This summer Talitha Arts has partnered with a new organisation, Change, Grow, Live. Change, Grow, Live (CGL) is a national health and social care charity. They support individuals who are facing challenges including drugs and alcohol, housing, justice, health and wellbeing. CGL has a wide range of branches and hubs across London and the UK.
Talitha have embarked on a 12 week project working with the Waltham Forest branch to bring a programme of workshops for their client users to help build structure, community and a safe space for self expression to the lives of those they support.
Our highly experienced practitioner team is working with 15 participants from CGL Waltham Forest on a creative and holistic journey to support their recovery within the CGL service. Research shows that community plays a key role in successful recovery. Hall emphasises the importance of connectedness to pro-social groups in promoting social and community capital, inspiring hope, providing role models, and facilitating positive identity development and reintegration (1).
Community Engagement
Our aim over the 12 week programme is to promote a sense of belonging, community and group cohesion, subsequently improving self esteem and positive thinking within recovery. In a study working with ex offenders and those in recovery, Hall shares;
"community engagement and social identity can lead to tangible benefits that not only reduce the likelihood of reoffending and/or substance abuse but also improve health, wellbeing and access to community assets." (1)
Activities within the Talitha structure focus on building confidence, teamwork, and communication through group-based games and activities. Each week, these factors progressively grow, fostering peer support and connectedness among participants.
Exploring Themes
Universal themes like nature, growth, hope, and light are explored through various art forms to enhance recovery and self-exploration. On enabling recovery through art and art therapy, Schmanke is of the view, ‘The cohesiveness of the group was enhanced by the universality of the themes’(3). Exploring themes can be a really useful tool for exploring the self through new perspectives. It can promote metaphorical thinking and enable participants to find physical form for these metaphors that represent them and their journey.
One example of this within the CGL programme was during an animal exploration exercise in which the participants were encouraged to choose an animal that resonates with them or that they feel inspired by somehow or whose qualities we hope to grow towards. One lady chose and created a snake within the creative activity, she shared with us and the group about a snake needing to ‘shed its skin in order to keep growing’ and that ‘it may be ugly for a while but it is needed to become who it wants to be’.
She shared this was a powerful metaphor to find to represent her and her journey. To share this with the group and feel the support and understanding from her peers helped her to feel held and proud within that moment. Dekkers, on ‘Exploring essential components of addiction recover’ shares; ‘Time’ and ‘supportive environments’ were identified as the foundations and facilitators for the transformative changes required in addiction recovery processes, which in turn contributed to ‘developing a sense of self’ and ‘developing a sense of future’. (2)
The Talitha Approach
At Talitha, all of our activities and overall approach is designed to be ‘forward facing’ and encourage looking forward towards one's future goals and aspirations. We aim to help to create a space in which our participants can set goals, think about their growth and journey and find a sense of their current strengths and qualities that will enable them to achieve their goals. Our structure allows for our participants to feel present in the moment and to set aside worries from the outside world. This in turn creates space for them to think ahead and find ways to express their desires and goals for this through the various art mediums we explore.
During one week within the programme we explored growth and as our main creative activity the group designed their own plant pot before planting their own ‘seeds of hope’. Each week the group tells us how their plants are growing each week and how representative that feels for the project and their journey within it. Placing meaning onto the creative work within the Talitha activities can be a really empowering experience that then holds meaning for those participants within the workshops and beyond. “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” –Aristotle
The act of creating, we recognise at Talitha, can within itself feel grounding, relaxing and therapeutic, however by adding therapeutic intent and meaning for participants to place within creativity can be powerful in healing. Ani de la Prida states:
‘ Creative approaches offer the inner subconscious an outlet for expression. This expression often emerges in metaphor, the meaning of which may be hidden from the client’s awareness. Having the opportunity to express and then explore it can be incredibly powerful, helpful and healing.”(5) An emphasis is placed within Talitha workshops on the process and not the product.
