Can You Do Art Therapy on Yourself at Home? An Honest Answer

No, not on your own. Art therapy needs an art therapist: it is clinical work that happens inside a relationship, with someone responsible for your safety and your pacing. What you can do at home, on your own, is make art that is genuinely therapeutic. For everyday stress, for grief that is still moving, and for knowing yourself better, that is often enough.

I am Rakefet Hadar, an art therapist, an author, and the founder of the school that trains SoulPages facilitators to guide creative work in a visual journal. I have stood on both sides of this question. In the clinic I am the therapist. And in 2014, the year my mother was dying of cancer and I was depleted from giving to my clients all day, I opened a visual journal because I needed one place where I could be the one receiving. Nobody was treating me there, and the SoulPages method was born there. So when you ask whether you can do this by yourself, my answer has two halves, and you deserve both of them.

Can you do art therapy on yourself?

No, and the reason is in the word therapy. Paint, paper and glue are the same in a clinic and on your own table. What makes it therapy is the trained person in the room, who assesses what you are carrying, notices what you cannot see in yourself, and stays responsible from one session to the next.

What you can do alone has other names: art journaling, visual journaling, therapeutic art making. Those names are accurate, and the practice behind them is real.

What can making art on your own actually do?

Quite a lot, as long as you ask it for the right things:

• It settles you. Small studies have found that a single session of 20 to 45 minutes of art making can lower anxiety or stress hormones in healthy adults, at least in the moment. I wrote about what that research does and does not show in how art journaling helps with anxiety.
• It gives a feeling a form outside you. A color, a torn image or a small figure on a page can hold an experience at a distance you can bear, so you look at it instead of being inside it.
• It builds a record. One page is a moment. Fifty pages are a map of a year, and patterns you could never see in a single evening become visible.
• It gives you a place that is yours. Nobody assigns the page, nobody grades it, and nobody needs to see it.

You do not need to know how to draw for any of this. You need to let color and imagery meet the page and see what rises.

What can’t it do?

This is the half most articles skip. A journal, however faithful, cannot:

1. Notice you. A page does not see that you have gone pale and quiet. A therapist does, and slows things down.
2. Assess or treat a condition. Depression, an anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress and other diagnoses need clinical care. A journal can walk beside that care. It cannot be that care.
3. Pace you when something opens too fast. Alone, you are both the one who is flooded and the one who has to stop the session.
4. Hold the thread between sessions. A therapist remembers where you were last week and where you were heading. A journal keeps the pages, and you have to do the remembering.

A home practice is a different thing with a different job, and it does that job well.

How do you make art at home in a way that is therapeutic and safe?

SoulPages is a method of working in a visual journal, built on seven elements (intention, the magic of chance, background, images, color, line and text), in which every session begins by connecting to the strong, good parts of you and to your resources. Harder material is approached only from that ground, and only if you brought it yourself.

For a first session at home, set a timer for twenty minutes and choose your stopping point before you begin, the way a swimmer checks where the ladder is before entering the pool. Then walk through the seven elements:

1. Intention. Choose one word for what you want from this page today: rest, steadiness, company. It is a direction, and the page is free to go elsewhere.
2. The magic of chance. Leaf through a magazine and pull out whatever you are drawn to, before you understand why.
3. Background. Cover the page with a color you love. This first layer is the ground you will stand on.
4. Images. Glue down what you pulled, and make sure one image is a resource: a place that held you, or someone who loves you.
5. Color. Add color around the images, wherever the page asks for more.
6. Line. Take a pen and outline, connect or frame what is there.
7. Text. Write a few words, or a single one, and the date.

When the timer ends, meet the page before you explain it. Ask what it does to you when you look at it, describe what is actually there, and ask one open question that you leave open. Then close the journal, rest both hands on the cover for one breath, and give yourself ten ordinary minutes before you return to your day.

My Bridges to Myself protocol walks you through a resource-first page in more detail.

When is working on your own not enough?

Watch the direction, more than the intensity. A home practice is doing its job when heavy material moves: you create, something shifts, and you leave the page a little lighter or clearer. Bring in a credentialed therapist when:

• The same overwhelm returns every time you open the journal: a pounding heart, fog, numbness, a scene replaying without relief.
• Sleep, work or daily functioning are suffering.
• The trauma is recent and still raw.
• You are living with a diagnosis, or suspect you might be.
• There are thoughts of harming yourself. In that case, reach out right away: call your local emergency number or a crisis line (in the US, call or text 988), or tell someone close to you.

Reaching for help is a continuation of the same care that brought you to the page. My article on whether it is safe to journal about trauma covers pacing and stopping in depth.

Is there something between working alone and seeing a therapist?

Yes. A course, a group or a retreat led by a trained facilitator gives you structure, teaching and other women around you, without a clinical contract. In SoulPages, community is a resource in its own right: your page is witnessed, and what one woman dares to put on paper opens a door for the others.

A facilitator is not your therapist, and a good one says so plainly. I have mapped all three options in art journaling vs. art therapy vs. therapeutic art.

Can you keep a home practice while you are in therapy?

Yes, and the two strengthen each other. A journal gives you the six days between sessions. It catches what surfaces late at night, holds it until you can bring it somewhere, and gives you something concrete to bring. Tell your therapist that you keep a journal and ask how they would like you to use it.

Frequently asked questions

Can I do art therapy on myself?

No. Art therapy is clinical work led by a trained art therapist within a therapeutic relationship. What you can do on your own is therapeutic art making, such as keeping a visual journal, which calms, clarifies and builds self-knowledge without being treatment.

Is making art at home as good as art therapy?

They do different jobs. A home practice gives you a daily place to settle and reflect. Art therapy adds a trained person who assesses, paces and holds what is too heavy to carry alone. For ordinary stress a home practice is often enough. For trauma or a diagnosis it is not.

What do I need to start at home?

A journal with thick pages, watercolor or any paint you own, a few old magazines, scissors, glue and a pen. Twenty minutes and a timer matter more than the quality of the materials.

Do I need to know how to draw?

No. Color, torn paper, collage and simple marks carry the work. You only need to let color and imagery meet the page and see what rises.

How do I know I need an art therapist rather than a journal?

Watch the direction. If creating leaves you a little lighter or clearer, the journal is doing its job. If it repeatedly leaves you flooded, numb or worse than before, if sleep and daily life are suffering, or if the trauma is recent, choose a credentialed therapist.

Can an online course replace art therapy?

