When Words Aren’t Enough: Creative Therapies for Trauma Counseling

When trauma closes the door on a client’s cognition, the counselor’s usual tools can stop working. In this one-hour course, DMU counselor educator Dr. Kathie Erwin shows how creative and experiential methods, such as sand tray, projective object work, and expressive art, open what she calls the “back door” to healing, reaching a wounded person on a level talk therapy cannot. You will learn why trauma constrains both cognition and creativity, how to recognize when verbal processing has stalled, and how to choose a creative intervention that keeps the client’s safety, agency, and dignity at the center. Throughout, Erwin situates the work within a whole-person understanding of the client, one that has room for the question almost every survivor eventually asks: where was God? Grounded in Divine Mercy University’s Catholic Christian view of the person and in current scholarship on trauma, resilience, and post-traumatic growth.