The power of language in art therapy

Tell us about your experience of co-writing your recent paper ‘Language is power’ and how your ideas evolved?

Alex: It’s been such a joy. This paper grew out of workshops we led at the American Art Therapy Association’s annual conference. Afterwards, when art therapists started inviting us in to chat with their teams, the British Association of Art Therapists invited us to present at their annual conference, and the International Journal of Art Therapy invited us to turn  the content into an article, it all made sense.

Lynn: We started collaborating professionally when I was editor and Alex was copyeditor for Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association. So, I would say that’s where the roots of the paper began. But it also comes from our love of language and the many conversations we’d had before the workshops. Working together and taking a measure of each other’s strengths, skills and rhythms made writing this paper not only enjoyable, but also not very difficult because we knew each other and we knew which of us could express certain things best.

Alex: The way we got into this together—through editing the journal—was just so full of care, it was so generative. I was in my early 20s and newly into copy editing, and my mom, as president of the American Art Therapy Association, was just coming off a peak  in her career. Being from different generations and different fields meant we had different understandings of language and how it worked. As a copy editor, I’m self-taught, I read the APA manual cover-to-cover but was never told, ‘These are the rules. Follow these rules’. Instead, it’s always been a process of curiosity, of asking, ‘How do different people use language? How does language get used in different contexts and why?’ And that’s so interesting to me. Watching how my mom used language also made me think differently about both copy editing and language use in art therapy.

Lynn: Similarly, because of how Alex was paying attention and asking different questions when copyediting Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, I gained a lot of insight into how art therapists express themselves in words. And we would go on these riffs about art therapy and the relationship that art therapists have to words, which influenced the content of this article as well.

Julia: I found the article really invites reflexivity. It made me think of being in a house with a door you never thought to open, and when you do, you discover there’s a whole other room and your house is suddenly so much bigger.

Lynn: That metaphor really speaks to this notion that we just go through our professional lives never opening the door of unquestioned language because we’re not even aware that it’s there. It speaks to language used unconsciously or just ‘language I’ve picked up’. But when you start thinking about it and then you infuse that language with the idea of ‘it’s okay, it’s really about care’, then it’s not about whether you’re following the rules or not. It’s about whether you’re really living the value of care? Then it becomes a creative, subversive act to say, ‘I’m going to interrupt ‘that’ way of using language or ‘that’ way of describing an experience without questioning why and where it came from.’

In introducing your ideas of care in language over correctness, could you tell us about how the article offered an acknowledging perspective that removed any feelings of castigation readers might fear as they re-consider how language is used?

Alex: There’s so much hyper-individualism in US culture, and I’m sure this is true in British culture and in cultures touched by imperialism and colonization. It makes us think it’s a personal failing if we do something wrong, or if we have more to learn. But of course all of us have internalised and picked up so much that we have been given and inherited that is unconscious or a feature and function of dominant culture. If you believe in care, in the values of acceptance, tolerance and inclusion and trying to make the world a better place for everyone, then it is going to be a lifelong journey of figuring out how to do that. The weight of everything that we have inherited from that culture is not individual, it’s systemic. So we need to give ourselves and each other grace while we collectively work to do better by each other.

Why you feel this topic is relevant now?

Lynn: We’re really living in a moment, aren’t we? We’re living in a moment where people are hyper-scrutinising each other’s language. Online and in social media, words have become weapons. Certainly, in the US right now we’re living in this war of rhetoric between different political factions that are taking language and twisting it and turning it into something it was not intended to be. I really do see this notion of ‘how we can ground our language in love and care’ as an important and radical reorientation, and a reclaiming of language and the power of language. So, we don’t have to be swept along with language used as a form of violence. We can stop, interrupt and say, ‘No, wait a minute, let’s practice speaking and writing intentionally in a different way.’ And  become a sort of counterforce against this weaponizing of language. That’s what comes to my mind. What about you, Alex?

