Building Resilience from the Inside Out

Through Puppets, Play, and Storiesor A Back Door To Culture, Well-being, and Strength

“If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in!” -  Shel Silverstein

Lani Gerity DA, ATRFebruary 21, 2011

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This course, Building Resilience from the Inside Out, will provide participants with an absorbing methodology for practicing art therapy in a multi-cultural world. We will explore how puppets and doll-making as well as the creation of resilience narratives can enhance the therapist’s empathy, compassion, attention, curiosity even appreciation for beauty and other intrinsic rewards.

The course will weave an experiential art-making component into a didactic examination of the idea of culture being a vehicle for learning skills of resilience. Through case material we will look at resilience and puppet-making with dissociative patients, with grandparents and grandkids, and across cultures. There are optional readings which will provide some clues as to the ability of modern Western consumer culture to teach values of inner strength and resilience. We will take a peek at dominant and non dominant cultures, colonialism, and the culturally syntonic ego ideal, all in relation to art therapy. Particular attention will be paid to the difficulties of transference and countertransference in working with populations from cultures other than our own. We will discuss the possibilities of supporting a culture of resilience within our art rooms.

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What will be required1. Come to the class with a lot of curiosity and not too many assumptions. We really don’t know what is around the next corner, do we?

2. Find a resilience narrative, either a folk tale, or a bit of history from your own cultural background or family, that clearly speaks to human resilience (see strategies below). Be prepared to tell the story as the introductory exercise.

3. Not required, but very helpful: read the following two articles (should be a separate email): Gerity, L.A. (2000 a). The Subversive Art Therapist: Embracing Cultural Diversity in the Art Room. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 17 (3) pp. 202-206. and Gerity, L.A. (2001). Josie, Winnicott, and the Hungry Ghosts. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 18 (1) pp. 44-49.

Resilience Strategies: 1. Do what ever we can to build relationships, because we need people.

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2. We need opportunities to take charge of aspects of our lives whenever possible, because we are more resilient when we feel competent rather than helpless.

3. We need to have goals and wishes, because these produces optimism.

4. We need to look for good things in our environment, because we do better when we have at least a few positive things in our awareness even in the most difficult times.

5. We need to believe in ourselves.

6. We need insight, so that we can think, draw conclusions, and problem solve.

7. We need to exercise our creativity for the above reasons and because it feeds us in non-material ways.

8. We need humor. We need to be able to distance ourselves from life’s difficulties at times, and humor allows for this.

9. We need an internal moral compass, to help us with our decisions.

10. We need to take care of ourselves.

11. We need time and space to help us create meaning of our lives. We need to keep a journal (art journal) to help us reflect on what is happening to us.

12. We need meditation or a spiritual practice that helps us feel ourselves a part of a greater whole.

13. We need to have compassion, kindness, and generosity for ourselves and others. (see Dr. Kristin Neff’s website: http://www.self-compassion.org/)

14. We need to study resilience, because in my experience it makes us more resilient.

Sources:

Figley, C. R. (2005). Combat Stress Injury : Theory, Research, and Management. Brunner/Routledge Five Ways to Well-being. The New Economics Foundation http://www.neweconomics.org/ Lyubomirsky, S. (2010). The how of happiness: A practical approach to getting the life you want. London: Piatkus.Petronis, V. (2005). Resilience following Katrina. Loyola University New Orleans. Road to Resilience, American Psychological Association. Found at http://www.apahelpcenter.org/featuredtopics/feature.php?id=6

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Making Paper Puppet People or Paper Action Figures

What you will need:

Scissors, card stock, old magazines, photocopies of old photos, glue stick, embellishments, hole punch; yarn, string, or brads for your puppetʼs joints; and pencils, markers, crayons, even rubber stamps can be fun.

You may also want a template. Here is one you use. Cut it out, trace it on your card stock or construction paper and you are ready to get started.

This template can be adjusted, of course. You can make it taller, thinner, fatter. You can give it long hair, short hair. You can make it bald, or even give it feathers for hair. Once you have your head, torso, arms and legs cut out you need to make holes where you see the little black spots on this little templateʼs shoulders and the top of the legs. (8 holes)Now you are ready to attach arms and legs to the body of your puppet. Brads

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are easy to use and you can find decorative versions in scrapbooking stores. Yarn and even long skinny scraps of cloth work really well. Experiment!I used a small hole punch and made holes where I joined

arms and legs to the body. If you are using cloth or yarn, push the ends though an arm hole and the corresponding hole at the shoulder, tied a square knot (right over left and left over right) and then again at each joint. Of course brads would work as well in these holes.

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and use the whole personality and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” D. W. Winnicott (British pediatrician / psychoanalyst and the quote comes from page. 54 of Playing & Reality)

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A personal note on transformation & puppets: I found this process of using old photos very liberating. I began to look at the memories and photos of childhood in a more playful way than I ever had before. Suddenly these little frozen capsules of time could be a source of fun, less fossilized, there were more possibilities, more kinds of feelings. The feelings of new possibilities, and new ways of looking were probably the most remarkable of all the feelings that emerged.

These particular puppets were rubber stamped on water color paper and water color was added afterwards. The yarn hair came from a scrap-booking collection of embellishing yarns and there are brad joints at knees, elbows,

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hips and shoulders. I figured more joints would give her more flexibility, metaphorically speaking. (And what more could we ask for than more metaphorical flexibility?)

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me at: lanipuppetmaker@mac.comAnd check out my blogs for more ideas and inspiration:http://lanipuppetmaker.blogspot.com/http://14secretsforahappyartistslife.blogspot.com/

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