Art therapy with older people.

Art therapy is a discipline with many implementation possibilities. Individually or in groups, in institutions or privately, with very diverse audiences, with different characteristics.

It is essentially taking advantage of the therapeutic potentialities of creative and artistic work, in a job where the person is guided and motivated to explore themselves through the transformation of artistic materials. Creating is a way of building and developing your own affairs, being able to intervene in very different ways.

The work can be located in the body and in its movement, on a blank sheet of paper, or taking clay or ceramics as raw material, among many other options. Acting, the creation of puppets or masks, painting, and music are among them.

The population of older adults is very fruitful for work with Art Therapy. It is a vital stage in which motivation or project is often not found. Free time, loss of loved ones, and proximity to death are often complex issues to deal with from a psychological point of view. Art offers a way of doing that restores dignity, rebuilds subjectivity, and helps strengthen self-esteem.

Physical skills and cognitive functions are also lost at this stage. This deterioration usually produces great frustration and a feeling of uselessness, which if not worked on, usually leads to decay and in many cases depression.

Working with art therapy tools can help to recover autonomy and the construction of personal projects that encourage and provide motivation. Expressing yourself creatively is a way, in addition to leaving a legacy, your own imprint that transcends and has an independent existence from that of the person himself.

The work is an expression of the internal world of whoever creates it, but at the same time, it has its own entity. Creation, in this sense, helps to work on transcendence, what we leave behind, what can pass from generation to generation, the symbolic, and what endures, so important for this moment in life.

Art therapy collaborates with sensory deployment, reconnects the person with the world, and helps them to know it again, with the same tools used in childhood but from another subjective position. This rediscovery of the world and its possibilities is a generator of change and opens up a whole spectrum of new and rich possibilities.

Art and creative possibility open up to a new reality, where new experiences are possible, and this is extremely therapeutic in the context of someone who is going through old age.

The art therapy space also favors bonding. The possibility of being part of a group, even now in virtuality, and of communicating emotions and experiences through what has been created. It is a way of building, linking, and linking something from those ruptures that distance, death, loss, or illness produce.

Trusting again in one's own productive and transformative capacities is an extremely enriching experience for those who attend this period. It implies the possibility of metabolizing everything lived, connection with others, and playful accompaniment in the final stage of life.

 

Thank You