Disruptive, impulse-control, and conduct disorders refer to a category of disorders that comprised of oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, kleptomania, and pyromania. These disorders are fueled by difficulty managing anger and controlling impulses, emotions, and behaviors. Some important goals to keep in mind for individuals that may be struggling with the residual effects of living with this diagnosis include identifying and managing emotions, increasing social skills, and improving frustration tolerance. While it may be hard for an art therapist to admit, artmaking and the expectation to create can be stress-inducing; often clients use self-minimizing statements during their progress, “I’m not a good artist”, “I can’t draw” or “I’m not creative”. It is the art therapist's responsibility to navigate frustrations that may exist within a session and problematize adaptive ways to support the client’s process and their interest in artmaking or with a strong-rapport encourage frustration tolerance within a session.
For a child struggling with managing impulses and identifying anger, papermaking may act as a positive outlet for repurposing feelings of frustration. Children often tend to ask for a new page of paper or crumble a piece of artwork that does not feel satisfactory. This frustration and impulse to destroy unfinished work may be intensified by thoughts and behaviors related to oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder. Whether a child has this diagnosis or not holding onto unfinished works can suggest care and transformation for something that was left to be discarded. The task-oriented process of papermaking can provide a sense of mastery while embracing the kinesthetic exploration of tearing paper and fabric. Matott writes (2020) “the therapeutic process of papermaking includes the purposeful, concrete, and repetitive steps to safely engage the maker in stages that ultimate resolve in meaning-making and reconstruction of experiences and emotions through the pulled paper sheet and created artworks” (p. 312). The publication identifies some benefits of papermaking such as strengthening resiliency, empowerment, emotional awareness, the encouraging process of transformative change, sensory-based exploration, and the interaction of the mind and body (Matott, 2020). Papermaking possesses qualities that can repurpose, reimagine, and reclaim thoughts and behaviors while embracing destruction and promoting transformation.
References
Matott, D. & Miller, G. (2020) Papermaking. In Crawford, P., Brown, B., & Charise, A. Editor
(Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Health Humanities (pp. 311-315). Routledge
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