Alex: I couldn’t have said it better. It’s true. It feels like conscious language is such an important tool in this larger toolkit of trying to cross divides instead of making them worse and bringing more care into all our interactions. Language is not the be-all and end-all. It’s not the most important thing, but it’s part of this larger practice, in our larger worlds and in our lives, that needs to be attended to. One of the things that’s so important to me is helping people reclaim a sense of curiosity, joy and playfulness when it comes to language, instead of fear and rigidity. There’s this idea that everything’s a binary and that you’re either a good person or a bad person; you’re using the right words or violent words, but that’s not how anything works, so we have to help people break out of that mindset.

Lynn: One of the things that I love about art therapy and art therapists is the incredibly  creative way that art therapists approach the world. I know that we, as art therapists, have the capacity to reclaim language and make it another tool, another art form. Rather than continue to think of ourselves as the non-language specialists or the anti-language specialists, let’s claim language again and make that part of our creativity. And I know that art therapists can do that. This is another way we can be ethical in our practices while centering on social justice and equity as well, which are values that are becoming more consciously important among art therapists.

Can you describe an experience where you saw the impact of conscious language producing, reaffirming or amplifying a notable shift in either thinking or ideas?

Lynn: In our presentations we offer experientials to help people to practice conscious language. One example is to take one of your clinical notes and read it aloud to yourself and imagine that it had been written about your mother or was describing your child. It’s a really powerful practice to read your writing and think, ‘Wait a minute, I’m describing this person with this mental illness in this shelter. I’m not describing my mother, but as soon as I imagine this as my mother, I’m recentring on care. Because I love my mother, it’s coming out of my relationship.’ And then you can see the slippage in the language, whether pathologized or medicalized, that is moving away from her humanity, and you can feel the lack of conscious attention to the power of language.

Alex: That was a really good one. It’s a powerful practice.

Lynn: As Alex says, it goes to the heart of the matter around care. In our presentations we get a lot of folks saying, ‘But how do we stop this? How do we interrupt this pattern in our language?’ without the fear of being called out or calling out other people on your team, and feeling like the language police. And we said, well, make it a team effort and give your team a catchword, like saying ‘language alert’ when somebody has just described something in a way that isn’t centred around care. You could then stop and as a team say, ‘Let’s look at that again. Let’s revisit what we just said. I wonder. . . what if I had said it this way? Or what would it feel like if we had said it that way?’ So the practice becomes a team effort of interrupting what has just been said, and showing care for that person by stopping or interrupting the pattern.

Engaging in these sorts of everyday practices is a key tool in our efforts to create positive change. We can’t just read an article or take a seminar and think, ‘Check. I’ve got it.’ It’s going to take all of us, it’s going to take everybody doing their part to make the kind of shifts that will bring equity and dignity to everyone, and it’s going to take all the tools in our toolbox.

Lynn: Art therapy is a small profession with an abundance of creativity and creative, curious people who are dedicated to helping other people. So, to me, this is very important work. I think of where I can do my small part to help people I care about become more equipped to do this really big work, in all of our ways, and be aware that it’s our moral and ethical responsibility to do so.

So, over years of conversation, we found ourselves thinking and talking more and more about how art therapists can use language more mindfully in the context of care. As we became more fluent in describing this practice, we thought, ‘This is something we can offer that art therapists can then pick up and offer to many others in their work, elaborating and multiplying its impact’. But I actually think of conscious language as a big thing that art therapists may not always have been attuned to because of a propensity to think in terms of the non-language of our work. So, let’s bring language back in as well, and make that part of the whole enterprise of art therapy.

 

Article and special issues

Lynn and Alex’s article, Language Is Power: Anti-Oppressive, Conscious Language in Art Therapy Practice has been published in a special issue of the International Journal of Art Therapy foregrounding intersectionality as a theoretical framework for art therapy.

This is one of three sister special issues published by three art therapy journals collaborating internationally to highlight the importance of responsive, relevant, and anti-oppressive art therapy practices. The Canadian Journal of Art Therapy special issue highlights anti-colonialism and re-indigenization within art therapy and the Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association special issue focuses on cultural humility in art therapy.

Members of the British Association of Art Therapists have full free access to all three journals via the memberzone.