Your Passion Is the Therapy: Expressive Arts and Strengths-Based Healing
When someone asks me what therapeutic interventions I use, I genuinely can't answer. Not because I don't have a framework — I have many. But because the honest answer is: it depends entirely on who is sitting across from me. And that is not a vague non-answer. It is the whole point.
I am an artist. I went to film school. I have made short films, worked in photography, spent years immersed in the language of story and image and the ways that creative expression carries what ordinary language sometimes cannot. And what I discovered — both in the making and in the years of clinical work that followed — is that the creative instinct is not separate from the healing process. It is often the most direct route into it.
Expressive arts therapy, in its traditional form, brings art-making into the therapeutic space — drawing, painting, movement, music. That work has real value. But what I do is something slightly different, and it took me years of practice to name it clearly. I don't introduce creativity as a technique. I find out what a person already loves — what they are already doing, what lights them up, what they lose track of time inside — and I make that the medicine.
If someone builds cars, we talk about what it feels like to take something broken and make it whole. If someone dances, we explore what the body knows that the mind hasn't caught up to yet. If someone writes, we write — letters, timelines, autobiographical prompts that let a person tell their own story from the outside in. If someone plays chess, we talk about strategy and patience and the difference between a reactive move and an intentional one. The metaphors are already there, alive in what they love. My job is to help them see it.
The homework I give is never generic. Nobody does homework they don't want to do — and forcing a disengaged person through a worksheet helps no one. But ask someone to do something they already love, in a slightly different way, with slightly more intention, and something opens.
I worked with a teenager on the autism spectrum who was obsessed with typography. Fonts were his world — their history, their personalities, the subtle differences between a serif and a sans-serif and what each one communicated. So we built his therapy around that. The characters in the story we were writing together were named Arial, Seraph, Garamond. He wrote about himself in the third person, as a character in his own book, and in doing so found a way to talk about his experience that direct conversation had never quite unlocked. The distance of fiction gave him room to be honest. The fonts gave him a language that was entirely his own.
I worked with a young person who was terrified of speaking in public — a fear that had become so large it was organising their whole life around avoidance. We didn't talk about the fear. We made a song about it. They danced it. The body said what the mind had been too frightened to say out loud, and something shifted that months of talking about the fear had not been able to move.
I worked with someone who was building a tiny home with their own hands, learning as they went. We used that. The mindfulness of working with physical material, of problem-solving in real time, of creating something from nothing — all of it became the practice. Therapy didn't happen only in our sessions. It happened every time they picked up a tool.
This is strengths-based work in its truest sense. Not starting from what is broken and trying to fix it, but starting from what is already alive and building from there. The assumption underneath all of it is one I hold deeply: that the person in front of me already has most of what they need. My job is not to provide answers but to help them find the ones they already carry — in the things they love, in the stories they tell, in the creative intelligence that was always there, often long before they ever came to therapy.
Joseph Campbell understood this. The hero doesn't gain new powers on the journey. They discover the ones they always had. That is what I am trying to create space for — in every session, with every person, through whatever language happens to be theirs.
I want to say something honestly: this way of working has enriched my life in ways I didn't anticipate. I have learned about typography and tiny homes and the physics of a chess endgame. I have been introduced to music I never would have found, art forms I didn't know existed, ways of seeing the world that only become visible when you take someone's passion seriously enough to step inside it with them. The exchange is real. The learning goes both ways. And that, to me, is what therapy at its best actually looks like — not an expert dispensing wisdom to a patient, but two people genuinely curious about what this particular human life contains.
If you are a creative person who has found traditional therapy too passive, too talk-heavy, or simply not quite designed for the way your mind works — this might be the work for you.
I'd be glad to connect.
Megan Shea is a trauma-informed psychotherapist and holistic counsellor integrating expressive arts, narrative therapy, depth psychology, and somatic approaches. She works with adults and young people online across Australia and worldwide.
