When we think of working our hands through soft and mouldable clay, most of us believe it would be relaxing. This tactile therapy is like a massage for your insides.
Push the material away, pull it towards yourself, smooth it down with warm water and make it nice and smooth, pick it up, squash it down, make room for your hands to tunnel down, even slap down some clay on the floor!
Anything is possible, and all of it is right, as the hands can do no wrong in the clayfield. You’re not there to make something or do something, you’re just there to BE.
The 'clay field' is a large, flat box filled with smooth clay. With closed eyes one makes contact with the material and allows the hands to find their way through touching, scratching, digging, kneading, patting, beating until shapes start to emerge. At the end of a session, there will be no art object to take home, except an intense and transformative emotion filled sensory experience.
BENEFITS OF WORKING WITH CLAY THERAPEUTICALLY
Sensory Experience: Engages the sense ‘touch’ to evoke emotions and memories without verbal expression.
This is perfect for individuals who want to tune in to their bodies and do some therapy without speaking. This is also great for clients who find it hard to express themselves or express emotions in words.
Implicit Memory Exploration: Accesses implicit memories related to touch, addressing trauma and developmental setbacks.
This is beneficial for accessing early developmental trauma and trauma that has been dissociated from the self and working through it at the pace of the body. As touch is the first of the senses to come online, developmentally, pre-verbal trauma can be accessed and worked through.
Safety and Support: Provides a safe environment for exploring touch-related experiences and emotions.
Embodied Healing: Facilitates release from fear, fostering trust and growth by addressing negative touch experiences.
Clients are supported throughout the entire process by a trained facilitator to watch both the somatic response of the body and to watch what is happening in the clayfield and guide the client towards a fulfilling outcome.
Transformational Process: Transitions negative touch encounters to positive, symbolizing personal growth.
Clients often report feeling lighter after the clayfield sessions and body and symbolic insights are debriefed at the end of the session.
Feedback Mechanism: Clay provides immediate feedback, empowering a balanced relationship with oneself.
Talk therapy is a feedback loop, where the therapist acts as a sound board for thoughts, beliefs (helpful & unhelpful), feelings and somatic observations. The clay itself acts as a sounding board for what the body has to say and using the clay makes it easier for the client to listen and see what has been or is going on for them. At the end the session, clients engage in cognitive therapy to debrief the sensory experience.
Memory Processing: Rewrites biography, supporting healing from trauma through sensory exploration.
The clay helps clients to explore memories in a kinaesthetic way, and it common for clients to report that they were in a different world. Specific recommendations by the therapist ensures clients can safely explore memories and emotions that are linked with past experiences.
Complementary Therapy: Clayfield offers a dual approach to therapy, aiding cognitive (top-down) and somatic emotional processing (bottom up).
Diverse Outcomes: Enhances body awareness, emotional regulation, resilience, and boundary-setting.
This is one of the most striking outcomes of having sessions in the Clayfield and that is developing an internal sense of boundaries. This in my opinion can be achieved faster using Clayfield than through talk-based boundary therapies.
The clay itself acts as something to hold on to when clients are feeling intense emotions such as anger, resentment, anxiety and sadness.
Self-Perception & Resilience: Strengthens self-perception, boundary awareness, and decision-making.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT CLAY FIELD THERAPY
Clay Field Therapy® is a body based therapy that involves the sense of touch. The haptic sense of touch is the most fundamental of human experiences. Universally infants experience safety and love through touch; being rocked and held soothes and settles them. Love, sexuality, but also violence are primarily communicated through touch. Our skin boundary becomes invaded through inappropriate touching, through accidents and medical procedures. The vast majority of traumatic memories involve touch. As the hands touch the clay they will remember these formative, implicit experiences. The smooth texture, the weight and resistance of the clay will evoke attachment patterns, developmental setbacks and traumatic events. This does not occur in a cognitive way, but as learnt action patterns and felt sensations. In a safe and supportive setting, the hands of clients will find their way out of restriction, collapse and frozen fear into growing trust and fulfilment, because the clay has the unique ability to feedback any contact we make with it. Initially clients’ hands may expect something cold, unavailable or disgusting, because this was their experience in the past, but almost inevitably they will search for increasingly reliable contact, balance in the relationship with the material and self-fulfilment through it.
The therapeutic focus is neither on symptoms nor on the story of what-happened, but on allowing motor impulses and physical urges to make an impression in the clay and in turn finding a more adequate response to the world at hand.
Whilst outcomes in the Clay Field are different from individual to individual, many clients feel lighter, more connected to their body, attuned with their emotions, can safely inhabit their body and feel their feelings, being able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, have a sense of letting go of “emotional baggage”, build inner strength and confidence, release stress, grief and other strong negative emotions.
Work in the Clay field often helps people to have a stronger sense of self, a felt sense of boundaries required to repair ruptures due to interpersonal trauma and improve grit and resolve to make decisions and enact change.
