Features
Emotional Art & Stealth Healing
At one time or another we all have experienced the creative and personally enriching potential of art. As a child, you probably found enjoyment in making crayon drawings, cut-paper collages, sand castles, or handprints in clay.
As an adult, you may not consider yourself to be “creative” or an “artist” but still may have experienced some therapeutic aspects of art in your daily life. You may paint or take photographs as a hobby, enjoying the process of creation and recognising that creative activities help relieve stress.
You may keep a drawing diary, sketching your dreams, noting symbols, and thinking about their meanings. You may scribble lines on the corner of your notepad on your desk, finding that it helps you think more clearly and relaxed.
All of these simple activities are ways to soothe yourself, release stress and tension, give enjoyment and pleasure, and transcend troubling feelings. They are methods of self-expression that change your state of being and tap your intuitive and creative powers.
Although you have experienced some of art making therapeutic powers, you still may not think of art as related to therapy.
Depending on your personal definition of art, you may think of it as something used as decoration, entertainment, or novelty, or only as those paintings and sculptures that are exhibited in museums and galleries.
You may see art as only child’s play, or perhaps as a diversion or hobby. While art is sometimes difficult to define, you would probably agree that art enhances your existence, but you may not be fully aware of all the ways that art can be life enhancing.
While art can serve as decoration or hang in a museum, there are other purposes for art, ones that are connected to self-understanding, a search for meaning, personal growth, self -empowerment, and healing.
Many of us have lost contact with these purposes or have not realised that art is more than novelty or ornamentation. Drawing, painting, sculpture, and other art forms are powerful and effective forms of communication, and cultures through the ages have been defined and understood through their art.
While art has been used to record human history, it has also incorporated our ideas, feelings, dreams, and aspirations. Art chronicles and conveys a wide range of emotions, from profound joy to the deepest sorrow, from triumph to trauma.
In this sense, art has served as a way of understanding, making sense, and clarifying inner experiences without words.
Art therapy has grown from this concept that art images can help us to understand who we are, to express feelings and ideas that words cannot, and to enhance life through self-expression.
Despite its acceptance as a viable treatment method and a modality for self-understanding, emotional change, and personal growth, art therapy is not widely recognised and is often misunderstood.
People are often confused about just what the term art therapy means. While it was coined to describe the use of art expression in therapy, it frequently generated some unusual assumptions.
Over the years, I have heard many interesting impressions of what art therapy might be, some of which are quite humorous. I once was asked if art therapy was only for “sick” or “disturbed” artists, providing a special treatment for curing their depressions, anxieties, or creative blocks. I was recently asked if art therapy could help improve one’s drawing and painting abilities.
Another person inquired if I worked with paintings and sculptures that had “problems.” Apparently, he imagined that art therapy could make “bad” paintings and sculptures look better! It is easy to understand that the term art therapy can be confusing when first encountered and especially if one has not had any personal experience with it.
There are several reasons art therapy is not easily understood. First, art therapy is practised with a wide range of people.
The use of art therapy has been documented with a variety of populations including children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly; people with addictions; individuals with serious and sometimes terminal illness; war veterans; people with disabilities; families experiencing difficulties; prisoners; and individuals experiencing a wide spectrum of emotional disorders.
You may have heard of art therapy being used with children who have been traumatised by abuse, with troubled families to explore their problems, or with disabled older adults in nursing homes.
You may know of a psychologist who asks his or her patients to make drawings as part of their therapy or an expressive therapist who uses art to help people deal with chronic pain or other symptoms.
You may have read in the newspaper about an artist who works with paraplegics, helping them paint, or about a therapist who has created an art studio for disabled adults.
There may be an art therapist who works in your local school system with children with learning or developmental problems, or one who works at the medical centre in your community with children and adults with cancer.
These are all common examples of where Emotional Art Therapy is used, demonstrating the vast diversity of the field. Another reason many people are confused about art therapy comes from the experiential nature of art itself.
Art therapy is a dynamic therapy, requiring one to participate in one’s own treatment, in this case through art making. Therefore, truly understanding art therapy requires first-hand experience.
…to be continued
Robert Grimmond-Thompson
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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