Supercharging Art Therapy with AI

A Surprising New Tool to Enhance Trauma Healing

Supercharging Art Therapy with AI

As a trauma therapist, long-time EMDR consultant, and registered art therapist, I’ve found that art and collage-making offers a low-barrier, effective way to work through blocks to entrenched trauma memories. In fact, my clients often tell me the sessions they remember most are ones where we’ve made art together, images they could take home and work on between sessions. As a therapist, I can relate: although I may forget what clients say after a few months, I always remember the imagery they create.

But even highly creative clients sometimes balk at using traditional art therapy tools in conjunction with EMDR because they feel shame or self-judgement about painting or drawing. Plus, using AI art therapeutically is still a novel idea in the field of art therapy, and many art therapists believe it’s risky and may dampen creativity. Initially, I too had doubts. Then, a middle school principal I was working with brought an AI image he’d created to one of our sessions and it changed everything. The image was of a man standing inside a hollowed-out heart, shoveling pieces of it into buckets being held by a long line of people. “When I showed this to my wife,” he told me, “she got how I was feeling about my job, and my life, for the first time.” I too was moved.

Since then, I’ve been experimenting with AI art as a therapeutic tool to do what all forms of expressive art therapy does: help clients access their imagination through metaphors that reflect blocked emotional experiences. In bypassing their analytical thinking, they can foster deeper emotional insight and experience a more accessible, visual, and intuitive way of healing.

Here are a few of the benefits of using AI art to help clients generate these metaphors. It’s efficient. Clients can work quickly, saving time and getting a dopamine hit within a few minutes. It can boost creativity by allowing clients to quickly create unexpected elements, enhance ideas, and combine different concepts. Customization allows clients to quickly create a visual representation of a problem or situation they resonate with, adjusting the particulars of images to fit elements of their identity that are important to them, such as skin types, gender, and any other elements unique to them. Finally, it’s cost-efficient. The availability of so many free AI tools makes this method well-suited to projects inside and outside of therapy.

Needing to Be Perfect

Harper, a female client in her late 30s felt alone and misunderstood. “I don’t have the words for what I’ve gone through,” she said, referring to her childhood trauma and the way her family had always dismissed it. “My heart hurts constantly.”

When I asked if she might be willing to try to create an image of what her heart feels like, she dismissed the idea. “I can’t do art,” she responded. “It’s too frustrating. I get pictures in my head, but they never come out right on paper.”

“I hear you,” I said. “And I have an idea. Maybe using AI could help you create what you have in your mind—and feel in your heart. Would you be open to that?”

“Maybe,” Harper sighed. “I guess I just like getting things perfect.”

Her response didn’t surprise me. Trauma clients can present with self-protection in the form of perfectionism, which can block their creative process. At the same time, what initially appears to be resistance to creativity can be a helpful metaphor in healing. So, I asked Harper, “Where else do you feel blocked by this perfectionism?”

“Everywhere,” she said. “I grew up needing to be perfect, so I wouldn’t add to the problems in my family. I only felt loved when I looked and acted a certain way. Mostly, when I picture my childhood, I see myself alone in a desert with no horizon.”

“If your heart was in this desert, what would it look like?” I asked, trying not to sound too enthusiastic, as I suspected we’d just co-created her first image—a lonely desert—where I could meet her and she could meet herself.

“My heart would be crying. It needs those tears—that precious water—to survive, but they keep spilling out from loneliness.” As she described this image, tears welled up in her own eyes.

“Would you be willing to pause?” I asked. “Just take a moment to close your eyes and place your hands on your heart as you breathe into this image.”

After a few moments, she opened her eyes. Her features had softened. “So how do I use this AI thing?” she asked.

I clicked on the OpenArt tab in the browser of my laptop then handed it to Harper. “Jot down whatever’s bubbling up for you,” I said. “Then press enter. It’s that simple.”

Harper began typing a few words onto the screen. A few minutes later, her face lit up. “Wow,” she said. “That’s it. That’s how it feels.”