No. A course gives you a method, structure and often a community, and for many women that is exactly what they were missing. It does not include assessment, a treatment plan or a therapist who knows your history.

There may be a journal in your house already, bought for a day when you would have the time, the talent or the reason… You can begin tonight without any of the three. Start with a color you love and one image that stops your hand, and let the page be a place where you receive something. Give yourself twenty minutes, take a page, some watercolor, a few images, and make something that reflects exactly what you feel right now. And if the page keeps bringing more than you can hold alone, let that be the moment you invite someone in. The courses at soul-pages.com are there whenever you want a structured way to continue.

With love,
Rakefet

How Does Art Journaling Help With Anxiety? What the Research Actually Says

Art journaling helps with anxiety mostly in the moment, giving your attention somewhere to land: your hands, the paper, one color. Small studies find that 20 to 45 minutes of art making can lower anxiety scores or stress hormones in students and healthy adults. The stronger trials test therapist-led art therapy, so a journal at home is support, not treatment.

I am Rakefet Hadar, an art therapist, an author, and the founder of the school that trains SoulPages facilitators to guide creative work in a visual journal. I didn’t open my first visual journal because a study told me to. It was 2014, my mother was dying of cancer, I was giving to my clients all day and coming home with nothing left, and I needed one place where I could be the one receiving. Look closely at what gets quoted online about art and anxiety, and a good deal of it turns out to be inflated or lifted out of context. So here’s the honest version: what the studies found, what they cannot tell you, why I still teach this work, and four ten-minute exercises for the moment your heart starts racing.

Does art journaling actually help with anxiety?

There is good reason to think it helps you settle, and much less evidence that it treats anxiety. Many articles blend three kinds of research into one sentence, so it is worth pulling them apart:

• One session of art making. Students or healthy adults make art once, for 20 to 45 minutes, and their anxiety or stress is measured before and after. Most of these studies find a short-term drop.
• Art therapy for anxiety. A trained art therapist works with people who live with anxiety, over a period of weeks. The trial that comes closest to a real answer found large improvements. The reviews disagree: one called the question hardly studied, and a later one counted fourteen positive trials.
• Visual journaling itself. Here the research is thinnest. The one small study I can point to saw anxiety go down, in a group too small to prove anything.

What nobody has shown yet is that a journal kept on your own, over months, treats an anxiety disorder.

How does art journaling help with anxiety?

It works through the body and the senses, which is where anxiety is loudest in the moment. Anxiety pulls your thoughts forward, toward what has not happened yet, while your hands are always in the present. Four things happen on the page:

1. Your attention gets somewhere to land. When your hand spreads paint across paper, there is something to see and something to touch, and the senses bring you back to now faster than a thought can. It is hard to be completely inside a worry while your eyes and fingers are busy with wet color and the grain of the paper.
2. Slow movement slows the breath. Brushstroke after brushstroke, line after line, your body gets a slow rhythm to lean on. My protocol for easing tension, Bridges to Myself, opens right there: laying down colors that feel good, slowly, while breathing deeply. I developed it in my work with women recovering from trauma.
3. The worry can move outside you. On a calmer day, a worry that has been given a color and a shape is no longer circling only in your head. It lies on the page in front of you, and you can sit back and look at it from a little distance.
4. Structure takes away the hardest decision. SoulPages is a method of working in a visual journal, built on seven elements: intention, the magic of chance, background, images, color, line and text. They come with a suggested order, so you do not have to decide where to begin, and in an anxious moment that is often the one decision you cannot make.

These are the mechanisms I work with as a practitioner. The studies below measure outcomes, and none of them shows which of these four is doing the work.

What do the studies show?

Here, in plain language, are the studies most often behind the claims you read about art and anxiety. Every one of them is real and worth reading. The last column is the part that usually goes missing.

Two reviews frame the table. In 2018, Annemarie Abbing and her colleagues searched for controlled trials of art therapy for anxiety in adults and found three randomized trials, with 162 patients between them, all at high risk of bias. Their conclusion was that the question had hardly been studied. In 2025, a review by Szymon Mizera and Krzysztof Krysta counted fourteen randomized trials with 1,686 adults, ranging from a single session of 15 to 30 minutes to programs of 5 to 12 weeks, and every one of them found less anxiety in the art group. The trials were too different from one another to pool into a single result, so the review could count them but could not say how large the effect is.

Does making art lower cortisol, and does that mean less anxiety?

It lowered cortisol in one well-known study, and lower cortisol is not the same as feeling less anxious. Girija Kaimal and her colleagues measured cortisol in the saliva of 39 healthy adults before and after 45 minutes of art making, with no instructions and an art therapist present in case anyone asked for help. Cortisol fell significantly overall and dropped in about three quarters of the participants, whether or not they had made art before.

That study is behind a headline you may have come across: making art lowers stress hormones, whatever your skill level. Before you lean on it, three things are worth knowing:

1. Cortisol is a stress hormone, not a measure of anxiety. The two are related, but one does not stand in for the other.
2. There was no comparison group. We cannot tell how much of the drop came from the art and how much from 45 quiet minutes at a table.
3. The volunteers were healthy. Nobody was recruited because they lived with an anxiety disorder.

The researchers said much the same themselves, and called for future studies with comparison groups, clinical groups and psychological measures of stress. It is a careful small study that measured exactly what it says it measured. Nowhere does it claim that art lowers anxiety by any percentage.

Is coloring as good as art journaling for anxiety?

Nobody has compared the two directly. The closest evidence is the 2005 study by Nancy Curry and Tim Kasser, which deserves more attention than it gets: after 20 minutes of coloring, anxiety fell about equally in the students given a mandala and in those given a plain plaid pattern, and barely changed in those given a blank page.

The plaid had none of the mandala’s symbolism and did the same job. Their explanation was structure: a pattern tells your hand where to go, while a blank page asks you to decide everything yourself. It’s only one study, and it needs repeating. Still, as an art therapist, I recognized it at once. In Bridges to Myself I wrote that a blank page is the most frightening thing in the room, and that a woman who says she cannot draw is usually talking about starting, not about talent. The suggested order of the seven elements gives your hand that structure.

Whether a structured journal page calms anxiety as well as a coloring page has never been tested. What a journal adds is room for something of your own: a coloring page is finished when every shape is filled in, while a journal page can hold a color you chose, an image that stopped your hand, a word that is yours.

Is art journaling the same as art therapy for anxiety?

