Why is art therapy so powerful for Introverts?
Clare McCarthy, ATR-BC, LCPC
According to the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, people fall broadly into two major styles of interfacing with the world: extraversion and introversion. Extraverts base their frameworks and conduct on the outer situation, whereas the introvert bases their framework farther back—with inner ideas, and mental concepts derived from what Jung referred to as archetypes. These are the abstract essences of experiences, universals, broad shapes of thought, and powerfully connected by ideas and concepts.
Because of this preference for the internal and the abstract, introverts tend to be not readily understandable to one anther, and can be thoroughly incomprehensible to extraverts. Additionally, when introverts do communicate their internal world with others, they tend to share only their conclusions, and can come across as impersonal in their brevity. This terse and dense communication preference allows introverts to more quickly return to the realm of internal work which feels inherently more rewarding and engaging. However, this can also pose significant challenges in forming a working alliance with a therapist.
For these reasons, art therapy offers significant advantages in assisting introverted clients through life challenges, as explored below:
Introverts are forethinkers, they cannot live a full life until they understand it.
Art Therapy provides clients with opportunities for non-verbal reflective thought processes through the use of symbols, diverse creative processes, and intuitive visual art making. This allows clients to engage in the forethinking process without being rushed or pressured to explain their inner processes in words that may feel premature and inaccurate. Having access to the client’s visual art making process also allows the art therapist to engage with the client’s internal process in a way that provides an attuned witnesses, but does not impose or threaten the client’s internal privacy or creative autonomy.
Introverts have an attitude that tends to be reserved and questioning. They expect the waters to prove deep, and pause to take soundings in the new and untried.
Art Therapy allows for multiplicity in expressed meaning that is not bound to any single interpretation of the client’s artwork. This can invite ongoing questioning, and creation of deepening meanings as clients move towards a fuller understanding of themselves. Through utilizing rich archetypal frameworks, client’s natural mental depth is celebrated, explored, and naturally expanded.
The mind of introverts are inwardly directed, frequently unaware of the objective environments, interest and attention being engrossed by inner events. Their real world therefore is the inner world of ideas and understanding.
Art Therapy provides clients with an elegant and efficient way to connect their intangible internal process with the physical world, through the creation of sensory self-reflective artwork. This can help to ground the client in the '“here-and-now,” while also allowing for the expression of their powerful inwardly directed mental processes. Through creating expressive artwork, clients are also able to connect with the art therapist and share their complex and shifting internal concepts in a way that allows them to feel fully seen and understood.
Introvert’s minds are rich with ideas and abstract inventions—often enjoying going from considering to doing and back to considering.
Art therapy offers a way to help the client shift naturally from conceptual verbal exploration to active art making, and back to verbal exploration. This allows clients options to explore, finely tune, and re-evaluate their internal models—all while staying deeply engaged in abstract and meaningful ideas. In the context of art therapy, clients are able to share and refine their internal ideas in a flexible and collaborative style, which helps them to gain perspective, increase options to solve challenges, and refine unhelpful or inaccurate models that may be holding back personal growth.
For introverts, conduct in essential matters is always governed by subjective values.
Art therapy is values driven. Visual expression provides clients a powerful way to identify, clarify, and live their lives in accordance with their personal values. This is also reflected in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy framework, which integrates with values-oriented art therapy practice.
Introverts tend to be subtle and impenetrable, often taciturn and shy, more at home in the world of ideas than in the world of people and things.
For many introverts, making eye contact with a therapist during a session is uncomfortable, and distracts them from referencing their internal concepts that they seek to explore. Art therapy offers both the client and the therapist options to direct their attention in an triadic relational format, using the art making process as a third point of focus beyond the direct sharing of verbal ideas. Under these secure and defused conditions, the client may more fully be able to explore, share, and adapt internal concepts that may be contributing to mental health challenges.
Intense and passionate, introverts tend to bottle up their emotions and guard them carefully as high explosives.
Introverted people may not have the best strategies for expressing and regulating their intense and passionate emotions. Often, they tend to feel that they alone are capable of understanding their internal challenges, and this sense of isolation may compound emotional intensity and contribute to mental health and relationship difficulties. Art therapy offers unique opportunities for clients to externalize, visualize, and process their emotions in safe and contained ways so that clients can learn how to identify and to regulate their emotions in more strategic and productive ways.
For introverts, health and wholesomeness depend on development of balancing extraversion.
In any personality style, health comes through balance. For introverts, this balance relies on developing the skills and competencies to have healthy connections to the world around them, including strong nurturing relationships. Art therapy offers clients the relational container to practice the skills and behaviors that help to increase healthy connections with others. Having felt deeply understood and fully known in the therapeutic space, clients can move forward into the world secure in the knowledge that their uniqueness and personal strengths can be understood and nurtured in a variety of important relationships.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
—Carl Jung
References:
Myers, Isabel Briggs, and Peter B. Myers. Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Palo Alto, Calif.: Davies-Black Pub, 1980 1995. Print.
