Sharon Strouse,
MA, ATR-BC, LCPAT
Associate Director: Portland Institute for Loss and Transition
The Core Courses in Art-Assisted Grief Therapy equip learners with a theoretical and conceptual scaffold for incorporating the expressive arts into meaning reconstruction grief work with individuals, groups, or communities. The principles and practices of the expressive arts, the architecture of an expressive arts session, and benefits of using multimodal expressive approaches in grief work will be examined in relation to the meaning making process. Consideration will be given to various factors in selecting a particular medium, including but not limited to the expressive qualities of various materials and categorical distinctions in the arts disciplines, developmental considerations, evidence for their use in practice, as well as the orientation and preferences of the therapist. Case examples will be used to examine the use of the expressive arts with various types of loss and populations, as well as various settings.
These Core Courses cover the following essential areas:
- Principles and Practices of the expressive arts
- Architecture of an expressive arts therapy
- Materials and methods for meaning making
- Expressive art therapy, trauma and neuroscience