Sagar was one of the first to claim that mess can be a form of symbolic communication, with clients using physical mess-making to express (consciously or otherwise) a sense of chaos or disorder in their internal worlds. Several art psychotherapists have written about ‘an abundance of mess’ 2 in their work with traumatised children and young people, particularly those who have experienced significant early relational adversities and those who are ‘looked after’. Here, I draw primarily on sources from art psychotherapy, as this is my main modality and the territory with which I am most familiar. How can we understand and work with mess in therapy? However the mess is presented, we need to consider how we can help our clients to make sense of it and how we might respond. Especially for older children, and in our work with their adult family members, mess might primarily present through the verbal narratives they share about their own experiences of trouble, difficulty or confusion. Dramatic or pretend play can become littered with characters or plot developments, or may be so fragmented that we simply cannot make sense of the story that the client is trying to create. Some clients talk so quickly or persistently that it is difficult for us to keep up with their narrative, or to meaningfully respond. Metaphorical messes are also created within therapeutic spaces in a variety of ways. The mess-making may or may not be accompanied by a feeling of overwhelm for the client and/or the therapist, or a sense of boundaries and limits being tested.Ī similar kind of chaos can also be created using toys and other play materials, which may be taken out of their storage spaces and quickly discarded, leaving a trail of physical detritus in the client’s wake. There may or may not be an identifiable product at the end of this process, such as a ‘potion’ 3 or a ‘messy package’ 4 that the child or young person may wish to either keep or discard. Solid materials and artefacts (like glitter and small-world figures) may be introduced into the mixtures as required by their makers. Messy use of art materials is often described in terms of fluids like water, paint and glue being used as a substrate for processes of swamping, smearing, spilling, pouring, dripping and mixing. In my experience, this kind of literal mess-making can involve art materials, toys and any other objects that are present in the space. In the counselling room, mess is perhaps easiest to identify when children and young people explicitly create some kind of physical chaos, untidiness or disorder. For example, the Merriam-Webster entry includes, ‘…a disordered, untidy, offensive, or unpleasant state or condition’ and ‘…one that is disordered, untidy, offensive, or unpleasant usually because of blundering, laxity, or misconduct’. Nonetheless, dictionary definitions of mess all seem to touch on things that are usually considered to be negative: dirt, confusion, problems, trouble, difficulty and so on. Mess is a nebulous concept your mental image of ‘mess’ will likely look and feel different from the mess conjured up in my imagination, or anyone else’s. So, if this article prompts you to go away and do some further thinking about mess (and your relationship with it), so much the better! I anticipate that this article might leave you with more questions than answers, and this is no bad thing, since mess can be such a significant part of a therapeutic intervention, for both service users and professionals. Finally, I introduce my own model for thinking about orientations towards (or away from) mess, and consider how this simple framework might help us to make sense of the messes that are created in therapy. I start by exploring what ‘mess’ actually means, both inside and outside the therapy space, and share what other writers have had to say about it, drawing on art psychotherapy theory and literature. Experience suggests that mess of one kind or another is a ubiquitous feature of therapy, where messes, both literal and metaphorical, can usefully help to express, communicate and process a wide range of experiences. The title of this article may sound like the start of a joke, but I want to make the claim that mess, mess-making and messiness are serious matters when we work therapeutically with children, young people and families.
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