IVANA LESSNER LISTIAKOVA, PhD.
Drama Therapy
Drama therapy uses drama as a medium for healing. Engagement in dramatic activities offers expression and enactment. You can try to be anyone and play around with different solutions to situations. Anything can be put in play. It offers a safe space for experiment and exploration. In drama therapy, we use our bodies, but also masks, puppets, objects, or sand trays. Everything happens in the metaphor of a story and a role.
Bibliotherapy
Bibliotherapy includes working with literary text, from novels, through short stories, to song lyrics, jokes, proverbs and citations. Existing text serves as a starting point for further discussion and creative ways of changing it. We can identify with the heroes, or confront them. Bibliotherapy uses reading and creative writing as the main activities.
Play Therapy
Play is the most basic and natural way of reaching children. Play allows communication, it is safe, open and creative. Pretending actually shows the truth. Children are witnessed, they are listened to and accepted. Their emotions are taken seriously and they can let them out in an appropriate way in play.
Expressive Therapies
Expressive therapies use arts as a means of change. Thinking and talking does not always give us answers we need. Art, movement and play create space for expression of emotions, externalization, transformation into a new shape and re-integration. Through expressive therapies we learn to listen to our body and our actual needs.
As a therapeutic pedagogue I tend to use methods of multiple expressive therapies, depending on the preferences and needs of clients.
Sandtray Therapy
The touch of sand brings us into connection with earth and nature and with ourselves, it is grounding and calming. The borders of a sandbox make safe borders and frame the picture we create. Putting small figures and objects into the sand intuitively, opens up emotions and insights through the metaphor of our own symbols.
Art Therapy
Paint, clay, smells and colours create complex images. Sometimes we can think better in pictures. They are representations that hold expressed emotions. After they are out on paper, we can charish them, mould them, destroy them, or create new.
Sensory Integration Therapy
Chaos in perception of the environment can cause problems in effective functioning. Sensory integration therapy focuses on providing sensory stimuli in multisensory environments so that our brains can process this information in a helpful way. It is usefull for children with learning disorder, ADHD or autism, but often also for people who feel disorganized.
Other Therapeutic Approaches
There are other therapeutic approaches and concepts that therapeutic pedagogues use in their work. They are not called expressive therapies, even though expression is a part of them, because therapeutic pedagogues use a client-orientated approach.
Occupational Therapy
Occupational therapy or ergotherapy consists of several parts: gross and fine motor skills training for children as a developmental support in early childhood intervention and later, and for adults after injuries. That includes also general physical rehabilitation and support of competences in everyday life routines. Another direction of OT is building occupational habits and reintegration into employment.