Thematic Workshop "Letting Go"
Workshop — Letting Go: Protection and Self-Care for Art Therapists I led this workshop in November, aimed at art therapists and practitioners, on the Lyceum Academy training platform in Milan. The theme: letting go. A necessary yet profoundly difficult act that concerns every professional in the helping relationship field.
Emptiness as a Generative Space
We work alongside loss, grief and the strain of relationships with patients who ask a great deal of us. We confront other people’s pain on a daily basis, and often we do not realise how much of it we absorb. This workshop was born from the need to pause and look at what we carry — to recognise it, process it and, where possible, let it go.
What We Explored Together
- The emotional weight of situations involving loss and grief in art therapy work
- The dynamics with demanding patients and the relational fatigue that follows
- The risk of burnout and the need to set healthy boundaries without losing empathy
- Self-protection strategies and self-care as an integral part of professionalism
- The process of letting go: not as surrender, but as an act of awareness
The Outcome
The participants experienced first-hand an artistic process connected to the theme, because letting go cannot be learned through words alone. It is traversed with the body, with materials, with the creative gesture. It is in the doing that resistances surface, and it is in the doing that one finds the way to release them.