We will often see participants creating something within our main event section of the workshop and only on reflection, during the sharing section, make the realisations or observations of what their piece means. The structure of the Talitha approach is designed to create a sense of creative flow for the participants who join so that they can let their creative expression emerge rather than thinking too much about the finished product or making something beautiful.
In agreement with this notion Chandler shares; ‘it is not the final aesthetical product of the artwork that is of interest; it is the experience of creating art and the growth of self-awareness, transformation, and emotional exploration that comes from the process of art making in a therapeutic setting that is of primary benefit. ‘ (4)
No need to be a perfectionist!
A number of the participants from CGL expressed to us their feelings around ‘needing to be a perfectionist’ when it came to artwork and their desire to ‘make something perfect’ and throughout the process we have been exploring the notion of letting go and letting the act of creativity and working cohesively as a group become the aim instead. Within a Talitha workshop we have a section called the ‘Bridge In’. The idea of this section is to ‘bridge’ into the main activity in which we might introduce the themes, materials or notions of the main activity to help ease them into working independently on that. Often this is a group activity that will allow participants to work on something as part of a larger group before they do it on their own, and thus can help to make it feel less intimidating and more accessible.
During one workshop with CGL we worked on the notion of ‘process over product’ and created what the group titled a ‘colour wall’. They added scribbles and made marks and moved around the table adding to one another's scribbles. One participant noted “it was a representation of collaboration and teamwork” and another said “how much easier it was to create something that big and impressive as a group”. This enabled the group to then create their own piece with an understanding of the process and lean into that for themselves in a reflective and relaxed way.
“I trusted how we did it as a group and then did the same on my own one” one participant shared on her own piece. One lady was very intrigued by her own piece and relished in trying to figure out its meaning for her or where it came from as she said she was just “starting creating and not overthinking”. The Talitha structure is built and influenced by Natalie Rogers Person Centred Expressive Arts Therapy (The Creative Connection) and the idea that everyone is innately creative. She shares: ‘The seeds of much of our creativity come from the unconscious and our feelings and intuition. The unconscious is our deep well. Most of us have put a lid over that well. Feelings can be constructively channelled into creative ventures: into dance, music, art, or writing. When our feelings are joyful, the art form uplifts. When our feelings are violent or wrathful, we can transform them into powerful art rather than venting them on the world. Such art helps us accept that aspect of ourselves.’ (6)
We hope that through our programme that the participants attending might learn new tools and techniques that can help them express their experiences and internal worlds in contained manners. Creativity can be an incredibly powerful tool for self expression and throughout the programme we explore a broad range of creative mediums that we hope will give individuals a wide understanding of what is out there and what they themselves connect to moving forward throughout the programme and beyond. We hope that having a safe and welcoming space for creativity during the programme has started to build confidence, self esteem and structure for the participants that can support them throughout their recovery journey with CGL. We look forward to finishing the 12 week programme with our group and developing our partnership with Change Grow Live.
Recovery and communities- The role of structure in stable addiction recovery and desistance- By Lauren Hall, David Best, Amy Musgrove- Book -The Architecture of Desistance
2. Dekkers, A., Bellaert, L., Meulewaeter, F., De Ruysscher, C., & Vanderplasschen, W. (2021). Exploring essential components of addiction recovery: a qualitative study across assisted and unassisted recovery pathways. Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 28(5), 486–495. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687637.2021.1943315
3. Art Therapy and Substance Abuse: Enabling Recovery from Alcohol and Other drug addiction- By Libby Schmanke
4. Colorful recovery: Art therapy for substance abuse and addiction treatment -C Chandler - 2015
5. British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy https://www.bacp.co.uk/about-therapy/types-of-therapy/creative-therapy/ - By Ani de la Prida
6. PERSON-CENTERED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY By Natalie Rogers
(From The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing, Science & Behavior Books, Palo Alto, CA 1993)
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