Interactive Drawing Therapy (IDT)
Interactive Drawing Therapy (IDT) uses right-brain drawing and writing techniques to complement and extend the more common left-brain talking and cognitive processes.
IDT has won wide professional acclaim for its efficacy and integrity, with over 4,000 enrolments in IDT training courses. Many agencies incorporate IDT into their professional tool kit, and it has become an approved option for professional training and accrediting institutions.
IDT accesses wise and resourceful parts of the unconscious, and provides us with new tools for understanding and working with the therapeutic process.
By externalizing onto the page, the clients change their perceptions about themselves, their experiences, and their world of possibilities.
IDT allows the words, images and behaviors of the client to reveal where they are in their therapeutic process, the nature of the underlying issues, and how best to intervene.
IDT is a client-centered, process-directed method that follows the natural path of the psyche as it seeks to resolve issues, release potential, and move on.
IDT works by systematically alternating between left-brain and right-brain functions, - between the client's cognitive schema, beliefs and attitudes, and their latent capacity to put things into a different perspective with insight and conviction. IDT gives us a remarkable and unique set of tools to safely and gently transform resistance or depression, and access the inherently resourceful parts of the client's unconscious. Used in both short-term crisis work and long-term developmental work, IDT bridges across age, language and cultural differences, and adapts to different levels of client readiness and ability. It has the range and relevance to address tough behavioral issues of literal, pragmatic reality, through to matters of symbolic value, metaphor, archetypal and existential meaning. IDT heals the past, anchors the present, liberates the new, and unfolds the future.
Visual Language
The page is used as a therapeutic tool to mediate the interaction and relationship between client and counsellor, between one part of the client and another, between ego and the unconscious, and between the personal and the collective. As clients layer their talk down from surface-level matters to deeper-level issues, they will naturally and spontaneously move their perception from literal and pragmatic explanatory talk (about their external-world life events) to symbolic and metaphoric image-description (about their internal -world sense of self).
This change in the way clients present themselves corresponds to a shift from left brain functions to right brain functions and provokes a fundamental cognitive rebalancing of dominant schema. This is an archetypal adjustment that occurs for all of us and IDT embraces this phenomenon into its way of working. The use of interactive drawing and writing to reframe between the literal and the metaphor is a potent and unique way of working that bridges across cultural and language differences, and helps clients and supervisees, counselors and supervisors transcend limitations and release latent resourcefulness.
IDT has nothing to do with art therapy, has no interest in aesthetics or the making of art objects, and requires no drawing ability or artistic talent.
Wide Application
Enrolments in our training courses come from mental health teams, counselors psychologists and psychotherapists, alcohol and drug units, specialist education services and teachers, community and social workers, trauma and abuse specialists, Maori and Aboriginal counseling agencies, occupational therapists, child and youth workers, hospice and spiritual care providers, nurses, prison workers, supervisors and mentors, group facilitators, mediators and managers, guidance and career advisors.
IDT can be used in either individual or group settings. It is a practical, modern therapy suited to both short-term crisis work and long-term developmental work. It can be used in simple non-interpretive ways or more intensively at greater depth. It is an easily learnt, user-friendly therapy that can stand alone or be used in conjunction with other modalities. Strong and often deeply buried feelings can be accessed, yet be safely contained and transformed within the tangible and anchoring focus of the page. It is particularly useful with clients who are not verbally or conceptually fluent. IDT works well with all age groups.
Benefits of IDT
Agency managers are delighted with IDT's demonstrable results, improved safety-making, increased turn-around of casework, enhanced staff morale, and the acquisition of new tools to assist with clinical assessment, the planning of client care, and peer supervision.
Counselorsreport that IDT is inspiring, produces breakthrough results, builds professional competency, eases their load, enhances client relationships and captures the client's self interest.
Clientsexpress their amazement at the relief, satisfaction, empowerment and liberation that IDT brings them with behavioral changes unfolding as long-held issues dissolve their grip.
Supervisorsadvise that IDT helps supervisees quickly reveal issues of parallel-process, greatly advance their clinical competency, build a strong sense of professional empowerment, and increase self-observation.
