Healing Through Creativity: How Art & Music Therapy at Profound Treatment Transforms Recovery in Los Angeles

The challenges of substance abuse are not only tied to substance use. Addiction often co-exists with mental health challenges that impede your quality of life. Therefore, access to a treatment program that addresses your needs as a whole person is invaluable to treatment and recovery. At Profound Treatment, we recognize how important it is to provide evidence-based treatment modalities that help you confront barriers that impede your emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. Thus, modalities like art therapy and music therapy can support whole-person healing.

Power of Creative Expression in Addiction Recovery

The science of creative expression has been studied for decades to understand its power in society’s individual and collective lives. Creativity or creative expression is difficult to define fully. However, as noted in “The Science Behind Creativity” by Kirsten Weir, creativity involves an honest expression of the self. Creativity is art, an expression of imagination and selfhood. Whether it is found in music, paint, or another medium, it can reflect on and work through the individual and collective nature of experience, emotion, and ideas. 

At its core, creative expression is transformational and empowering to self and community. Yet, how does the power of creative expression relate to addiction recovery? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, arts activities and/or clinical arts-based interventions can have a positive influence on your well-being and relationships. Thus, creative arts therapies like art therapy and music therapy are evidence-based programs that target the challenges of addiction and enhance protective factors for recovery. However, what exactly encompasses art therapy and music therapy?

What Is Art & Music Therapy?

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) defines art therapy as the making of art and your response to art to improve your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Moreover, the goal of art therapy is to use the creative process of techniques like collage, paint, and sculpture to gain insight into the self for healthy coping. Further, as NCI notes, music therapy uses music to help improve your well-being. Through self-expression in interventions like songwriting, singing, dancing, and listening to music, you can improve your quality of life.

How Art and Music Therapy Support Substance Abuse Treatment

Often, the roots of addiction are deep in your subconscious, but manifest in self-destructive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Through art therapy, you are given a non-verbal way to express those difficult-to-reach thoughts and feelings. Similarly, music therapy allows you to tap into emotions that are difficult to express and process. Music therapy presents another creative way to reflect and engage in self-discovery for greater self-understanding and thus improve your physical and psychological well-being.

Therefore, art therapy and music therapy are invaluable to treating substance abuse and co-occurring conditions like mental health disorders.

Mental Health and Art: Expressing Emotions Through Paint, Drawing, and Sculpture

Art therapy is a tool for emotional expression and mental well-being. Art therapy can take on a variety of media, such as writing, sculpture, drawing, and the use of paint. As noted in Frontiers in Psychology, historically, drawings and paintings have been particularly useful to the therapeutic process. The use of materials like paint, markers, crayons, oil pastels, and colored pencils offers a level of accessibility that opens the door to artistic expression regardless of skill.

Listed below are some of the ways art therapy can support your well-being:

• Emotional awareness
• Decrease depression and anxiety
• Emotional regulation
• Positive mood
• Self-efficacy
• Improve social function
• Reduce stress, pain, fatigue
• Self-confidence
• Improve cognitive functioning
• Self-sufficiency

In addition to art therapy, music therapy can also support psychological well-being.

How Music Helps Process Grief, Trauma, and Anxiety

Difficulties with substance abuse are often rooted in mental health disorders like anxiety and depression. Moreover, challenges with co-occurring disorders are rooted in adverse experiences like trauma and grief. The act of listening to or making music has a profound impact on how you engage with emotions, memories, and feelings. Some of the ways music therapy helps you process challenges include:

• Exploration of negative and positive thoughts and feelings
• Emotional release
• Community building
• Emotional regulation
• Reduce stress, anxiety, and avoidance behaviors
• Enhance self-worth
• Foster resilience

Thus, music is a powerful tool to improve quality of life in treatment and recovery.