Southwestern College Santa Fe, NM
Flexible Resonating
Or
Who are You Drawn To?
As a child I really loved “Bunny Rabbit”, the silent bunny on Captain Kangaroo. I suppose that could have predicted my introverted personality. I cringe when my youngest grandson seems spellbound by “SpongeBob” – I can only hope that’s not a predictor of anything.
Similarly, there are art therapists and theoretical stances that I’m drawn to, and some that I’m not. I would never tell a student who to resonate with. And that, to me, is a treasure within Southwestern’s Art Therapy/Counseling program. We consider art therapy to be our primary theoretical foundation, and students have the freedom to explore and choose how they want to work as art therapists. Our eclectic faculty members help with that because they practice and think about art therapy in many different ways. Last week students could have learned art therapy from a Jungian, an Adlerian, a person-centered therapist, a therapist with strong psychodrama training, a somatic-based based art therapist, and someone who loves DBT.
We know that given population, place and client needs, we’ll need to be flexible in how we approach our therapeutic work. We may resonate with one way of being an art therapist yet need to be somewhat fluid at times.
I appreciate that I used to be drawn to “Bunny Rabbit”. And right now, it’s incredibly satisfying to resonate with Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons!
Deborah Schroder, M.S., ATR-BC, LPAT
About the Moderator
