Healing Art

Mission

The mission of Healing Art is to help people by using play therapy and expressive arts to grow emotionally and heal from their trauma.

Vision

The vision of Healing Art is to use play therapy and expressive arts as an integrative approach to therapy that utilizes play and creative expressions in the visual, media, and performing arts as tools to help people grow emotionally and heal from their trauma.

Marcus Robinson

M.S. Organizational Psychology 

Doctoral Student | D.Min. 

Why Healing Art?

Trauma has lasting effects that affect the spirit, soul, and body. Play and expressive arts therapy directly impacts the healing process and can lead people to happier and more fulfilling lives. Creativity and art-making are inherently therapeutic processes, and we want to see people hurt by traumatic experiences find healing through play, art, music, dance, filmmaking, and theatre.

My life has been a process leading to helping people find healing through the arts.  That journey started with finding my resolve and peace through making art and music.  I have experienced the trauma of abandonment, poverty, hunger, discrimination, physical abuse, sickness, and death.  The deep pain and grief from these traumatic experiences often cannot be expressed with words.  Still, something about painting, drawing, singing, playing an instrument, dancing, and acting expresses the soul's cry.  There is something spiritual about being creative.  Something is healing about being creative.  When I am creative, I feel closest to God; it is my way of relating to him because he is the ultimate creator.

I believe that all people can be creative to a certain extent because all people are made in the image of God.  The goal of Healing Art is not to get people to make pictures that are fit to be hung in a museum or music that is ready to be streamed on social media for the world to hear but to enhance the interplay of the arts to support self-exploration, connect to a community, and to grow emotionally and heal from their trauma.

What Makes Our Approach Different

Christian Worldview

Our philosophy comes from a Christian worldview.  We believe that God is the universe's creator and that humans' ability to create comes from him.  Furthermore, we believe that the arts are a common grace God gives all humans to enjoy regardless of their religious beliefs or faith.
We also believe that God uses the process of creativity and art-making to assist in the healing of those who are hurting.

Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts

Recent race-related social unrest in the United States has brought the question of how we can heal as a divided nation.  Many books have been written about the problem of racial discrimination, implicit bias, systemic racism, and so forth.  There are a lot of discussions and theories, but rarely any practical solutions to the problems.  Many churches and religious institutions have found themselves at a standstill regarding racial reconciliation and healing.  Often, the proposed resolution is “talking it out” or having candid discussions about race.  Talking it out is reasonable but limited in its scope of impact.  What about a child who cannot articulate what they feel with words or a person who does not feel comfortable or safe to communicate what they have experienced verbally?  Maybe because of limited education, fear, or a variety of other reasons, the expressive arts are the more appropriate vehicle for honest communication.  The uniqueness of Healing Art is that our philosophy of expressive arts considers racial trauma and includes culturally relevant art forms such as graffiti art, hip-hop, soul music, break dancing, jazz music, gospel, blues, and other culturally specific African American art forms.

Play Therapy

Play therapy is a therapeutic procedure that meets children at their level to bring about change and healing. Rather than expecting children to verbally engage in sessions to resolve their problems and discuss coping strategies, play can achieve the desired results that might be limited in verbal communication. The Association for Play Therapy (APT) defines play therapy as a way to “help clients prevent or resolve psychosocial difficulties and achieve optimal growth and development.” For most children, play is the only effective way to express and communicate their difficulties and internal issues.  Children can use words to share abstract ideas only after they reach adolescence. (Green & Drewes, 2014).

Play therapy is not only for young children but teens and adults who have experienced trauma can also benefit from play therapy.  Play therapy allows people to use symbols (i.e., toys and other materials) to communicate their thoughts, feelings, fantasies, and experiences nonverbally to an accepting and supportive therapist (Green & Drewes, 2014).