Expressive Arts Therapy: Outside Client Report
(Fall, 1998)
Session 3
In our final session, we went back specifically to the relationship
with the father, and spent some time discussing what he wanted to do about
it. Jim mentioned specifically that he wanted to have some sort of
conversation with his father where he laid everything on the table, telling
him how he felt abandoned, unloved, unwanted, neglected, etc., and to get
some sort of response from his father, even a negative one.
I asked him if he felt he was ready to do this, and while he
thought he was at first, we delved into the issue of why he hadn't so far,
and we both realized that had he been ready, the conversation would have
already taken place. So we started talking about the possible consequences
and the fears involved in having such a discussion.
I guided him through another meditation in which I asked him to
think about having the conversation with his father, and to see if a
particular part of his body was serving as some sort of blocking force and
to focus in on that part of its body and see if it had anything to say to
him.
As fate would have it, it had a lot to say to him.
He drew an image which looked like a fist holding a bag of fire,
surrounded by smoke. But when I started to ask him about it, it wasn't a
bag of fire. It was a belly full of anger. And the fist wasn't holding it
up. It was blocking it from release. We discovered that whenever he gets
angry, he feels a tightening around his throat when he's getting ready to
express that anger.
So we talked about this for awhile, and I reiterated something I'd
mentioned in prior sessions which was that it's impossible for us to
guarantee anything about how his father will react to the conversation, or
to make a therapeutic goal to receive something from somebody else. The
only thing I can focus on is the client in the room at the time. So we
decided to spend the final session focusing on his relationship with his
father, but specifically in terms of what he could do, regardless of his
father's reactions.
The chokehold was a perfect opportunity for this. I had assumed
that the hand represented his father but upon questioning, I discovered
that, in fact, it represented himself. He was able to totally own the
issue at hand, knowing that he blocked himself, and that he had to take
responsibility for that.
We then discussed what he might wish to do to change or transform
the image. After some more processing, he decided that he didn't want to
completely give up the holding in of anger. He said that sometimes the
ability to hold back can be helpful and useful to him. However, he didn't
like the sense of it being a chokehold. I asked him if he wanted to
transform the image and this time he sketched over the current image,
making the hand a little bit more open (it was previously a closed fist)
and releasing some small amount of the fire into the area outside the
belly.
This seemed to settle well with him-- using his own grip on his
throat as a release valve as opposed to continuing the extreme of holding
in all the anger, or going to the other extreme of choosing an
instantaneous release of letting it all out at once.
We then spent some time processing all four of the images he'd
created, as a way of closing the sessions. One thing I noticed is that
hands were featured in every one of his drawings.
I asked him if this had any specific significance for him, and he
wasn't sure, but we did spend a little time probing that. In every image
he was either reaching out for something (his father or other older men),
or holding onto something (his brother, his anger). I didn't press him
further on this but told him he might want to ask himself about it later
and see if anything comes to him.
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Session 2
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What I've Learned
