Ani de la Prida
Country: UK
Organization: Association for Person Centred Creative Arts (APCCA)
Short CV
Ani de la Prida is a psychotherapist and creative arts counsellor who brings a creative, person-centred, pluralistic approach to her work. She is passionate about creative methods in therapy and has experience working with groups, adults, children, and young people in a wide range of settings. Ani founded the Association for Person Centred Creative Arts (APCCA) where she is course director. Ani has taught at various universities including Roehampton and the University of East London, where she did her masters research on the use of digital media in therapy. Published work includes; Person Centred Creative Arts Therapies in The Handbook of Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling 3rd ed. (due 2023), Demedicalised counselling and psychotherapy with children and young people in People not pathology: freeing therapy from the medical model (2023) What Works in Counselling and Psychotherapy Relationships (BACP, 2020), and The Pluralistic Therapy Primer (2021).
Workshop
Title: Exploring person-centred creative arts therapies and its potential for promoting relational depth – an experiential workshop
Creativity is at the heart of the person-centred approach; therapy is a creative process and the actualising tendency is a creative motivational force that promotes psychological healing, change and growth. When the person-centred approach is integrated with creative materials and methods, it can become an incredibly powerful and transformational approach, one that promotes relational depth, psychological integration and a deep authentic connection.
Creative arts provide a route for the ‘inner’ voice of the client to be externalised in the ‘outer’ world. Multiple internal voices or perspectives can be expressed and co-exist in art form –making internal polyphony visual. The unconscious is made conscious through art. Traumatic experiences are often stored non-verbally as fragmented sensory, emotional, and visual elements, and using creative arts in therapy can help to access and process these experiences, even on a non-verbal level.
I see a hunger for creative work with clients. We are facing socio economic, political, pandemic and climate related challenges to our wellbeing, and perhaps need creative methods more now than ever. But until now creative arts therapies have not been considered a fully-fledged tribe of the person-centred nation, the approach is not widely understood, and person-centred therapists can feel unsure how to integrate creative materials into their practice.
In this workshop I will explore a person-centred approach to the therapeutic use of creative arts and how it can promote relational depth. I will discuss a person-centred view of the unconscious and its relevance to creative arts therapies. I will introduce a brief history of its development and key aspects. I will share case study material to illustrate, highlight the relevance of non-directivity and share some ideas and exercises you can safely use at any stage and level of experience.
This is an experiential workshop, and participants will be invited to engage with a simple experiential creative art exercise. Art materials will be provided.