No, and the difference changes how you read the research. The trial that comes closest to a real answer, by Annemarie Abbing and her colleagues in 2019, worked with women diagnosed with generalized anxiety, social anxiety or panic disorder. Those who had art therapy showed large drops in anxiety compared with those on a waiting list, and the change held three months later. That is a real result about anthroposophic art therapy led by trained therapists. It says nothing yet about a journal kept alone, and nothing about how art therapy compares with other treatments for anxiety.

Art therapy is clinical work inside a relationship, and a journal at home is a different thing with a different job. I mapped the differences in my guide to art journaling vs. art therapy vs. therapeutic art.

What do popular articles get wrong about art and anxiety?

Mostly, they quote numbers without the studies behind them. These patterns come up again and again:

• A precise percentage with no study named. If an article says art journaling cuts anxiety by an exact percentage and never says who measured it, ask where the number came from.
• “75% of people felt more relaxed.” The 75% comes from the cortisol study above. It is the share of participants whose cortisol fell, and it was never a measure of how relaxed anyone felt.
• “Making art releases dopamine.” The study usually behind this line, by Kaimal and colleagues in 2017, measured blood flow in the front of the brain while 26 people colored a mandala, doodled and drew freely, three minutes each. Blood flow rose, most of all while doodling, and the researchers read that as activity in the brain’s reward pathways. Nobody measured dopamine.
• “Brain scans show that art calms the amygdala.” I know of no study that shows this for art journaling.
• Coloring studies presented as journaling studies. A study of coloring a mandala tells you about coloring a mandala.

Art can still help you. You simply deserve to know what was measured.

If the evidence is this thin, why do I still use art journaling for anxiety?

Because across students before exams, healthy volunteers and women in therapy, the small studies lean the same way, toward less anxiety or stress. The one clear exception is the blank page with no structure, and structure is exactly what a method gives you. And because it asks so little: one page, one color, ten minutes, at the kitchen table at two in the morning if that is when the anxiety comes.

So I won’t promise you that a journal treats anxiety. What it can do is give the next anxious moment somewhere to go, and leave you, page after page, a record of the moments you got through.

Should you draw your anxiety?

Not in the anxious moment itself. It is tempting to draw the anxiety, the knot in your chest or the storm in your head, and on a calm day that can be interesting. When your heart is already racing, drawing it brings the feeling closer at exactly the wrong time.

In SoulPages, every session begins by connecting to the strong, good parts of you and to your resources: people you love, places that feel like home, moments when you were braver than you knew. Harder material is approached only from that ground, and only if you brought it yourself. So in an anxious moment, the page turns first to what steadies you. The anxiety can wait, and if you want to meet it on a page, there will be time for that on a calmer day.

What can you do in an anxious moment? Four ten-minute exercises

Get these ready on an ordinary day: a journal or a few sheets of thick paper, watercolor, a wide brush, a black pen, an old magazine and glue. Keep them where you can reach them. When the moment comes, choose one exercise only. Each one is built on one of the seven elements, and they follow the method’s order.

1. Background: a whole page in one color. Wet the wide brush, choose a color you love and cover the entire page with it, edge to edge, in long, slow strokes. No plan and no shapes. When the page is full, put the brush down and watch the color dry.
2. Images: a place that feels like home. Leaf through the magazine and stop at the first image of a place you would like to be right now: a window, a garden, the sea, a made bed. Tear it out by hand, glue it in the middle of the page and stay with it for a minute.
3. Line: a line that moves with your breath. Take the pen and start a line at one side of the page. On each out-breath your hand moves forward, and on each in-breath it rests. Let the out-breath be longer than the in-breath, and keep going until the page fills with waves.
4. Text: one word and a date. In a corner of the page, write one word that will be waiting for you when you come back, and add the date. Then close the journal, rest both hands on the cover and take one breath.

And if nothing comes up? Then you made a page, and that is all this moment asked of you. Right now the page is a place for your hands, and it owes you no meaning.

How long do you need to make art to feel calmer?

The studies used one sitting of 20, 30 or 45 minutes. In an anxious moment I suggest ten, with a timer set before you begin, because a clear end is calming in itself: you know when it will be over, and you don’t have to decide halfway through when to stop. No study I know of compares ten minutes with 45, so this is a practical suggestion, not a research finding.

On the other days, I would rather you make a small page daily, quiet days included, than one long session once a month. It becomes a habit in your hands, so that when an anxious moment comes, they already know what to do.

What if art journaling makes your anxiety worse?

Stop. It happens sometimes, especially when a page gets too close to something painful too fast. The signs are a heart racing even faster, breathing that turns shallow and quick, or a foggy feeling of being far away from the room.

1. Put the brush down and move your chair back a little.
2. Take three long breaths, with the out-breath longer than the in-breath.
3. Name out loud five things you can see in the room, and feel your feet on the floor.
4. Drink a glass of cold water, close the journal and come back to it on another day.

One hard session is not a reason to worry. If it happens every time you open the journal, it is time to work with a professional beside you. I cover pacing and stopping in more depth in my article on whether it is safe to journal about trauma.

When is art journaling not enough for anxiety?

Art journaling can calm and strengthen you, but it is not a treatment for an anxiety disorder. See a doctor or a licensed therapist when:

• Anxiety comes back almost every day, and has for several weeks.
• Your sleep, your work or your relationships are suffering.
• Anxiety comes with strong physical symptoms, such as pressure in your chest or shortness of breath.
• You avoid places or people to keep the anxiety from coming.
• You have thoughts of harming yourself. In that case, reach out for help right away: a doctor, a crisis line or someone close to you.

A journal and therapy go well together. The pages you make can come with you into the therapy room and show what is hard to say in words.

Frequently asked questions

Does art journaling help with anxiety?

Small studies suggest it can ease anxiety in the moment: single sessions of 20 to 45 minutes of art making often lowered anxiety scores or stress hormones in students and healthy adults. A journal kept alone at home has hardly been studied, so it belongs beside professional care for an anxiety disorder and cannot stand in for it.

Does making art lower cortisol?

In one study of 39 healthy adults, 45 minutes of art making lowered cortisol, a stress hormone, overall and in about three quarters of the participants. The study had no comparison group, and lower cortisol is not the same as feeling less anxious.

Is coloring as good as art journaling for anxiety?

Nobody has compared them directly. In a 2005 study of 84 students, 20 minutes of coloring a mandala or a plaid pattern reduced anxiety more than free drawing on a blank page, which barely changed it. Structure seems to matter, and SoulPages gives you structure: seven elements with a suggested order to lean on.

