As an educator, Jess Minckley found that many of her students had mental health challenges that she couldn't assist with due to the ethical scope of her role. But now as a registered art therapist at Pacific Art Therapy, Minckley is able to help patients heal from traumatic experiences.

"Art therapy can happen on a Post-it with a number 2 pencil, or it can be a huge 3D painting over time, or it can span to a whole community effort to make a mural, or a quilt, or a whole mosaic wall," Minckley told the SGN.

She explained how talk therapy only uses the left side of the brain — the part that controls logic, sequences, numbers, language, math, and time — while art therapy uses the right side, which controls emotions, senses, dreams, imagination, and creativity.

"It's very weird how we attempt to solve right-brain problems, which is where trauma lives, using only left-brain tools. Art therapy uses both sides," she said.

Art therapy is more capable of fostering an integrated brain, Minckley added, because it utilizes the nonverbal, creative, and imaginative parts.

"Even the most stifled, repressed software engineer can still use both hands to scribble, and that brings online this whole part of you that is lost, oftentimes because people are encouraged to stop doing art roughly when they're eight," Minckley said.

Queer joy

Minckley did her internship in Georgia, which provided her with helpful experiences, since she was counseling Queer youth in rural areas.

"I think it was a really hard time for Queer folks, and I just got a really different perspective, because the culture [there] is basically the opposite of Seattle," Minckley said. "The LGBTQ community experiences something like 75% more traumatic experiences than the average Joe, so we just go into working with them knowing that they have been oppressed."

Since all children make art, doing so as an adult can transport one back to a time when one's attachment and understanding of the world began. Minckley, however, doesn't force her clients to make art. First sessions generally involve the creation of a genogram on a Zoom whiteboard, which displays an illustration of a person's family members based on colors. They then make circles and connect lines that show further connections. Minckley later sends this genogram to clients so they can continue to work on it in their spare time.

The art portion of the therapy session takes about 10 minutes of the 50-minute session. They talk through the genogram with patients, and sometimes play calming music during the art making.

"We don't really care what it looks like, but having a by-product of a therapy session is having something someone can look at [to help] remember what they were talking about," Minckley said, noting how this doesn't happen in talk therapy.

Minckley highlighted how humans have engaged in the arts since evolution, like singing, dancing, and cave drawings. Due to social norms and repression, she said people need to be reminded of what brings them joy — and that Queer joy is needed.

"We're doing world making here: making a world that is full of Queer joy. It's a process, and [with the election and inauguration], I think the focus has been extremely weighted toward fear," Minckley said. "Fear kills joy, so an antidote is to focus on ... healing through pleasure, because we can experience joy by ourselves in a bathroom stall on a break from work anytime we want, but we forget that listening to a song on Spotify helps improve our light."

Since access to care remains a challenge for many, Minckley encourages people to connect with various social programs, like Peer Seattle, which provides "peer emotional support and development services to the LGBTQ community impacted by addiction, mental health and/or HIV."

"It's unfortunate, because the discipline is relatively new and thus it's not completely accepted, although the winds of change are coming," Minckley said.