Just Between Us: When Words Are Not Enough

An Interview with Dave Middleton, Art Psychotherapist

“Say you’re in a boat on the sea, and the sky is full of light. You look down into the water, and in the first few feet you can make out a fish or two and maybe some seaweed, but below that it’s dark. You know there’s a disturbance of some kind down there – the boat is rocking a bit – but it’s mysterious. You can’t see a thing. You start to worry about what’s hidden in the deep.

“That’s what mental life is like. We live our lives on the surface. Most of the time we float along, but people with severe mental illness find themselves in storms of feelings. They’re overwhelmed. Therapy can help them find their way back to calm seas.” – DM

As an art psychotherapist, I know that talking therapies don’t work for everyone. For some people it can feel as if they’re focused only on pathology. Mental illness is, in fact, like physical illness. If you’ve ever had a broken arm, you know that pain, swelling and redness are some of the symptoms. They’re the body’s way of coping with a fracture.

For people who have a mental illness, anxiety and depression are some of the symptoms. They’re the mind’s way of trying to cope with something deeper.

But sometimes these symptoms are treated as if they were the illness itself.

Art therapy is an important alternative. It builds on a person’s strengths, allows the client to reflect on his or her problems, and treatment engages the client as someone who can make and create. It can be helpful for anyone who finds verbal therapies too daunting or ineffective, which means that it’s useful in work with children, people with learning disabilities, those who have had neurological trauma, and many others.

As art therapists we have to know about both the art process and about relating to people.  In the art therapy studio my clients use art materials to express their inner states. Some materials, such as pens and pencils, suit people who want a high degree of control. Other materials, for example pastels, wax crayons and charcoal, allow more physical experiences like smudging and smearing. Still others, like paint and clay, hold the potential for lots of mess.

I encourage my clients to play around and find out which materials they like and what they can do with them. If clients feel stuck, instead of telling them what to do I try to talk with them about the stuckness and what may be behind it. I relate some of my own experiences of art. I too feel anxious in front of a blank canvas.

Then at some point an image emerges, and that makes it possible to relate to the client through the picture.

You can use the picture at first to establish trust and communication. Then more personal elements come into the image-making. You aim for a more direct relationship, and eventually you don’t need the picture any more to talk about things. The best way to work is to facilitate the client’s own insights, so that at some point he or she says, “Dave, I’ve had this idea about the picture.”

There are important ideas about safety – physical, emotional and organizational — in the art therapy setting. The therapist fiercely protects the boundaries for the client. Each session is confidential and sacrosanct. The clients’ artwork is absolutely secure, and no one else can see it without permission.

The therapeutic relationship creates a safe space for letting out controlled aggression. I found the same thing when I used to play rugby. It was a sort of therapy. With the referee and the boundary of the pitch, I had an area of safe space where I could release controlled aggression in a bounded way. I no longer play rugby, but I’ve shifted that experience to my art-making.  My work in stone carving  is very concrete, very physical, with a lot of hitting and cutting.

For me the whole purpose of therapy is to help people develop relationships.

Some people think art therapy is recreational, an extension of art teaching, that it’s about skill, about “art class”, and they’ll be found wanting.  One of the first things clients say when they meet me is, “I’m no good at art”. But what they’re really saying is, “I don’t feel very good about myself.” They’re saying to themselves, “Am I good enough to be here? Am I going to be a failure?”

Another assumption is that the art has to be about misery, but I simply ask my clients to make a picture of what’s meaningful to them. Others think I have x-ray eyes.

They think I can see into them by looking at their pictures, and they’re afraid they can’t keep anything for themselves.

People also imagine that I’ll interpret their picture and tell them what it means, without listening to them. If art therapists did that, I don’t think I would trust them myself.

When two or three art therapists get together, at some point someone always says, “Are you still making your own art?” And we look down at our shoes and confess that we’re not doing as much as we’d like. When you’re so absorbed in the imagery of others, week in and week out, it’s a challenge to keep your own art going.

Until recently most of my art was two dimensional, but now that I work with sculpture it feels as if I’ve at last come home. I love working with things that are fractured or fragmented. I’m not worried about perfection. I love ancient sculptures that are full of character, with cracks and faults and bits knocked off. I see a parallel in that with my psychotic clients, and I try and help pull them together so they have a consistent sense of identity.

An important theme in both my art and my work as a therapist is this whole business of the dark and the light in our lives.

We need to tend to our darker side, to throw light on it, or we risk becoming split. And we need to take love and hate together as a whole, so that when we’re able to let go of hate, we can live our lives in love.

I’m due to retire from my NHS work next year. I’ve been very involved in and passionate about my work as a therapist, but I always knew that in the end I would return to being an artist.

I do have mixed feelings about giving up entirely my career as a therapist. It’s become a part of me I’d rather not lose.

Notes

Dave Middleton is a sculptor and registered Art Psychotherapist who lives in Windsor. When he was young he was interested in art, natural history and psychology, and he went on to work in design for 15 years before retraining as an art psychotherapist. He works within the NHS at Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot, where his clients are mainly people with severe mental health problems.  Dave’s dark and light stone sculpture “Partnership”, seen here, is made of porphyry and Carerra marble.

British Association of Art Therapists (BAAT) www.baat.org Art psychotherapists are skilled in the dynamics of therapeutic relationship and non-verbal communication. The profession emerged in the UK during the 1950s, as artists began to work in the old asylums with people who had serious mental disorders. Art therapists must have an accredited post-graduate degree to MA level, and in order to call themselves Art Therapist/Psychotherapist and practice within the NHS, they are required to be registered with the Health Professions Council. They must also be registered with BAAT.

Cynthia Barlow Marrs is the Art Editor for Beat Magazine. An artist based in Windsor, Cynthia is on the Council of the Society of Graphic Fine Art. She started out with a degree in fine art and worked internationally in environmental planning and business-community programme development before returning to  England to stay put and paint. More about Cynthia Barlow Marrs

Tagged as: Art Psychotherapist, art therapist, BAAT, British Association of Art Therapists, Dave Middleton, issue 18