Do I need to be good at art for journaling to calm me?

No. The exercises that suit an anxious moment need no drawing at all: a page covered in one color you love, a line that follows your breath, an image of a calm place torn from a magazine, and one word with a date.

How long should I make art to feel calmer?

The studies used single sessions of 20 to 45 minutes. In an anxious moment, ten minutes with a timer set in advance is enough to try, and a small page on ordinary days gets your hands ready for the harder ones.

Can art journaling replace therapy for anxiety?

No. Art journaling can calm and strengthen you, but it is not a treatment for an anxiety disorder. If anxiety returns almost every day, affects your sleep, work or relationships, or comes with strong physical symptoms, see a doctor or a licensed therapist.

Anxiety doesn’t ask before it comes. It may find you in the checkout line, at two in the morning, a minute before the phone call you’ve been putting off all week. You can’t know when. What you can do is have a journal waiting on the table, with a wide brush and one color you love. Between those moments, give yourself ten minutes a day: take a page, some watercolor, a few images, and make something that reflects exactly what you feel right now. If you want the ground beneath the method, I wrote about the research behind the visual journal as a therapeutic tool, and Bridges to Myself walks you through a whole page made to ease tension. The courses at soul-pages.com are there whenever you want a structured way to continue.

With love,
Rakefet

Studies mentioned in this article

• Abbing, Ponstein, van Hooren, de Sonneville, Swaab and Baars (2018). The effectiveness of art therapy for anxiety in adults: a systematic review of randomised and non-randomised controlled trials. PLoS ONE, 13(12), e0208716.
• Abbing and colleagues (2019). The effectiveness of art therapy for anxiety in adult women: a randomized controlled trial. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1203.
• Curry and Kasser (2005). Can coloring mandalas reduce anxiety? Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association.
• Joschko, Klatte, Grabowska, Roll, Berghöfer and Willich (2024). Active visual art therapy and health outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open.
• Kaimal, Ray and Muniz (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants’ responses following art making. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 33(2).
• Kaimal and colleagues (2017). [A brain-imaging (fNIRS) study of coloring, doodling and free drawing.] The Arts in Psychotherapy.
• Mercer and colleagues (2010). [A study of visual journaling with medical school students and staff.] The Arts in Psychotherapy.
• Mizera and Krysta (2025). The impact of visual art therapy on anxiety: a systematic review. Psychiatria Danubina, 37 (Suppl 1).
• Sandmire, Gorham, Rankin and Grimm (2012). The influence of art making on anxiety: a pilot study. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, 29(2), 68-73.

The Visual Journal as a Therapeutic Tool: What the Research Actually Says

A visual journal used therapeutically is a single continuous book in which a person works in mixed media, guided by a therapist who teaches both art techniques and guided-imagery techniques. The journal gathers meaning across the whole course of therapy, becomes a transitional object the client takes home, and allows symbolic expression that never forces her to name in words what she has no words for yet.

I first set this out in an academic paper published in 2016 in Bein HaMilim (Between the Words), the peer journal of Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv, under my earlier name, Rakefet Link-Skop: Internal Journey Journaling: The Visual Journal as a Therapeutic Tool. That paper is the theoretical ground the SoulPages method grew out of, and what follows is the paper in plain English, with a link to the original at the end. The rest of the publications and press are gathered on the publications page.

My name is Rakefet Hadar. I am an art therapist, an author, and the founder of the training school for SoulPages guides. I began my own visual journal in 2014, the year my mother was dying of cancer and I was working as an art therapist who gave all day and came home in the evening with nothing left. I was looking for somewhere to be the one receiving for once, and I found it between the pages of a book I sewed myself.

How is a therapeutic visual journal different from ordinary art therapy?

The difference begins with the surface you work on. In classic art therapy the work accumulates in a box or a folder and stays in the therapy room, and towards the end of the process it is reviewed, sorted, and sometimes partly discarded. In a visual journal everything lives in one place, in the order it happened, and it travels home with the client after every session.

That looks like a technical detail, and in practice it changes three things at once:

• Narrative. Page after page builds a personal story you can turn back through, and inside it you can see movement the client herself could not feel while it was happening.
• Continuity. The work does not stop when the door closes. She carries on at home, and the bridge between what surfaced in the room and the life waiting outside it gets built on the page rather than left to memory.
• An object that remains. What is left at the end is not a scattered pile of paper but a book, and that book has weight in the hand.

In the paper I called the approach Internal Journey Journaling (IJJ), and I presented it through five foundations.

Why is the method called SoulPages today and not Internal Journey Journaling?

The name changed; the method did not. In 2016, when the paper was written, it was called Internal Journey Journaling, and that is the name used throughout it. In the years that followed, as I began training guides and taking the work beyond the therapy room, it took the name it carries now: SoulPages, and in Hebrew shitat “dapei nefesh”.

The newer name is the more accurate one, because it describes what actually gets made, a page that is a soul. Anyone who meets both names in two different places is meeting the same method and the same five foundations.

What are the five foundations of the method?

1. The frame. Continuous work inside a book, usually one the client sews by hand at the start. The book is an ancient and loaded symbol, and when a woman chooses the size of the pages, the texture of the paper and the thread she binds them with, every hope she holds for the process is already inside it before a single mark is made.
2. The content: parts of the psyche. Before the making there is inner work through guided imagery or dialogue with an inner part, and afterwards that material is translated into color and image. One of the techniques I draw on is Voice Dialogue, developed by the Jungian psychologist Hal Stone and Sidra Stone, in which inner voices take on a figure you can hold an actual conversation with.
3. A wide range of techniques and materials. The mixed-media language, in which a single piece is built from layers of different materials: monoprints, spattering, collage, watercolor, acrylic and simple mark-making. Those layers imitate the structure of the psyche, where there is always one layer showing through from beneath another.
4. Extended session time. Fifty minutes is not enough. A session in this method runs at least an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half, because it crosses repeatedly between imagination work and making, and every crossing needs time in order to happen at all.
5. The therapist’s presence, the ignition function. A therapist working this way keeps a visual journal of her own, regularly and out of genuine appetite. She is not a witness only: she demonstrates, she teaches, and at times she works beside the client on a shared page of that therapeutic hour. A therapist who does not create herself will struggle to ignite in a client the creativity that brought her through the door.

