Applications
Color psychotherapy is a therapeutic and preventive approach.
It is applicable to a variety of therapists, populations, ages, and educational institutions. It can also be implemented in group settings.
The range of people and problems that color psychotherapy can help is wide and diverse. This is due to the fact that the therapist can largely navigate the nature of the topics that arise in the therapy room through creative work. "Mapping" the range of difficulties and abilities, limitations and strengths, can help the therapist to provide each patient with a therapeutic intervention area that is appropriate for their level of psychological development, and for the mental resources available to the patient in the given situation.
In this way, a "soft" atmosphere is created in the therapy room, focused on a process of creation and discovery.
The engagement with content is not direct or explicit in a verbal way, but rather through the creative interventions that the therapist offers, which leave a wide range of choice and freedom of action for the patient. The patient may connect to the experience of discovering their strengths, their qualities as an artist and creator, and feel a great deal of control in the situation. In all of these, the powerful power of exposure to colors stands out, which arouses and produces a high and enjoyable level of emotional arousal, which penetrates through the layer of anxiety and defenses.
The preventative value of the formation of proper balances between the mechanisms of sensation, perception, cognition, and emotion is great. Thus, exposing young children to creative activity in the spirit of the approach, may help to moderate abnormal emotional and functional developments, and to help in the proper existence of the various developmental processes.
The materials and creative activities offered are adapted to the appropriate developmental stages for different ages, and to the given mental abilities. Thus, the topics that arise in the therapy room through creative work, may be mediated by the therapist, who maps in his head both the range of the patient's difficulties, and their ability to "digest".
Working with patients on the autistic spectrum
Therapeutic work with children on the autistic spectrum is a complex challenge that poses many obstacles for therapists and educators who work with them. The central difficulty in establishing interpersonal relationships is often accompanied by disabilities in the areas of sensation, perception, and thinking. The world of emotions and their expression is blocked and limited, and is often not accessible to therapeutic contact. The repetitiveness and stereotypy to which people with the disorder tend, often inhibit processing the contents of the inner world and the formation of a meaningful therapeutic process.
Color psychotherapy offers accessible ways to the closed world of autistic people, using the channels of visual art. The accumulated experience points to the effectiveness of the approach for children and adolescents suffering from difficulties on the spectrum.
The direct contact with the material and color "bypasses" the limitations of the existing scaling and language abilities of these patients and "opens" the channels of their blocked emotional expression.