The simplicity of discovering images by typing in keywords and layering one image over another gave her the power to hide things that needed to be hidden and magnify others. She was in the driver’s seat as she traversed—and redesigned—her desert in a way that helped her heal. Click here to see it.

A Golden Eagle

With my Mexican American client Lucia, our EMDR work had stalled after several months. She lived with her aging father, and believed it was her duty to care for him no matter how abusive he was toward her. Some of this aligned with her cultural values, but at times, his degrading treatment of her reawakened the childhood trauma of witnessing him inflict physical violence on almost all of the intimate partners he’d had over the years.

Her goal for therapy was to find ways to set better boundaries in her life and have a healthy family of her own someday. First, I encouraged Lucia to create images of her most persistent negative beliefs, such as “I’m trapped and don’t deserve freedom.” Then, I asked her to create images of the beliefs she’d rather hold like, “I’m not trapped and can trust myself.”

In our sessions, I showed her how to use a free AI program called DALL-E. The first image she created was of a dad holding chains beside a young, crying girl. Click here to see the image. Over time, as therapy progressed, she developed a second image with words between each broken link of the chain, each emphasizing the benefits of being her own person. This image served as a reference point for exploring the emotions, sensations, fears, and hopes connected to setting boundaries with her father. We used slow bilateral movements with EMDR to enhance this resource.  Click here to see the image.

Over time, Lucia created an image of her future self and what she wanted. She used words like “I am courageous, bold, strong, and fearless. I have the ability to choose emotional maturity over feeling trapped.” We were able to solidify these thoughts and feelings about her future into a concrete image of a golden eagle breaking heavy chains and flying out of a storm. Click here to see the image. Since then, she’s created many collages to process traumatic memories. She plans to put them together someday and make a book about her healing experience with EMDR and collage art with AI.

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Unfortunately, as we get older, many of us disconnect from our natural expressivity and innate imaginative powers. As an art therapist, I see this clearly in the contrast between what happens when I guide a roomful of kids through a creative exercise versus a roomful of adults. With kids, a sea of hands rises into the air when I ask, “Who wants to share their art?” In a roomful of adults, I’m lucky if I get one or two tentative fingers.

Bringing AI art into therapy can help reconnect “unartistic” clients to the imaginary realm of metaphor, helping them unearth feelings and ideas that need attention and compassion. Not all our clients are artistic, but they’re all creative.

AI Art Resources

OpenAI

Account required: Easy to create via Google

Cost: 1000 free credits (500 prompts), subscription plans start at $1.99/month

Features: Generates 2 designs per prompt, images are around 300 KB, downloadable without watermark; automatically saves created images and allows for organization in folders; creation time varies from 15 seconds to over a minute

Craiyon

Account not required: Optional account for saving work.

Cost: Free (ad-supported)

Features: Generates 9 low-quality images per prompt (about 1.5 MB total); allows upscaling of images for better quality; image generation can take 1-2 minutes per prompt

Picsart

Account required: Easy to create via Google

Cost: Free for AI image generation; additional features may require a subscription

Features: Generates up to 4 designs per prompt, with options for more; images are around 100 KB and can be downloaded without watermark; fast generation time, typically under 20 seconds

Google’s ImageFX

Account required: Google account needed

Cost: Free

Features: High-quality, realistic image generation; quick generation times, good for beginners

Microsoft Designer’s Image Creator

Account required: Microsoft account needed

Cost: Free

Features: Powered by DALL-E 3, offering high-quality outputs similar to ChatGPT’s image generation

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Jocelyn Fitzgerald

Jocelyn Fitzgerald, LMFT, is an Art Therapist, EMDRIA-approved EMDR Consultant, and coauthor of EMDR and the Creative Arts Therapies and Colorful Place: Mindful Story and Art for Kids. She specializes in using art and EMDR to help clients of all ages manage anxiety, process trauma, and build resilience, and mentors clinicians incorporating EMDR into their practice.