How does Winnicott’s theory explain why journaling works?

Winnicott described an in-between space where a child is neither entirely inside her own world nor entirely in external reality, a space in which the illusion holds and the capacity to play is born. That, he argued, is where creativity begins, and with it a person’s sense of being alive.

A visual journal constitutes precisely that space: real and not-real at the same time, entirely yours and also something happening between you and the person guiding you. In the paper I mapped the four stages Winnicott described in the development of play onto four stages of the therapy:

These stages do not run in a straight line. There is progress, and then a return to a stage where the client needs more dependence again, and that circling motion is part of the process rather than evidence of its failure.

What does Jung’s Red Book have to do with this?

Carl Jung kept several visual journals, the best known being The Red Book, in which he painted the difficult visions that plagued him and the fantasies that rose in him. He said that being able to paint those visions carried him through a period when he feared he was losing his mind, and out of that journal came his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, along with his development of active imagination.

When The Red Book was published in 2009 many people came to regard it as the finest example of a visual journal there is, and in its wake art therapists began drawing on the journal in trauma work. The line that runs from Jung’s book to the notebook a woman sews on her kitchen table today is exactly what the 2016 paper set out to trace.

What does it look like in practice?

The paper follows a woman I called Irena, a pseudonym, a 36-year-old mother of two who took part in a mothers’ group I led for three years. She arrived unable to show affection to her children, especially her younger son, and at the first session she told me she had not touched art materials since second grade.

Three years is a long stretch, and her movement through it matters more than any single moment in it.

In the first year the theme of the group was the child in me, and the work went towards each mother’s connection to the girl she herself had been. Irena sat beside me, asked me to decide every placement for her, and checked after each choice whether it was all right. Together we rebuilt on the page the cramped flat her family arrived at when they immigrated from Russia, the flat she was sent away from to boarding school at fourteen, and halfway through she no longer wanted to stop working.

In the second year we widened the theme to the relationship with the children in the present. In the session where the mothers were asked to meet their children in imagination and hold them, Irena could not, so I took her to another room until she could see the embrace with her eyes closed, and then she smiled and said he was holding her back. At the following session, in the journal, she glued a photograph of herself and one of her son close together but unconnected, and only after I reminded her of the embrace did she ask me to help her cut out the mother’s arms and reattach them so that they held him. Later that same year she made a figure she called the anger goblin, photographed it, showed it to her family with real pride, and around that time she also decided for the first time to come home at six in the evening, the hour her children come home.

In the third year I no longer had to lead. Her son’s behaviour and her own behaviour towards him had both changed markedly, she became the veteran mother in the group who tells the newcomers what she went through, and she worked in the journal by herself. At the last session of that year she glued a photograph of herself as a child beside a photograph of her son, side by side but not touching, asked for one piece of technical help so that they would hold hands, and finished everything else alone. At the bottom she wrote: we both had independence.

The change did not begin in conversation, and it did not happen in a single session. It began the moment the page made the embrace visible, before Irena knew how to give it at home, and from there it took another full year to become something she could do on her own.

Who is this approach for?

Both in the paper and in everything since, the answer has held: it suits adults who would never walk into art therapy by the usual door. Women for whom the word therapy is off-putting, women certain they cannot draw, and women looking for somewhere to put themselves inside a stretch of life that is hard to cross alone.

The groups that come to me include women living with cancer, with divorce, with the move into later life, with grief for parents or partners, and with the search for meaning. What they tell me is that the journal becomes a kind of companion in daily life, and that the techniques learned in a session set off work at home too, in hours when nobody is guiding them. That is the bridge the method is built for: between the therapeutic space and the life being lived outside it.

Frequently asked questions

Is visual journaling the same as art therapy?
Not necessarily. Working in a visual journal at home is a tool for self-reflection and processing, and it is not therapy. It becomes a therapeutic tool when it happens inside a professional relationship, with a therapist or trained guide who works with both the journal and imagery techniques.

What is the difference between a visual journal and a written journal?
A written journal needs words and relies on narrative order, and many people are afraid to commit their real thoughts to paper. A visual journal allows symbolic expression through color, line and image, expression that need not be confessional and still reaches deep.

Do I need to know how to draw to keep a visual journal?
No. The mixed-media language is built on techniques that require no drawing skill at all: backgrounds, prints, spatters, collage and simple mark-making. Meaning comes from how the layers combine, not from draughtsmanship.

How long should a visual journaling session be?
At least an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half for individual work. The session contains a crossing from imagination work into making, and that crossing does not happen inside fifty minutes.

What is the difference between Internal Journey Journaling and the SoulPages method?
There is no difference; they are two names for the same method. Internal Journey Journaling is the name it was published under in the 2016 academic paper, and SoulPages is the name it has carried since, and the name guides are trained in today.

What are the theoretical sources behind the method?
Principally Winnicott, especially potential space and the transitional object; Carl Jung and The Red Book; Lucia Capacchione and The Creative Journal; Cathy Malchiodi’s writing on visual journaling in trauma work; and the Voice Dialogue method of Hal and Sidra Stone.

Where was the original paper published, and can I read it?
It was published in 2016 in Bein HaMilim (Between the Words), the journal of Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv, issue 11, under the name Rakefet Link-Skop. It is freely available on the college’s website, in Hebrew.

Ten years have passed since that paper was written. The method has a name now, a school that trains guides, and hundreds of women working in it, and its foundations have not moved: one book, layers of material, enough time, and someone making alongside you. Give yourself twenty minutes today, take a page, some watercolor, a few images, and make something that reflects exactly what you are feeling right now. If you are still deciding what you need, this piece on art journaling versus art therapy lays it out, and there is a free lesson waiting when you join the list: soul-pages.com

Read the full academic paper: Rakefet Link-Skop, “Internal Journey Journaling”: The Visual Journal as a Therapeutic Tool, Bein HaMilim, issue 11, Kibbutzim College of Education, 2016 (Hebrew)

With love, Rakefet

Art Journaling After Trauma: Working Through Resources Instead of Through the Pain

Art journaling after trauma works through resources, not through the difficult memory. Instead of asking a woman to tell you what happened to her, you build on the page a connection to the strengths she already holds: people she loves, places that feel like home, moments when she was braver than she believed. That ground thickens layer by layer, and only from there can the heavy material move at its own pace, if it moves at all.

