Institut apk

apk Institute, your personal place for education and continuing education

APK GmbH offers you and approximately 50 fellow students part-time training in art therapy (specializing in design and painting therapy) and a wide range of continuing education and self-awareness courses. The modular training program can be completed alongside your existing professional training or as an introduction to a new profession. In addition to your own experience, it also covers theory and an introduction to practical work.

Umbrella term art therapy

Art therapy is a form of therapy that draws on people's natural abilities for creative expression and, through this, self-regulation and self-healing. It is resource- and solution-oriented. It encourages people to engage with images that arise from their inner world or that affect them from their external environment. Through action and creative activity, people are directly and effectively involved in their own experiences.

Creative and painting therapy

is one of the five specializations in art therapy defined by the umbrella organization OdA ARTECURA. Our training institute is recognized by OdA ARTECURA for all modules leading to the HFP (higher professional examination) and we are eduQua-certified.

We work closely with the professional association for art therapy gpk.

 

Painting therapy – the therapy method at APK

The method guides people to

• project their inner state of mind onto a picture (symbolization),
• to let the picture make an impression on them (activating implicit memory),
• reflect on themselves and the image, experiencing what is inappropriate and appropriate and moving creatively in the resulting tension (through assimilation and accommodation),
• to internalize the experience (personification) and to continue shaping it in the image, connected with what was in the image and what it can still become (presentification),
• distancing oneself from inappropriate image elements and integrating appropriate ones,
• continuing one's own actions until reaching a personal point of view: "Now it's right" (homeostasis),
• finding language for the event, creating awareness through abstraction and enabling the experience to be stored in long-term memory (narrative work),
• evaluating experiences gained from trying things out, differentiating, and integrating, and transferring good experiences into everyday life by practicing and reviewing selected actions (validation and verification),
• Proceeding dialogically in contact and exchange in the triad of client, work, and therapist.

 

Goals of the method

Resource orientation:

The methodological interventions are selected and dosed in such a way that they promote the inner strength and sensitivity of the individual.

Self-healing powers:

The method supports the natural human ability to achieve homeostasis by creating colors, shapes, forms, and entire images that support the continuous search for and discovery of personal balance.

Presentification:

Since life can only be shaped in the here and now, art therapy places all therapeutic work with images in the context of the person currently creating them. This emphasis in the method gives the person acting a self-determined choice, including in their current approach to the past and future of their life.