Creative encounters: exploring contact boundaries through the creative process

Abstract

ABSTRACT Integrating creative processes within therapeutic encounters encourages us to be in contact on many levels and layers. Creativity may bring us into contact with our inner world and knowings, with the intersubjective space we share with others and with the world around us. This creative contact calls us into action, experimentation, imagination, risk taking, embodiment, and it cultivates our ability to be responsive. Three creative arts therapists write expressively into a hybrid online/in person workshop they facilitated during PCE2021. While witnessed by online observers, the workshop invited in-person participants to use movement, visual art-making, creative writing, and enactment to reflexively explore and experiment with their own dynamic ‘contact boundary’. This personal inquiry was then opened to an experience of how others in the group may make contact and place boundaries in different ways and places. The authors thread creative narration alongside descriptions of theories informing their choice of various processes. This article invites the reader into the workshop experience aiming to facilitate vicarious exploration of each reader’s own contact boundary in relation to self and others, and open consideration of movement as a sometimes confronting but often rewarding therapeutic mode.