I set this out in a paper published in May 2024 in Psychologia Ivrit (Hebrew Psychology), Israel’s main professional portal for psychologists and therapists, under my earlier name, Rakefet Link-Skop: “Bringing Back the Light”: The Visual Journal in the SoulPages Method as an Intervention for Hope and Resilience Resources. The paper documents group work with women evacuated from the communities around Gaza in the months after October 7th, and what follows is that paper in English, with a link to the original at the end. The rest of the publications and press are gathered on the publications page.

My name is Rakefet Hadar. I am an art therapist, an author, and the founder of the training school for SoulPages guides. Then October 7th came, and together with guides trained in my method I sat facing hundreds of evacuated and surviving women, with a blank page and a pencil in hand, and we asked ourselves the only real question there was: what do you do with pain that has no words?

How did the volunteer project begin?

In the first weeks after October 7th I contacted Merav Shaked, a SoulPages guide and an entrepreneur, and together we set up a volunteer network of guides who went into the hotels and the evacuation centres. We called the project Bringing Back the Light, and we meant it literally: not treating the trauma, but searching together for the points of light that remained and strengthening those.

Each group was given ten sessions, two to three hours each. I wrote the paper afterwards because I understood that something had happened there which other therapists deserved to know about.

Why not work on the trauma directly?

Because this is accompaniment rather than treatment. The women sitting opposite us were inside the event and not after it. They were still living in a hotel room without knowing when they would go home, and any request to tell the story would have pulled the memory close far too fast.

That distinction is the heart of the whole thing, and it is the line between processing and re-experiencing:

• Processing brings the pain closer at a pace the woman controls, and leaves her tired and a little lighter.
• Flooding puts the body back on alert, as though the event were happening again right now, and leaves her shaking and disconnected.

The trauma is in the room and everyone knows it is there, but it is not the door you come in through. The door is made of the woman’s own resources.

What are the seven elements of the SoulPages method?

The SoulPages method is a way of working in a visual journal in which every page is built in layers, following a fixed order of seven elements, so that what was split apart inside reconnects on paper.

1. Intention. One word or one sentence you enter the page with. Not a subject to work on, but an intention.
2. The magic of chance. Opening the page with a technique you cannot control, a print or a spatter, so that something nobody planned is already there, waiting.
3. Background. The first layer, which gives the page its atmosphere before it holds any content at all.
4. Color. The page’s big emotional choice. Color says the thing that does not have a name yet.
5. Image. A cutting from a magazine, an old photograph, a simple drawing. The image holds the experience whole but covered.
6. Line. What connects the parts, encircles them, or keeps them apart.
7. Text. One word or one sentence, at the end and never at the start, once the page has already said its piece.

That order was built deliberately. It begins where there is no judgement, and reaches words only at the point where they are no longer required to explain anything.

What made a hotel room feel safe enough to work in?

Four things, described in the paper as the pillars of the intervention:

• The frame. A personal journal for each woman, one book that stays hers even when the house itself is an open question. When there are no walls, a sewn notebook is a place.
• Session content. Each meeting is built around a metaphorical image, the tree of resources for instance, and from there a gentle mapping of the parts of the psyche, including work with the inner child and with archetypes of strength.
• Extended time as community time. Two to three hours are not needed for the making alone. These are the hours in which women talk while their hands are busy, and community forms out of that conversation.
• The guide’s presence. The guide works beside them rather than in front of them, and part of her job is to notice the points of light and name them, including while the woman herself still cannot see them.

What happened to those groups afterwards?

What surprised me more than anything is that some of the groups carried on meeting by themselves once the ten sessions had ended. Women organised to make things together on days when no guide came, and the journal went on accompanying them through daily life inside the hotel.

That was the point of this tool from the start. Not a woman dependent on a guide, but a woman walking out with a notebook under her arm and knowing how to open it by herself, on the day that turns out to be hard.

Does this apply to people who have not been through something extreme?

It does, and the principles are identical. Any woman moving through a period she has no words for, grief or illness, divorce, separation, a change she never asked for, can work in exactly the same order: intention, an uncontrolled background, color, image, line, and then one word.

The difference between working alone and working with a guide is not the technique but the question of who is holding the page with you. If flooding returns every time you open the journal, that is the signal to work with professional support rather than on your own.

Frequently asked questions

Does art journaling help after trauma?
It does, when it works through resources rather than through the difficult memory itself. Journaling that connects a woman to the strengths she already has builds resilience and a sense of capability, and lets the heavy material move at its own pace. Journaling that asks her to reconstruct the event can flood her instead.

What is the difference between creative accompaniment and psychological therapy?
Accompaniment in a visual journal works on resources, hope and a sense of capability, and does not treat the trauma itself. Psychological therapy and art therapy engage the traumatic material directly. They do not replace one another, and many women use both at the same time.

What are the seven elements in the SoulPages method?
Intention, the magic of chance, background, color, image, line and text. Every page is built in layers in that order, so that words arrive last, after color and image have already said the difficult part.

How long is a group visual journaling session?
Two to three hours. The extended time is not a luxury; it is what allows the crossing from inner work into making, and it is where the conversation between the women happens.

Do I need art experience to join a group like this?
No. Most of the women who came had not touched art materials since primary school. The techniques are built specifically so that no drawing ability is required, and the result comes from how the layers combine.

Where was the paper published and can I read it?
It was published on 23 May 2024 on Psychologia Ivrit (hebpsy.net), Israel’s professional portal for psychologists and therapists, under the name Rakefet Link-Skop. It is available there in Hebrew.

One of the women told me, after the third session, that those had been the two most meaningful hours she had spent in all those weeks. I had said nothing wise to her. I sat down beside her, suggested yellow, and she added it herself. Give yourself twenty minutes today, take a page, some watercolor, a few images, and make something that reflects exactly what you are feeling right now. If something heavy surfaces while you work, here is exactly what to do in that moment. And there is a free lesson waiting when you join the list: soul-pages.com

Read the full professional paper: Rakefet Link-Skop, “Bringing Back the Light”: The Visual Journal in the SoulPages Method as an Intervention for Hope and Resilience Resources, Psychologia Ivrit, May 2024 (Hebrew)

With love, Rakefet

When Words Hurt: Visual Journaling When There Are No Words for the Pain

When words hurt, you begin with the hands. Instead of asking a woman to tell you what happened to her, you give her a page, some color and an image, and she puts down the thing that has no name yet. The page holds the experience whole and covered at the same time, and the word, if it comes at all, comes last and by her choice.

