Expressive Arts Therapy in Edmonton

Accessing healing through creativity, imagination, and embodied expression

Expressive Arts Therapy invites you to explore your inner world through creative processes—images, movement, clay, colour, sound, storytelling, and symbolic expression. It offers pathways into parts of ourselves that words alone often cannot reach.

You do not need to be an artist to benefit from expressive arts. This approach is not about making something “good,” impressive, or polished. It’s about giving form to feelings, uncovering deeper layers of meaning, and allowing the psyche to speak through symbol, gesture, image, and imagination.

Expressive Arts Therapy is gentle, intuitive, and transformative—supporting emotional release, nervous-system regulation, self-understanding, and creative empowerment.

Why Expressive Arts?

Some experiences live beneath language. Trauma, grief, longing, intuition, and embodied memories often emerge as:

  • images or flashes of colour

  • sensations in the body

  • impulses to move or shape

  • dreams, symbols, or metaphors

  • emotional textures that are hard to name

Expressive arts creates space for these nonverbal layers of experience to unfold and be understood.

It helps when:

  • talking feels overwhelming or insufficient

  • the body holds tension or emotion that needs form

  • parts of you feel silenced, stuck, or difficult to articulate

  • you feel disconnected from creativity, vitality, or imagination

  • you want a more intuitive, embodied path to healing

Creativity becomes a gentle companion and a bridge into your inner world.

How Expressive Arts Therapy Works

Expressive Arts Therapy is process-oriented. It emphasizes exploration over performance, meaning-making over mastery, and curiosity over judgment.

A session may include:

  • Clay work (sculpting emotions into form, grounding through touch)

  • Collage (working with archetypes, imagery, narratives, or dream symbols)

  • Painting or drawing (expressing energy, emotion, or unconscious material)

  • Movement or gesture (accessing embodied emotion or shifting nervous-system states)

  • Writing or poetry (giving voice to parts of you that need expression)

  • Sound or breath (expressing emotion through vocal resonance or rhythmic grounding)

We follow what feels alive in the moment—not forcing, overthinking, or analyzing too soon. Creativity becomes a portal into deeper knowing.

An Integration of Depth, Somatic, and Narrative Approaches

Your expressive arts sessions with me are influenced by:

Jungian & depth psychology

Exploring symbols, dreams, archetypes, myth, and the unconscious.

Somatic therapy & Polyvagal Theory

Noticing how creativity impacts and regulates the nervous system—through touch, movement, breath, texture, and sensation.

Narrative therapy

Understanding the stories that emerge through imagery and creative processes.

Parts Work / IFS

Meeting and expressing parts of you through art—protectors, younger parts, shadow elements, strengths, and inner resources.

This integrative approach allows creativity to support emotional processing, meaning-making, and embodied transformation.

What Expressive Arts Therapy Might Feel Like

A session may begin with a check-in and gentle grounding. We might track sensations, emotions, or images that feel present.

From there, we may explore:

  • sculpting an emotion or inner part using clay

  • responding to an image or dream through painting

  • creating a collage of personal symbols or archetypes

  • expressing a body-based impulse through movement

  • writing a dialogue between parts of yourself

  • noticing how your breath or posture shifts with creative expression

The process is intuitive, safe, and paced with care. Creativity is always optional—you choose what feels supportive.

Expressive Arts Therapy Can Help With:

  • trauma, grief, or loss that feels “beyond words”

  • anxiety, emotional tension, or body-based stress

  • perfectionism or inner criticism

  • reconnecting with play, imagination, and intuition

  • exploring identity, meaning, and creativity

  • accessing younger parts or early memories

  • nervous-system regulation through sensory engagement

It is especially supportive for highly sensitive people, deep feelers, creatives, and anyone drawn to symbolic, intuitive, or experiential ways of healing.

Why I Offer Expressive Arts Therapy

My own therapeutic and creative journey has shown me that imagination is a powerful healer. Clay, texture, colour, symbol, and movement help bypass the analytical mind and access deeper layers of the psyche—layers that long for expression, integration, and understanding.

Expressive Arts Therapy allows you to move beyond talking into feeling, sensing, shaping, witnessing, and transforming.
It helps you reconnect with the inner artist, the inner child, the intuitive self, and the symbolic layers of your unconscious.

Is Expressive Arts Therapy Right for You?

You might be drawn to expressive arts work if you:

  • feel creatively blocked or disconnected from your inner world

  • struggle to articulate what you’re feeling

  • enjoy symbolic, intuitive, or body-based approaches

  • want a more experiential alternative to traditional talk therapy

  • are healing from trauma, grief, or chronic emotional overwhelm

  • feel resonance with tarot, astrology, dreams, myth, or archetypes

If this approach speaks to you, expressive arts therapy offers a gentle but powerful pathway into healing, creativity, and integration.