The Body Tells the Story: Using Art to Facilitate Children's Narratives

This article illustrates an art activity for use in psychotherapy with children or adolescents. The purpose of the activity is to utilize creativity to increase problem solving for child clients and to allow their narratives to expand therapeutically. The processing of the activity allows the art to be transformed into language, thereby involving discursive (linguistic) as well as non-discursive (image-making) symbolic coding systems. The activity is theoretically and therapeutically flexible, as it can be used with rapport building, narrative work by allowing clients to tell their stories and externalize their problems, and trauma work by utilizing attachment of feelings to the child's physical self.