Drawing & Talking Therapy

Our HOPE mentors, Ms Hackney and Mrs Streeter, are now trained to deliver Drawing and Talking therapy which is a gentle, non-intrusive method of working with children who need a little help to support their emotional and learning needs. This is a 30-minute session held every week for twelve weeks. The needs of the child will be discussed to consider whether this is an appropriate therapy in order to meet the needs of the child.

The Power of Drawing

Drawing enables a child to express, in a visual form, worries and preoccupations from deep in the mind that they would not be able to talk about. Very often children just don’t know themselves at a conscious level what is wrong with them. The unconscious deeper mind always know though, it is all stored away. Drawings enable symbolic and safe expression of deep worries and feelings that may seem very dangerous to a child.

Expressing old hurts and present worries through drawing with someone who is receptive to the emotions being expressed in the pictures, activates a powerful healing mechanism in the psyche, possibly through the interaction between the right and left brain. Through the combination of drawing and talking combined, the different sides of the brain can interact with each other. The left side can see in the picture what the right brain has been holding onto, unable to send over to the left for processing.

Over time, with an empathic adult giving the child attention and talking with them in a gentle, thoughtful and supportive way, the child can create a story through pictures that sorts things out, a symbolic resolution that heals the old hurts and enables the child to move on. The process gives the child a feeling of control over events; through drawing they can make a different end to their story. When a child has been overwhelmed by events and has felt totally powerless, it’s important for them to get back a sense of power in their lives. Then the old memory can be safely stored as something that happened in the past and is not still happening now, and can be forgotten if necessary.