✂️ Cut, Paste, Heal.

Welcome to The Growing Pains Collective. Written by licensed therapists and real people, off the algorithm. Driven by creativity, connection, and community.

There’s something deeply transformative about the tactile experience of cutting, pasting, and layering paper to create. Collage journaling, to me, has evolved beyond simply scrapbooking memories or engaging in self-care for recreation, joy, or fun—it’s become a purposeful activation, offering me an anchor as a therapist when words just aren’t enough. This type of creative self-expression has evolved for me into a deeply meaningful therapeutic tool that supports exploration and expression of experiences that may otherwise remain hidden, suppressed or unsaid.

In our work as therapists, we integrate art therapy techniques like collage for good reason. It's a powerful way to bridge our subconscious and conscious minds, connecting the unspoken with tangible imagery. Whether we’re navigating past trauma, exploring personal identity, or simply seeking new outlets for expression, collage provides a unique, non-verbal avenue for communicating complex emotions and experiences that words alone cannot fully capture.

Why Collage in Therapy?

Collage as an art therapy tool provides a variety of benefits, especially in a therapeutic setting. Here’s why we use it:

Embodiment & process over perfection

Collage gives us permission to step away from perfectionism. In a world where we’re often pressured to “get it right,” collage allows us to embrace imperfection as part of our healing. This aligns beautifully with expressive arts therapy, where the act of creating is just as valuable as the final piece of art itself.

Accessing the ‘subconscious’

The physicality and tactile nature of collage—selecting images, textures, and colours— is a naturally grounding activity that helps us connect to our inner worlds. Many of us hold emotions or memories, particularly around trauma, grief, or personal identity, that we haven’t yet found words for.

Collage can offer creative freedom and emotional safety when guided therapeutically, to visually explore these parts of ourselves, supporting a gentle approach to trauma-informed care. This method becomes particularly powerful for those who find verbal emotional expression challenging, offering a visual language to communicate feelings and experiences.

Collage as a metaphor

Collage can also act as a metaphor for healing. Just as we cut and rearrange fragments of paper, we can piece together fragmented life experiences into a coherent story.

This process resonates deeply with narrative therapy tools, where we’re encouraged to reshape and reclaim our personal stories. Collage offers a tangible representation of how we can actively participate in our healing journeys, visualizing the transformation from fragmented pain to integrated healing.

A safe space for exploration

As a visual and non-verbal medium, collage journaling offers emotional distance from overwhelming experiences. When we’re engaging with challenging emotions, especially grief or trauma, collage provides a safer outlet, allowing us to externalize and visually explore feelings without becoming overwhelmed. Rather than immediately diving into painful conversations, collage gently supports healing through art, offering protection and distance as we explore sensitive or difficult areas.

Creative Prompts Deepen the Process 🎨

Central to a therapeutic collage practice in our eyes, is the use of therapeutic collage prompts. Prompts guide our creative journeys, focusing our energy on specific themes or emotional landscapes and helping us set clear intentions for the healing work ahead.

Why Prompts? 👀

Think of prompts as little doorways into your inner world. They’re gentle nudges that help you tune in, release, and tap into whatever’s on your mind or heart. Prompts, especially ones that make you deeply think, reflect or inspire change and growth are the backbone and framework for offering a guided "scaffold" towards the catharsis, transformation and integration that merging journalling and collage can offer.

Prompts can also ground us in the present moment. They help create structure when we’re feeling scattered and, at the same time, give us freedom to explore new themes and ideas without feeling overwhelmed. I like to think of them as mini-guides leading us to surprising new places.

Following therapeutic prompts aren’t about “getting it right” per se, but about letting your heart and intuition guide you into creating a visual experience for what unfolds for you when you answer them.

Prompts serve as bridges connecting vague feelings with visual representation. A prompt like “What are you carrying from the past?” might inspire dark textures to symbolize burdens. Prompts guide our emotional expression and help refine the clarity of our artistic voices.

Insight drives deep reflections 🤔

Prompts are not only about artistic creation—they also encourage self-reflection. When you respond to a prompts, the opportunity to reflect on deeper themes, beliefs, and experiences emerges naturally. As people engage with a variety of found and collected materials in collage, they are able to make connections and insights that can lead to emotional breakthroughs. In therapy, this becomes a pivotal moment for both the client and the therapist. The art itself becomes the space where healing and insight emerge.

Releasing the urge to over-intellectualize 😵‍💫

When creating a collage, the focus naturally shifts from intellectual analysis to somatic (body-based) experiences. This embodied approach is essential in trauma work, providing valuable access to information stored within our bodies (i.e. this just feels right and I can’t explain it). Rather than rationalizing or labeling our emotions, collage helps us reconnect with bodily intuition, further deepening our therapeutic journey.

Reclaiming Space: Collage as a tool for representation ✊🏾

For Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), collage is especially powerful as a tool for reclaiming and reshaping spaces that have historically excluded or misrepresented us. Many existing media narratives and visual arts have marginalized our experiences and complexities. Collage empowers us to visibly assert our presence, using affirming images and symbols to create representations that honour our identities and truths.

Through collage, we visually reclaim narratives about beauty, power, community, and belonging. It becomes a form of identity reclamation through art, allowing us to reconstruct and tell our stories on our terms, in our own way.

Whether it’s reclaiming the idea of beauty, power, or identity, collage provides a metaphorical space to piece together what has been fragmented and influenced by external and/or oppressive forces.

Want to try this for yourself? Bloom Creative Collage workshops are back this spring 🎉

Whether you’re a dedicated creative, or simply curious about the role of creativity, collage and personal healing, this is our offering to invite a new way of being on the journey towards growth — whatever that means to you.

This time we’re partnering with artist pHoenix Pagliacci for a therapeutic collage and journaling experience designed for creatives of colour looking to explore identity, creativity, and self-discovery in an intimate, supportive space 🤎 ✂️✨

Get your tickets HERE. Early bird tickets are already sold out (😱) but we still have a range of ticket options left depending on your needs.

Whether you’re looking for a starting point, or looking for fresh perspective, there is no wrong way to be curious and try. I hope that exploring prompts as a tool for expression will help you express yourself, tap into your thoughts and experiences in new ways and support you in exploring your unique style of artistic collage creativity.

A Creative Invitation

Whether we’re working individually or as part of a collective, collage journalling offers us ways to reconnect with our innermost thoughts, emotions, and stories. It’s a reminder that healing is not about perfection, but about the process of exploration, self-expression, and transformation.

Explore some of the bloom custom collage resources (packed with prompts!) that we create for our workshops:

• Nurturing Your Inner Child

• Nourishing Your Nervous System

• Values and Vision

In case none of those prompts or themes speak to you, here are a few more that might spark your artistic imagination 🔮🎨:

1.  "The Season I’m In" – Use colours, textures, or images to capture where you feel you are in life right now. Think about seasonal themes: autumn colours, summer vibes, or any imagery that represents you, and what’s most important to you right now.

2. "Self-Compassion" – Create a collage around the idea of self-kindness, and how you access self compassion, kindness (or not). Include words, colours, or images that represent your relationship with self compassion now, or reflects the way you’d like to practice self compassion moving forward.

As you engage with collage, remember: there’s no wrong way to create. Your process is your own, and the journey of expression and healing is a personal one. Whether you’re just starting to think about inviting new ways to explore personal growth through a creative practice, or have been creating on your own for years, we hope this newsletter inspires you to lean into your creativity, trust the process, and lean into trying something toward deeper self-discovery.

Let’s create, reflect, and heal together.

Written by Meghan Watson, M.A, RP 

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