Exploring Emotions and Psychological ContainmentHolding & Witnessing
As part of our ongoing advocacy and outreach efforts, our team had the privilege of facilitating a series of workshops for a diverse group of participants in Changchun, China, bringing together 74 individuals aged 19 to 60, spanning both young and older adults of various backgrounds.
moments of reflective conversations happening during the workshop
About Holding & Witnessing
“Holding & Witnessing” is an art therapy–informed workshop designed to facilitate participants’ exploration of their emotional experiences and internal psychological containment processes.
The workshop comprises two interrelated components grounded in psychodynamic and expressive therapies frameworks. The first centres on the visualisation and externalisation of participants’ psychological containment spaces, drawing on Bion’s concept of containment as a means of holding and processing emotional experience. Through art-making, participants are supported in rendering these internal holding environments into tangible form.
Checking-in with their internal states by visualising their emotions through colours, shapes, lines, and textures
Exploring psychological containment through creative processes, externalising their inner landscapes
The second component extends this process by inviting participants to explore the contents of their internal spaces. This includes personal experiences, internalised roles, and emergent contradictions, with particular attention to how these are symbolised, negotiated, and integrated through the creative process. The art-making process thus serves as both a reflective and transformative medium for meaning-making.
A total of 37 valid evaluation forms were collected following the workshop of 74 attendees (some individuals departed after the first half of the workshop due to prior personal commitments), with participants expressing exceptional levels of satisfaction across all core indicators, including overall programme quality, content relevance, emotional benefit, facilitator effectiveness, venue and materials, and willingness to participate again and recommend the workshop.
Participants experienced meaningful personal growth through emotional exploration, creative expression, and share reflection, reinforcing the therapeutic value of the programme.
Individuals felt safe and psychologically supported, which allowed for them to process their own personal experiences through creative art-making and reflective sharing.
Crossing borders and languages, we journeyed with participants from different walks of lives and of varying ages to understand their own capacity.
