creative Therapy

When I was little, I hung out with this group of kids who were my parents’ friends’ children. They were really mean to me and didn’t really want me around. So, I’ve always had this idea that I didn’t belong and people didn’t like being around me. Even though, over the years, a lot happened to show me otherwise, I was just stuck with those ideas in my head.

About two weeks ago, I found a box of photos from my childhood and teenage years. I looked at the photos over and over again and realized that I was smiling in all of them. Even laughing in some. I had people around me, with their arms on my shoulder. Suddenly it hit me that I was all wrong. I had belonged and I was loved. I had hundreds of photos to prove it. (I can’t really put into words the fundamental shift this caused.)

So I grabbed a minibook I had, glued the photos all over it and journaled all around it. I journaled for 7 hours. I wanted to capture this moment of revelation and have something for my future self to revisit if I got delusional again. It was energizing and life-changing.

I wanted to couple that experience with my wish to create more often and to have more fun with creating, so I thought….why not do a weekly challenge? Yes, I know there are thousands of them. But the idea of this one would be using art, scrapbooking, photography, or whatever your creative outlet is as a form of self-therapy. It doesn’t have to be revealing. It can be with colors, a specific technique, lots of journaling, or very few words. It can be art journaling. It can be anything you want as long as it’s therapeutic to you. Creative therapy.

My hope was to have a team of scrappers and mixed media artists. Many of us, so that we don’t all have to do one each week. Since this is emotional at the core, I want to make sure it’s authentic.

I hope you’re as excited about this idea as we are. I am honored and humbled to be in the company of these amazing artists and I hope that their work will inspire you as much as it awes me.

I don’t want to call this a challenge site since challenge and creative therapy don’t go together in my opinion. So, we’re going to call them catalysts, since our goal is for the work to be the catalyst for our life and a catalyst for you to feel inspired to create your own piece of creative therapy.

So, come on over. Pull up a chair and create your own therapeutic art.

– Karen Grunberg