic/Sensory — Physical engagement with materials (tearing paper, sculpting clay, sweeping paint) supports grounding and nervous system regulation.
Perceptual/Affective — Attention shifts to color, shape, emotion, and visual organization.
Cognitive/Symbolic — Meaning-making, storytelling, and reflection emerge.
Creative — Integration occurs; emotion, thought, and action work together flexibly.
Expressive arts allow healing to unfold layer by layer rather than forcing insight. The ETC becomes a flexible map guiding the movement from sensation to integration.
The Harmony of Healing
Three elements that work cohesively in trauma recovery work are a strong therapeutic relationship, empathy, and imagination. Safety in relationships regulates the nervous system. Empathy fosters connection. And imagination opens possibilities. Expressive arts therapy weaves all three together.
When your body, emotions, and thinking mind are invited to work in harmony rather than in isolation, healing becomes possible. Expressive arts therapies offer a nonthreatening way to access and express trauma as well as create a corrective experience in the brain.
Aside from trauma, just some of the other concerns that can be helped by expressive arts are:
Chronic illness
Life transitions
Low self-esteem
I mentioned earlier that I was drawn to creating as a child and throughout my life, and it makes sense since creating really does feel good in the body. Aside from this, creating is playful. Just as play is the language of children, expressive arts can be another language for not only kids, but for teens, young adults, and adults.
“All people have an innate ability to be creative.”
