Creative Counsellors is a global community for therapeutic professionals who believe in the power of creativity to enhance therapeutic work.
We support practitioners to develop the confidence, skills and inspiration to facilitate creative approaches alongside their existing counselling modality. Not to replace the foundations of their practice, but to expand the ways they can connect, explore and work with the people they support.
Because therapy doesn’t always have to begin and end with words.
Creativity can offer another way in. Through art, imagery, metaphor, nature, objects, movement, play, writing and countless other possibilities, we can work with the interests, passions and ways of expressing that are meaningful to each individual client.
Creative Counsellors began in 2017 from a desire to create a space where counsellors could share ideas, learn from one another and feel less alone in their work.
Today, our wider community has grown to more than 14,000 practitioners, with training, membership, retreats, events, skill-shares, book clubs, our Rooted Journal and our annual Creative Counsellors Gathering.
Whether you’re training, newly qualified or have been practising for years, you’re welcome here.
Our Therapeutic Community on Facebook is an ever growing and evolving space full of wonderful like-minded therapists with an interest in offering out-of-the-box interventions to support their client work. Become part of a thriving community where we co-create a safe, nurturing and welcoming environment to deepen skills while sharing the ups and downs of being in practice.
Creative Counselling brings creativity into therapeutic practice, offering ways to explore experiences that can sit alongside talking therapy.
It isn’t about replacing a counsellor’s core training. Instead, creative approaches can complement established ways of working, whether a practitioner is person-centred, integrative, psychodynamic, CBT, transactional analysis or draws from another therapeutic tradition.
At the heart of Creative Counselling is curiosity about the person in front of us.
Rather than beginning with a particular creative intervention, we begin with the client: their preferences, interests, passions, ways of communicating and what feels meaningful to them. From there, creativity can offer different ways to explore what may be difficult to reach through conversation alone.
A feeling might be given a colour.
An experience might become an image.
A relationship might be explored through symbols or metaphor.
Something difficult to describe might find expression through movement, writing, nature, sound, symbols or making.
Creative work can help us give shape, movement, colour, texture, image and metaphor to human experience. It can create another route into reflection and meaning-making, particularly when words feel difficult to find.
Creative Counselling is about expanding the possibilities within therapeutic work while remaining grounded in the practitioner’s training, ethics, competence and the needs of each individual client.
When I founded Creative Counsellors, I wanted to create a space where we could come together and talk openly about something I felt passionately about: how do we support our clients when words alone aren’t enough?
What began as an idea has grown into this extraordinary community. Alongside Gaynor and Evie, I’ve watched therapists share ideas, learn from one another, experiment thoughtfully and bring more creativity into their work in ways that feel authentic to them.
The work keeps evolving, which is exactly how I think it should be. Eventually, I wanted to capture some of that journey and thinking in a book, and Creative Counselling went on to become an Amazon bestseller.
I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has been part of the adventure so far.
Tanja xx
