Draw On Your Relationships

Draw on Your Relationships is a bestselling resource to help people of all ages express, communicate and deal more effectively with their emotions through drawing. Built around five key themes, each section contains a simple picture exercise with clear objectives, instructions and suggestions for development. The picture activities have been carefully designed to help ease the process of both talking about feelings and exploring life choices, by trying out alternatives safely on paper. This will help to create clarity and new perspectives as a step towards positive action. Offering a broad range of exercises which can be adapted for any ability or age from middle childhood onwards, this unique book explores a range of emotions surrounding a person’s important life experiences, key memories, relationships, best times, worst times and who they are as a person. This is an essential resource for therapists, educators, counsellors and anyone who engages other people in conversations that matter about their relationship to self, others and life in general. This revised and updated second edition also contains a new section on how to use the superbly emotive The Relationship Cards (ISBN 9781138071018 Sold separately) to facilitate deeper therapeutic conversations.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

• How to use this book

• Why use drawings and images to speak about feelings?

• How to work safely

• Key rules and guidelines in helping someone to speak about feelings

• About sandplay and how to use it

YOU AND YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

• You, your relationships, your life

• Encouragers and discouragers in my life (past and present)

• People in your life, as gardens

• The cocktail party

• Your relationships as walls, bridges, comfortable sofas & take off

• Museum of too alone

• My childhood memories: People as places

• Relationship riches

DEAD, DEPRIVING, DRAINING, DISAPPOINTING RELATIONSHIPS

• My Relationship: Take off or stuck on the runway?

• To leave or to stay?

• The ‘nothing much happening’ times

• A relationship that’s holding me back

• People who energise. People who drain

• Too many takers and not enough givers

• Am I expecting too much from her/him?

• Disappointing relationship or futile quest for perfect mate?

LIFE-CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS

• People you’ve been flying with

• Flying together as a group

• Collecting moments, not things

• Oh, how we laugh!

• Knights (posing as people)

LOVE HURTS

• Museum of hurt

• When I can’t reach you

• Life after losing a person or their love

• The end of a relationship. What now?

• Loving someone who isn’t good at loving

• Do I matter to you?

• No one listens / too unhelped

• Rejected / not wanted / uninvited / redundant

• On the outside of the group

DAMAGING AND DESTRUCTIVE RELATIONSHIPS

• Power over / power under / power with

• Toxic shame

• Managing conflict badly

• Controlled

• Emotional baggage

• Hidden resentments

• So many difficult/annoying people in my life

• Anger fuelled by pain from the past

RELATIONSHIPS AND FEAR

• Fear of intimacy

• Withdrawal, avoidance and leaving

• Fear of closeness and fear of distance

• Fear of being in groups

• Fear of being myself in case I am too much

• Without a voice

• Mistrust

TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES TO IMPROVE AND REPAIR RELATIONSHIPS

• The art of relationship (for one person)

• The ‘when you…I feel’ exercise (for two people)

• The ‘unfinished sentence’ exercise (for two people)

• The 'like / don’t like it’ game (for two people)

• The empathy game (for two people)

• Our best and worst times (for two people)

• Theories of motivation (for two people)

• Paper conversations