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NHS England Workforce, Training and Education

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Art Therapy - The British Association Of Art Therapists (baat.org)

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Art Therapy - The British Association Of Art Therapists (baat.org)

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The British Association Of Art Therapists

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Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses visual and tactile media as a means of self expression and communication. Art therapists aim to support people of all ages and abilities and at all stages of life, to discover an outlet for often complex and confusing feelings, and foster self awareness and growth.

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Art therapy - The British Association Of Art Therapists

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Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses visual and tactile media as a means of self expression and communication. Art therapists aim to support people of all ages and abilities and at all stages of life, to discover an outlet for often complex and confusing feelings, and foster self awareness and growth.

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What is it?

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The squiggle game was invented by a psychoanalyst named Donald Woods, or "D.W.", Winnicott. The game works as follows. Take a piece of paper and draw a squiggle onto it, make it as messy as you like. Then, turn that squiggle into a picture of something. You don't have to keep to the same lines, you can add bits in or scribble bits out, but they key is to try and transform it into a picture of something that is meaningful, as opposed to an incomprehensible squiggle. Winnicott believed that this exercise was much more than a child's game, but an act of therapy. By creating meaningful images out of meaningless squiggles, he argued we are in fact accessing our inner fantasy world that we often don't acknowledge or believe in our regular lives. He would get his patients to talk about the images they seemingly spontaneous and random images they drew, asking them to try to unpack what hidden meanings might lie beneath the images as part of attempt to reconcile him with the inner workings of their mind.

Try it yourself! Download the template squiggle at Fantasy-Animation.org here, draw your own squiggle game, and post it online to share with us. You can also scroll down below to see some of the squiggles produced by our artists and animators as part of our "The Fantasy World of..." series.

Go on, release your inner fantasy world!

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The squiggle game was invented by a psychoanalyst named Donald Woods, or "D.W.", Winnicott. The game works as follows. Take a piece of paper and draw a squiggle onto it, make it as messy as you like. Then, turn that squiggle into a picture of something.

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The British Association of Art Therapists

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Claire reflects on her experience of art therapy, adolescent trauma and emotional dysregulation

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The British Association of Art Therapists

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The British Association of Art Therapists

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Group art therapy for adults in the hospice