| Since just before World War II, the use of art therapy has been gaining a foothold within the field of mental health. It has been successfully used with numerous populations in community centers, mental health facilities, prisons, senior centers/homes, and schools. However within this history, one population has been overlooked---the counselor trainee. While art therapy training programs exist, it has not been common practice to integrate an extensive amount of art therapy experience into counselor education training programs. In order to address this lapse in the research base, a model of how to use art therapy with counselor trainees was proposed, and an exploration of how art therapy can encourage self-actualization and personal growth of counselor trainees was undertaken.; Two groups of counselor trainees were studied: an experimental group consisting of ten first and second year Master's-level counselor education students who participated in an intensive two-day art therapy retreat during which they worked through several art therapy interventions with the goals of promoting self actualization through personal and professional exploration; and a control group of ten first and second year Master's-level counselor education students who did not participate in the retreat. Each group of students completed two inventories: the Measure of Ambiguity Tolerance (MAT-50, Norton, 1975) to measure cognitive flexibility and the Personal Orientation Inventory (POI, Shostrom, 1964) to measure self-actualization. The experimental group completed the inventories pre and post-retreat while the control group completed the inventories post-retreat time only.; There were no statistically significant changes detected in level of self-actualization before and after the retreat on the POI. Also, level of self-actualization did not differ by level of cognitive flexibility as measured by the MAT-50. However, verbal and written feedback received from the participants indicated that the intensive art retreat was may have been successful in promoting personal and professional growth for many of them. An explanation of the personal and professional growth that occurred during the intensive art retreats, as well as recommendations for future research, is included. |
