Visual Art Making for Therapist Growth and Self-Care

This article elaborates Kelly's (1955/1991) Kelly, G. A. 1955/1991. The psychology of personal constructs, Vols. 1 & 2, New York: Routledge. Google Scholar description of the creativity cycle and considers the implications of balancing Kelly's metaphor of person-as-scientist with a metaphor of person-as-artist. The personal artist metaphor offers new possibilities for creative practice in therapists’ personal and professional lives. Visual art making offers access to levels of construing that are difficult to verbalize. Visual images may be more intensely personal and more immediate than verbal descriptions. They may better capture tacit emotional nuances and an emerging edge of experience. Visual images are not necessarily preverbal, but may also be meta-verbal, offering ways of knowing that are nonlinear, nonsymbolic, and linguistically inaccessible.