Expressive Arts Therapy is a person-centred, relational and experiential arts-based approach to psychotherapy that engages the client through a process of creative discovery as a way to reconnect with inner resources. Clients may explore issues through visual art, creative writing, poetry, drama, music, voice and movement as catalysts for personal inquiry and providing new perspectives for healing and growth. Expressive arts therapy provides a way of using the arts to help people with a variety of challenges; whether they be psychological, emotional, behavioural, or associated with life traumas, relationships or transitions. It assumes that everyone has the capacity to respond creatively to the situations that they find themselves in.

By engaging in play and the arts, we are taken into the world of the imagination, where possibilities can be seen that are not evident in our daily lives. We can find resources that we did not know we had and possible solutions that were previously hidden from us. Instead of focusing on deficiencies and dwelling on problems, the EXA approach is resource-based and solution-focused.

The practice of the arts is an activity that involves the senses and the emotions. In an EXA session, we not only talk about our difficulties, we actively engage in artistic practices that give us a bodily and emotional relationship to what we are going through. The EXA therapist helps their clients by setting challenges within the arts that they can meet; clients thereby gain a sense of the abilities they have that can be used to solve their problems in daily life.