You Don’t Have to Be Creative to Benefit from Creative Counselling

When people hear the words creative counselling or creative working, there’s often a moment of hesitation.

“I’m not artistic.”

“I can’t draw.”

“Do I have to use paint?”

My hope is that through this blog you can see that creative working in therapy isn’t scary, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to and you certainly don’t need to be artistic.

What I’ve found is that creative work in the counselling room often happens naturally, without anyone realising it’s happening at all.

It naturally shows up…just when a client is trying to describe something that feels too big, too painful, or too complex to put into words.

When words alone don’t quite do the job, it’s incredible how the mind often moves to doing what it does best and reaches for imagery and metaphor, a bit like it does in dreams where it finds symbolic ways to communicate.

And clients do this naturally…

“I feel like I’ve hit a brick wall.”

“My emotions come in waves.”

“I might as well be on a deserted island because nobody notices me.”

“I feel like a sinking ship and no one can see I’m going under.”

These aren’t some thought up poetic inventions. They’re phrases people use naturally and without realising all the time in therapy.

This is creative processing in action. We use symbols and images to help make sense of what we’ve lived through, especially when it’s hard to explain or to get the words to come out of our mouths.

In counselling, metaphors can help move feelings from inside us to something we can explore together. They offer a bit of breathing space to the session when emotions feel overwhelming and can create a shared language between client and therapist, especially when the metaphor pops up unexpectedly by you the client.

Take the client who described feeling stuck behind a brick wall. We didn’t plan to “do creative work.” She simply shared what she was feeling, using words that felt right to her in the moment, helping her to describe her own experience as it came to mind.

Over time, that wall became something we could gently explore together just taking one brick at a time, sometimes it would be representing guilt, another brick that was about fear and another was about the shame that was never hers to carry.

Some weeks she noticed a brick that was particularly troublesome

Some weeks she let one go.

And…

Just to clarify… the sessions weren’t always about bricks!

But before we end with the “wall” I will share that in addition she imagined building a ladder.  Not to escape her  problem, but to help her see over the other side, to see from a different perspective.

That’s how creative working is… it can be quiet, often unintentional and powerful.

The same applies when someone talks about emotions arriving in waves. We might explore whether they feel knocked over, pulled under, or able to float at times. A “sinking ship” can open conversations about visibility, support, and what help is needed before everything goes under. A “deserted island” often speaks volumes about loneliness, people pleasing, and the exhaustion of always managing alone.

None of this requires art materials.

None of it requires you to be “creative.”

It simply requires space to be heard and permission for your experience and words to take the form they naturally want to take.

This way of working can be especially supportive for those who are used to getting on with things, downplaying their needs, or telling themselves they should be coping better because metaphors give feelings somewhere to land, outside of self-judgment.

So rather than “I’m overreacting,” it might become, “This feels like I’m drowning under a wave” and that tells us something important.

So if you’ve ever thought,

“Creative counselling isn’t for me, there’s a good chance you’re already using creativity in your life without even realising it and in sessions with me, there’s no pressure to do anything creative.

If it naturally shows up, we can use it.

If it doesn’t, then that’s absolutely fine too.

I’ll help you find your way through just as you are.

Jules