That is what I wrote in a chapter published in October 2024 in the anthology Safe Studio, from YAHAT, the Creative and Expressive Arts Therapies Association in Israel, under the title “When Words Hurt and Heal”: Visual Journaling with Women Evacuated from the Gaza Border Communities. The chapter is a testimony rather than a protocol, and it documents eight weeks of journaling with women evacuated to a hotel in the south of Israel. This page is its summary in English. Everything else I have published is gathered on the publications page.

My name is Rakefet Hadar. I am an art therapist, an author, and the founder of the training school for SoulPages guides. I heard about October 7th while I was in Mexico, and in the days that followed I learned that three women I knew from the Visual Journal Tribe community had been murdered in their homes that same Saturday. In early December I drove south with Maya Hod-Ran, a bibliotherapist, with no idea what was waiting for us there.

What happens when someone loses their words?

In the hotel lobby a woman sat down beside me. She had lost her daughter that Saturday. She made a page, and I asked her to give it a name. She broke into a heartbreaking cry, tried to describe what cannot be described, and then went silent.

That moment is where the chapter’s title comes from. Words, which are our ordinary way of telling someone who we are, had become another wound for her. In the visual journal the order is reversed: color and image speak first, and text arrives last, if at all.

The SoulPages method is a way of working in a visual journal in which every page is built in layers, following a fixed sequence of seven elements, so that the word only enters after the page has already said its piece.

What is an open studio, and why is it so hard?

An open studio is a therapeutic model in which the making space is open to anyone who walks in, with no registration and no fixed group. In the evacuation centres it was open in the most literal sense: a table in a hotel lobby, and people of every age making their inner world visible without a scrap of privacy.

The first time I walked in I felt lost, as though I were being carried off by the general sense of loss around me. Neglect, mess and chaos, and around all of it a grand hotel inside which this was happening. The gap between the two was impossible to take in.

What finally worked was not an organised workshop but moving between tables. I went up to each woman who arrived, showed her my own journal, told her about the seven elements, and invited her to choose one image for what she was feeling right then. The hands began to make, and the words began to flow on their own.

How do you build a safe space when there are no walls?

Three things held the sense of safety before we ever had a room of our own:

• A personal journal for every woman. Notebooks hand-sewn in advance by dozens of volunteers. When there is no house, a sewn notebook is a place.
• The suitcase. We kept the materials in it, and it became an object that belonged to the group. Two women were put in charge of it, and it gave a small anchor to women who had lost everything they owned.
• Regularity. Two fixed days in the schedule, week after week, in a place where nothing else was fixed.

When we later moved into a closed studio, four walls made possible what the lobby could not: meditation, guided imagery and speaking out loud. The worries I had about the move turned out to be unfounded.

How do you work with pain without flooding someone?

Every week I gave real thought to what the session would be called. I chose metaphorical names that connect a woman to her strengths and to hope, the Tree of Resources, My Powers, Landscapes of Hope, the Inner House, because the name is the first thing she hears and it tells her what she is walking into.

At the same time I learned how important it is to leave room for the pain and the uncertainty too, not only for the light. As the group came together, the moment ripened for heavier material. In one session each woman was asked to recall a life-giving figure who stays with her, and two of them spoke about a mother who had died many years earlier and still supports them from a distance.

One session has stayed with me since. I called it Painting the Darkness. We worked with a technique in which rainbow colors are revealed from beneath a black ground, and I asked the women to write a paragraph beginning with the sentence “when I paint the darkness I will discover that…”. Fine lines of light started to appear out of a great darkness.

I also learned something there about my own language. I told one of the women I would bring her gold thread from home the following week, and she answered me sadly that when I say “from my home” it hurts, because she has no home and everything she had collected over the years had burned. I understood how much care words that are trivial to me can require.

What do you do in a week when making is impossible?

One of the hardest weeks was the one in which it was announced that hostages had been murdered in captivity. The atmosphere was unbearable, eyes gone dull, anger and disappointment, and the trauma struck all over again.

The women themselves brought the answer. They arrived holding newspapers and asked to work with the terrible headlines. I guided them to express the pain and the anger however they wished, and to add a pinch of hope to the page as well, and we worked with poems of hope we had printed in advance, each woman choosing one line she connected to.

That is the simplest instruction I have, and it holds on an ordinary day too: do not block the pain, and do not stay only inside it. Both of them on the same page.

What is left for a group after the facilitator leaves?

In the eighth and final session we made a collective visual poem, one line from each woman, out of the bags of images I had prepared for them at home. The excitement was enormous, and the sadness of parting sat right beside it.

That parting was not an ending. Together with the centre’s director I built a continuation plan: I would come back once a month for two days of workshops, and alongside that I would mentor volunteers who came weekly to run journaling sessions for the group. The hours that suddenly opened up in my days back home felt strange, and my heart stayed there.

Frequently asked questions

What do you do when there are no words for what happened?
You start from the material rather than the story. Choosing a color and an image requires no phrasing, and it lets the experience be placed on the page without being said aloud. The text, if it comes, comes last and by the maker’s choice.

What is Safe Studio?
A project of YAHAT, the Creative and Expressive Arts Therapies Association in Israel, which ran therapeutic making spaces for refugees from Ukraine in 2021 and was reactivated when war broke out in October 2023. Some fifty such studios opened across the country.

What is the difference between an open studio and a closed group?
In an open studio the space is open to anyone who walks in, with no registration and no fixed membership, which makes it highly accessible but offers no privacy. A closed group in its own room allows meditation, guided imagery and personal sharing, none of which are possible in an open lobby.

Is it dangerous to work with newspapers and painful headlines?
Not when it is done with a facilitator and on one condition: something of hope goes onto the page alongside the pain. The women asked to work with the headlines themselves, and the instruction was to express the anger and add a pinch of light to the same spread.

Who wrote the chapter and where was it published?
Rakefet Hadar, in the anthology Safe Studio published by YAHAT in October 2024, edited by Dr Tamar Kichli-Borochovsky, Nona Orbach and Chen Jakobi. The chapter opens the section called Gathering Materials, on page 17. The anthology is in Hebrew.

Can you work this way on your own at home?
Yes, and that is exactly the intention. The sequence is fixed: intention, a background made without control, color, image, line, and then one word. If making floods you every time you open the journal, that is the sign to work with a professional rather than alone.

