Sometimes in a session, I might suggest we explore your experience through art.
And most people hesitate.
A laugh. A pause. A quick "oh, I'm not very good at it." Sometimes all three at once.
I want to talk about that hesitation. Not to explain it away. But because it is exactly why I love bringing art into sessions.
What we absorbed about doing things
Most of us grew up learning that doing something means doing it well. You practise until you are competent. You attempt things you have a reasonable chance of succeeding at. You do not put marks on paper in front of another person unless you have some confidence in the result.
That is not a personal quirk. It is something most of us absorbed quietly, over a long time. The message that effort without outcome is not quite acceptable. That the process only matters if the product is worth showing.
And so we stop doing things we cannot do well. We stop drawing. We stop singing. We stop moving our bodies just because it feels good. One by one, the things we used to do just because we liked them get quietly set aside.
By the time most people arrive in my room, they have been setting those things aside for a long time.
The hesitation is not a problem to move past. It is already telling us something.
What the hesitation is actually responding to
So when I bring out the pastels and colour pencils, what most people are responding to is not the materials themselves.
They are responding to everything that got attached to the act of making something a long time ago.
The fear of being seen doing something imperfectly. The discomfort of not knowing what will come out. The sense that what they make will reveal something, and they are not sure they are ready for that.
That hesitation is not about being bad at art. It is about something much older than that. A part of them that learned to stay safe by staying competent. By only entering rooms they already knew how to navigate.
Art does not offer that kind of safety. And some part of them knows it immediately.
The reluctance is not about art. It is about facing the unknown of what art will bring.
Why talking alone can sometimes feel too safe
Talking is something most of us are very practised at. We know how to find words for things. How to organise an experience into a sentence, a story, a version of events that makes sense. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed.
But sometimes the very skill we have with words becomes its own kind of protection. We explain instead of feel. We narrate instead of notice. We arrive at a coherent account of something and mistake that for having actually been with it.
Talking gives us words for things we have already, in some way, understood. Art sometimes works the other way around. You make something without quite knowing why, and then we look at it together, and something surfaces that the words had not reached yet. Not always. But often enough that it is worth sitting with the discomfort of picking up the colour pencil.
This is not about one being better than the other. It is about what becomes available when words are not the only way in.
Why the hesitation is the entry point
The discomfort that comes up around art is often the same discomfort that brought the person to therapy in the first place.
The fear of not knowing. The difficulty with things that have no clear outcome. The sense that expressing something before you have fully understood it yourself is exposing in a way that feels like too much.
These are not art problems. They are the patterns we are already in the room to explore.
Which is why the hesitation is not an obstacle. It is an entry point. The reluctance tells us something true about how this person has learned to move through the world. And that is exactly what we are here to get curious about together.
Something might surface in what gets made. Something might surface in the hesitation itself. In the laugh, or the pause, or the quiet relief when the colour goes somewhere unexpected.
Either way, we are already in it.
If you want to take this somewhere, try this. Set a timer for five minutes. Put some colour in front of you, pastels, colour pencils, or just a pen or a pencil, whatever you have. And let your hand move without deciding what it is going to make first.
Do not aim for anything. Do not evaluate what comes out. Just notice what it feels like to begin something without knowing where it is going.
That is all. Five minutes. You do not have to show anyone.
