Art Therapy & Creative Therapies

It works by giving you a language that isn’t words. You draw or paint or build from a place you don’t plan, where you’re experiencing the thing rather than describing it, and that engages the visual parts of your brain instead of the parts talk therapy uses. Sessions might be free-form, or your therapist might set a specific task, called a directive.

It also isn’t just for kids. That’s the assumption most people arrive with, and it’s wrong. Art therapy works across every age, and the reason it works has nothing to do with whether you can draw.

• Trauma, including experiences you can’t fully access in words
• Anxiety and chaotic emotion that’s hard to put language to
• Feeling stuck, or circling the same ground in talk therapy
• Grief and loss
• Children and teens who won’t sit and talk
• Adults who assumed this was a children’s service
• People who’ve been told they’re bad at expressing themselves
• Anyone whose background or culture doesn’t map neatly onto conventional talk therapy

Juniper Alves works from a framework called the expressive arts continuum. If you come in with chaotic emotion, she’ll hand you something structured, because structure contains. If you’re stuck and can’t get anything out, she’ll reach for paint or watercolor, something fluid and harder to control, because that loosens things.

Clay, acrylic, drawing, gel pens, linoleum prints, all of it is in play. Some sessions you’ll make something and then look at it together. Others start with you bringing in work you did during the week and asking what it’s telling you. A common prompt is drawing your inner critic alongside your inner caregiver, because having a face and a name for the voice in your head changes your relationship to it.

Available in person in Durango only.

Juniper Alves is a trained art therapist and matches material to state, deliberately, session by session. What she keeps encountering is people drawing intuitively and surprising themselves with what comes out, often clients carrying sexual trauma with no clear memory of it. The memory was there. It was blocked, and the art moved the block. She also pairs art with EMDR, using one to surface what the other then processes.

Skye Dowell brings art into other frameworks rather than treating it as its own lane, running parts work and IFS through it, sometimes somatic work. A client of hers might arrive stuck on something and leave having drawn their way around it.

Both are clear that art therapy isn’t a substitute for the rest of the work. It’s a door into it, and it opens for people that other doors don’t.