Creative Arts Therapies and the LGBTQ Community

This urgently needed book achieves the editors' judicious intent of sharing best practices for creative arts therapists in offering well-informed and affirming therapy with the LGBTQ community. Critical concepts, such as intersectionality and systems of oppression, are thoughtfully interwoven throughout case studies, practical approaches, and other elements to better combat stigmatization and discrimination. -- Daniel Blausey, MA, ATR-BC, ATCS, LCAT Founder, Studio Blue: Creative Arts Therapy, PLLC This book attends to a wide range of LGBTQ issues and provides clear guidelines for self-processing as well as tools to work with clients. The authors utilize a co-researching process, where the therapists integrate their clinical experiences and case examples with theory and research to demonstrate best practices. It made me feel a sense of community among creative arts therapists, as well as a strong desire to be orienting my own work more specifically towards LGBTQ+ clients/issues/themes. This book is filling a great need in our field and has the potential to generate necessary work. -- Alexis Powell, MA, LCAT, RDT, founder of Creative Spark and creator of Powell's Embodied Multicultural Assessment This is a great educational primer for working with LGBTQ-identifying individuals and has broader implications for working with all people who have been marginalized by our society. The authors encourage us to risk stumbling over unfamiliar nomenclature as well as to reflect on our own gender and sexual identities. This book sensitively guides us toward a necessary queering of our therapy practices, from the way we conduct assessment to how we implement methodology, aiding us all in the enormous task of dismantling oppressive heteronormativity. -- Suzannah Scott-Moncrieff, MA, LCAT, MT-BC, Fellow of the Association of Music and Imagery