A preliminary qualitative study on helpful processes of creative expressive - bodily maps of emotions in psychotherapy with children and adolescents

Research on the positive events in the therapeutic counseling process is usually undertaken from the client’s perspective. However, few studies have investigated the beneficial aspects of the therapeutic counselling process, particularly in creative expressive fields. This preliminary qualitative study aims to evaluate the therapeutic experience of utilizing Creative expressive – Bodily maps of emotions (CE-BME) with young clients in the helpful process. The CE-BME is an art therapy tool that counselling practitioners or therapists have extensively used in Malaysian mental health settings. A qualitative approach known as the grounded theory method was employed in this study through face-to-face and video call interviews with four therapists from the health setting who conducted sessions for children and adolescents using the CE-BME. As a result, six themes of the helpful process were identified: (1) facilitating emotional exploration and processing, (2) engaging relationships with young clients, (3) expanding the client’s self-awareness, (4) helping the direction of intervention, (5) release for clients, and (6) relief for therapists. Furthermore, these findings established the following outcomes regarding the CE-BME tool as a helpful process, thereby boosting researchers’ confidence in applying the main study to more therapists engaged in children’s mental health intervention.