Art therapy is not an art class, and you do not need to be able to draw. A recognised clinical field, it reaches the wordless places that talking cannot, especially after trauma.
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HAWAEditorial·June 2026 · 6 min read
Culture & Creative
It is not an art class, and you do not need to be able to draw. The image reaches places that language cannot, especially the ones that hurt.
There is a reason we hand a frightened or grieving child a box of crayons rather than asking them to explain how they feel. Children often cannot put their largest experiences into words, but they can draw them: the storm of a feeling, the shape of a fear, the family rendered in telling sizes and distances. What is less widely understood is that this is not only for children. The capacity of images to hold and express what words cannot is a deep feature of the human mind, and it is the foundation of a serious clinical discipline: art therapy. To picture art therapy as a relaxing craft session, colouring to pass the time, is to miss almost entirely what it is and what it can do.
Art therapy is a recognised mental health profession, practised by trained and credentialed therapists and represented by bodies such as the American Art Therapy Association. An art therapist holds qualifications in both art and psychology, and uses the process of making images, with paint, clay, collage, whatever medium fits, as a way to access, express, and work through emotional and psychological material, within a therapeutic relationship. The art is not the goal in the way it would be in an art class; no one is assessing your technique, and there is no such thing as doing it wrong. The making is a means, a way of externalising the inner world so that it can be seen, held, and gently explored. This is why the most reassuring thing an art therapist says is also the truest: you do not need to be able to draw. Stick figures, scribbles, smears of colour, all of it can carry meaning, and often the rawest, least skilled marks carry the most.
The reason it works reaches into how the mind and brain process experience, and it matters most for the hardest material. A great deal of what we carry, especially trauma, is stored not in tidy, verbal memory but in images, sensations, and feelings, in a part of the mind that language struggles to reach. This is why some experiences resist being talked about: the words simply are not there, or speaking them feels impossible. The clinician and writer Cathy Malchiodi, a leading voice in expressive arts and trauma, has shown how art-making can offer a route to this wordless material that talking therapy alone cannot, allowing what is held in image and sensation to surface in image and sensation, where it can finally be expressed and processed. The crayon, quite literally, can reach what words cannot. For someone who has carried something unspeakable for years, the discovery that they can make it visible without having to narrate it can be a profound and unburdening relief.
What is art therapy used for? A great deal. It is used to help people process trauma and grief, to work with anxiety and depression, to support children who cannot yet verbalise their distress, to help people living with serious illness, and to give voice to those for whom ordinary talking is difficult or unsafe. It is used in hospitals, in schools, in trauma recovery, in hospice care. Across these settings, the underlying gift is the same: a way to express and work through what is inside, especially the parts that words cannot hold, in the safe company of someone trained to help.
It is worth being clear about how this differs from making art on your own, which is also valuable but is not the same thing. Making art alone can be expressive, soothing, and genuinely good for you, and you do not need a therapist to benefit from creating. Art therapy adds the therapeutic relationship and clinical training: the therapist helps you make meaning of what emerges, holds the process safely, and works with you when difficult material surfaces, as it can. For everyday expression and stress relief, picking up paint or clay yourself is a fine and beautiful thing. For working with trauma or significant psychological material, the trained therapist and the safe container they provide make an important difference.
A note of care, because this is genuine clinical territory: art therapy can stir up deep and painful material, and for trauma it is best undertaken with a qualified art therapist who can help you pace it, and as a complement to, not a replacement for, other mental health care you may need. If you are in crisis, please reach out to a professional or a crisis line in your country.
So if you have been holding something that resists words, that you cannot quite say even when you try, know that there is another language available to you, one you spoke fluently as a child and never truly lost. Sometimes the way to what cannot be spoken is not to find better words, but to put down the words altogether and pick up the crayon.
To express what words cannot reach, find your guide.