ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the author’s own experience of being a client in one-to-one environmental arts therapy. It presents a therapeutic exploration of childhood trauma, domestic violence and parental suicide and demonstrates how environmental arts therapy can be used as a profound and effective method of exploration and change. The author shares his experiences of trauma, loss and the expression of feeling as he attempts to find reconciliation between the seemingly contradictory notions of masculinity and vulnerability. An account of five environmental arts therapy sessions is given, illuminating some of the more dramatic and action-orientated techniques of the approach. Environmental arts therapy is examined through a Jungian lens, which draws special attention to ideas of liminality and the experience of the numinous in nature. It highlights the ritual nature of the approach and its strong archetypal themes, such as that of ‘descent’ and the ‘wounded healer’. The chapter argues that learning to live with one’s own vulnerability is a crucial part of what makes a therapist able to safely enter into the woundedness of others. Further questions are raised in the chapter about the relationship between the psychological woundedness of humankind and the wounds that we inflict upon our planet.
