The Multiple Self-States Drawing Technique

Book excerpt: This book introduces the Multiple Self-States Drawing Technique (MSSDT), a creative, transdiagnostic, clinical assessment tool and treatment intervention for child and adolescent clients. The MSSDT provides clinicians and patients with a novel opportunity to bridge the gap in youngsters’ selves-awareness of discrete emotional states. Dr. Parente teaches clinicians how to guide clients through this contemporaneous version of projective figure drawing in order to discover and explore trauma-based, dissociative, and emotionally dysregulated self-states and to focus on adaptive, resilient states of well-being. Specific, step-by-step instructions are provided, and case illustrations demonstrating the proposed clinical advantages of the method are presented. Chapters show how this experiential, psycho-educational, arts-based activity can be flexibly applied to a broad range of ages and clinical populations and how using the MSSDT may support mental health professionals’ clinical work. Through this manual, clinicians will learn how to help clients foster a beneficial relational encounter, promote therapeutic self-expression, and develop an enhanced self and other awareness.