I came home after eight weeks, and the sense that we were all part of one whole stayed with me. I said nothing clever there. I sat beside them, offered a material, and they added their own. Give yourself twenty minutes today, take a page, some watercolor, a few images, and make something that reflects exactly what you are feeling right now. And if something heavy comes up while you work, here is exactly what to do in that moment. There is also a free lesson waiting when you join the list: soul-pages.com

The full chapter was published in Safe Studio, an Anthology: Creative Texts in the Wake of the Iron Swords War, YAHAT, October 2024 (Hebrew), section 1, page 17.

With love, Rakefet

Is It Safe to Journal About Trauma? What an Art Therapist Wants You to Know

Yes, journaling about trauma can be safe and deeply healing, but not unconditionally. Safety comes from connecting to your strengths and resources first, approaching the memory only in small, chosen doses, keeping one foot in the present, and knowing how to close the page when you are done. Diving straight into your rawest memory, alone and unprepared, can overwhelm you instead of helping you.

Almost every article about journaling and trauma says the same two things: “journaling helps” and “this is not a substitute for therapy.” Both are true. But nobody tells you the part in between, the part you actually need on a Tuesday night when the notebook is open and your heart is racing. I want to give you that part. I am a trained art therapist, the creator of the SoulPages method of visual journaling, and since October 7th I have sat with hundreds of women survivors in Israel, holding a blank page together with a pain that had no words. This is what I have learned about doing this work safely.

Can journaling about trauma make things worse?

It can, if it turns into reliving instead of processing. Writing or creating about a traumatic memory brings it close, and if it comes too close too fast, your nervous system can respond as if the event is happening again: racing heart, numbness, fog, panic. That state is not healing, it is flooding. The practice below exists to keep you on the healing side of that line, where you touch the memory and stay yourself while you do it.

How does the SoulPages method approach trauma?

Not head-on. In SoulPages we never go to the trauma directly unless you brought that material yourself and you are ready to work with it. The trauma is there, we know it exists, and it is not the door we walk through. Every session begins by connecting to the strong, good parts of you and to your resources: people you love, parents and family, including the ones who are no longer alive, places that held you, moments you were braver than you knew. There are many, many ways to connect to strengths and resources on a page, and this is the unique heart of the method: the stronger that ground becomes, the more the hard material can soften and move at its own pace.

Community is a resource too, and a very significant one. Creating alongside other women, in a group or with a trained facilitator, means your page is witnessed and held, and what one woman dares to put on paper opens a door for all the others.

What are the signs you should pause?

Stop and step away from the page, gently and without any sense of failure, if you notice:

• Your body switching to alarm: pounding heart, shallow breath, trembling, nausea.
• Going blank or foggy, feeling far away from the room, losing track of time.
• The writing pulling you into the memory in loops, the same scene replaying without relief.
• Feeling worse after journaling, again and again, rather than emptier and lighter.

One hard session is not a red flag; it happens. The same overwhelm returning every time you open the journal is your signal that this material needs professional company, not more solo effort.

How do you journal about trauma safely, step by step?

1. Set a container before you start. Decide how long you will work, twenty minutes is plenty, and set a timer. Choose a stopping point before you begin, the way a swimmer checks where the ladder is before entering the pool.
2. Make a resource page first. Before you go anywhere near the hard material, fill a page with what steadies you: a color you love, an image of a safe place, words of someone who loves you. This page stays in the journal. It is the place you return to. In the SoulPages method this is not a warm-up before the real work; it is the heart of the work.
3. Work at the edges, not the center. You do not have to write what happened. Start with where you are now: what the memory feels like in your body today, what color it would be, what it needs from you. The center can wait months. It can wait forever. Healing does not require a full retelling.
4. Let images carry what words cannot. This is why I work in a visual journal rather than a written one. A torn paper, a smear of dark blue, a small figure in a large empty page, these can hold an experience at exactly the distance you can bear. The image says it without making you say it.
5. Close the page deliberately. When the timer ends, end. Some women draw a border around what they made, some write one closing word, some physically close the journal and put both hands on the cover for a breath. The ritual matters: it tells your nervous system that the visit is over.
6. Come back to the room. Name five things you can see, feel your feet, drink water, step outside. Give yourself ten ordinary minutes before returning to your day.

Why can images be gentler than words?

Words demand a story: first this, then that. A traumatic memory often is not stored as a story, it lives in fragments, sensations, colors. Asking it to become sentences too early can force you through the worst parts in order. An image lets the experience arrive whole but veiled, as a symbol that you control. I have watched this again and again in my SoulPages work: a page of color and torn paper says what happened without the woman having to say it, and the page holds it, so she does not have to hold it alone.

When should you bring this to a therapist instead?

Journaling alone is enough when the material is heavy but moves: you create, something shifts, you feel a little lighter or clearer afterward. Bring in a professional when it does not move, when the flooding signs above repeat, when sleep or daily functioning start to suffer, when there are thoughts of harming yourself, or when the trauma is recent and still raw. This is not a downgrade. A therapist does not replace your journal; the journal often becomes the bridge, and the pages you have made can travel with you into that room.

Frequently asked questions

Is it safe to journal about trauma without a therapist?
Often yes, if you pace yourself: time-limited sessions, working at the edges of the memory rather than the center, and a clear closing ritual. If journaling repeatedly leaves you flooded, numb, or worse than before, that material needs a professional alongside you.

Can journaling about trauma make you feel worse?
Temporarily, yes; touching pain stirs it. The difference to watch is direction: healthy sessions leave you a little emptier and clearer, while sessions that repeatedly end in panic, numbness, or spiraling mean you are reliving rather than processing.

Do I have to write about what happened?
No. You never have to retell the event. You can work with how the memory lives in you today, in colors, shapes, and single words, and let images carry the parts that language cannot hold yet.

What is the safest way to end a trauma journaling session?
End at the time you set, close the page with a deliberate gesture such as a border, a closing word, or simply shutting the journal with both hands, and then ground yourself in the room for a few minutes before returning to your day.

Is visual journaling better than written journaling for trauma?
For many women, yes, because images can hold an experience at a bearable distance without forcing it into a story. Written and visual journaling also combine well: a page of color and imagery first, then a few words if they come.

If you are reading this with a specific heaviness in mind, I want you to hear one thing: the fact that you are looking for a careful way in, instead of just diving, is already wisdom. Your pace is not a weakness. It is the method. If you would like a gentle, structured way to begin, my guide to keeping an art therapy journal walks you through the first pages, and the SoulPages courses at soul-pages.com go deeper whenever you are ready.

With love,
Rakefet