Painting therapy
Our health can be seen as a state of balance, which is by no means constant, but should be constantly regained. If we lose this balance, we get sick. Which meaning does a colour have for a person who is striving to regain his balance?
Let us take day and night, light and darkness. These both qualities convey completely different impressions/emotions and make us do different things. We wake up in the morning light, we start being active, we move, we make decisions. The darkness is something very different: we become calm, we relax, we take a rest, and we sleep.
The warming light is compared with the red colour because of its invigorating power, whereas darkness with the blue colour because of its internal calmness. Light and darkness are two big polarities that determine our life and influence our personal rhythm. How do we deal with sleeping and waking up? If we are awake too much, if in the evening different thoughts disturb us too much, then it means that the red has exceeded its beneficial effect and an afflicted person can get sick. His “colourful medication” would be of a blue colour. In another case, when the red colour brings its invigorating warmth, the person has distanced himself from the world, is chill, often can not act properly, feels pain and mourning in his soul – the blue can become a disturbing darkness. We need the power of the red.
What sounds to be so simple, is very differentiated and many-sided in the therapeutic application, since every person is different. Two similar diseases never have the same pre-history and dynamic. That means that each diseased person must go through an own process in the art therapy.
The patient paints his first picture in the art therapy completely freely, he just paints anything that comes out of him. It has an artistic-diagnostic but not a healing value yet. In the most cases, the therapist can start a healing process based on this picture and continue developing pictures, so that a way appears where a sick person finds his “middle” again and can regain his balance with itself and with the world.
