Before I was an art therapist, I was a high school art teacher in Mesa.

I had recently moved back home after finishing my bachelor’s degree in studio art in Chicago. I was teaching teenagers how to paint, draw, experiment, and make things. But somewhere along the way, my classroom became more than an art room.

It became a safe place.

Other teachers knew that if a student was having a hard day, they could send them to Mrs. Johnson’s room. The students who came weren’t all artists. Some of them probably wouldn’t have described themselves as creative at all. They just knew that when they walked into the art room, they belonged.

They could sit quietly. They could take a breath. They could talk—or not talk. They could pick up a paintbrush and help with the next mural slowly taking over one of our walls.

I knew something special was happening in front of me, even though I didn’t have language for it yet.

Somewhere for it all to go

As I watched these students find somewhere for their experiences to go, I also began putting together pieces of my own story from when I was their age.

The specifics of our stories were different, but I recognized something in them.

As a teenager, I didn’t know that art was giving me a voice. I didn’t know it was offering expression to emotions that felt tangled, overwhelming, or impossible to explain. I only knew that I could take what was happening inside of me and put it somewhere else.

Sometimes I could turn it into something beautiful or meaningful.

Sometimes it simply became more manageable.

What I understand now is that the materials and the process of making were helping me regulate my emotions. Painting gave my disorganized thoughts movement, shape, color, and somewhere to land. It connected me to myself, to other people, and to something larger than myself.

Art had been doing more than helping me make things.

It had been helping me live.

Discovering art therapy

I taught in that Mesa classroom from 2012 to 2014. While I was there, I started researching art therapy programs and discovered there was an entire profession built around what I had begun to witness.

I enrolled in the master’s program at Prescott College and eventually changed jobs, moving from the high school classroom into an open studio setting at Art Awakenings in Phoenix. There, I worked alongside adults living with serious mental illness.

I taught painting, printmaking, stained glass, and throwing clay on the wheel. I got to wear ripped jeans and Converse to work and go home at the end of the day with paint all over my hands.

I knew I was in the right place.

But it wasn’t only because I loved making art or teaching someone how to use a new material. Again, the studio became more than a place where people made things.

It offered room to participate, connect, experiment, express something, and belong. People could make choices. They could develop skills. They could create something that existed outside of a diagnosis or a story someone else had told about them.

The studio made space for more of who they were.

Over time, I began to realize that I wanted more people to have access to this kind of work and this kind of space. I wanted it within my own community of Downtown Mesa.

That desire eventually became part of The Well.

What I understand now

More than a decade later, after years of studying, practicing, and teaching art therapy, I have much more language for what I first witnessed in that high school art room.

I understand more about the science now. I know how art-making engages our senses, bodies, attention, emotions, memories, and imagination. I have training in specific clinical interventions and in choosing materials and processes intentionally for different kinds of trauma, symptoms, and needs.

Art therapy is not simply handing someone supplies and hoping something meaningful happens. It is a mental health profession. It involves specialized graduate education, clinical training, psychological theory, and a therapeutic relationship.

And still, it blows me away.

It is incredible to witness what can happen with a few oil pastels, some Model Magic, chalk, plaster, ink, string, a pile of magazine images—or a lump of clay.

The materials move us.

They meet us differently than words do. They bring us into the present moment. They give our hands somewhere to go and our internal experiences something to push against, respond to, rearrange, or transform. They can help us approach something we could not explain or show us something we did not know we knew.

There is science underneath this work. There is research, clinical training, theory, and intention.

But there is still mystery too.

After all these years, I don’t want to lose that part. I don’t want to become so focused on explaining why art therapy works that I stop being amazed by what unfolds between a person and the materials in front of them.

Something happens when we make.

Sometimes it is visible immediately. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense until much later.

But I still feel incredibly lucky to witness it.

Art therapy has been part of The Well from the beginning because I still believe what I first learned in that Mesa classroom: when people are given a safe place to belong, materials they can interact with, and permission to make without having to do it perfectly, things that feel really impossible become simply human.

Sometimes art helps us find our voice.

Sometimes it gives the tangled and overwhelming somewhere to go.

Sometimes it makes an experience beautiful or meaningful.

And sometimes it simply makes it manageable.

That matters too.