Dr Carla van Laar Creative Arts Therapy

25/05/2026

NEW TIMES!
Supervision Studio:
Last Friday of the month 12.30-3pm ONLINE

Hi folks,

a little while ago I posed the question asking if a weekday afternoon session would be of interest and there was an overwhelming

"YES".

So, here it is - the first Friday afternoon session starts this week:
Friday 29th May
12.30 - 3pm

Close off your week and your month with a supportive, practice-led session with like-minded peers from around Australia.

"Knowing through creative experiencing"

In the Supervision Studio, reflection unfolds through attunement and the creation of a shared relational field, through art-making, image, gesture, embodiment, intention, poetry, and story. Words arrive alongside experience and deepen understanding.
The group plays an essential role. Practitioners recognise themselves in each other’s material, and shared practice wisdom forms across disciplines and career stages.

We come to our senses, stay with the art, listen to our heart.

"Returning to centre"

The Supervision Studio runs fortnightly on Sundays and Monthly on Fridays, in small groups (maximum six participants) and is PACFA-recognised supervision.

Over time, Supervision Studio becomes a place practitioners return to that helps them to remain connected to their professional centre and their community of support — a place where their work can be felt, expressed, explored, processed, shared and integrated, and a place where helping professionals themselves can receive care, can be held and nurtured, before they return to accompanying others.

Already registered? Just book yourself in.

Interested to join? New members always welcome, contact Carla@carlavanlaar.com

or follow this link for more details:
https://carlavanlaar.com/where-values-meet-practice-inside-the-supervision-studio/

22/05/2026

“POWER IN THE PRESENT:
VALUING THE ARTS NOW”

Last week I was very privileged to attend this important conversation.

It is deeply heartening to know that all over Australia creative practitioners are connecting, gathering together, sharing ideas, knowledge and wisdom, and generating a collective voice.

I highly recommend having a listen to the four incredible speakers, with the opening words by much loved Infigenous Midwife and Healing Arts Practitioner Marianne Wobcke, always profoundly resonant and moving with her visionary clarity that cuts through illusion and gets to the heart.

“

DDCA NATIONAL ONLINE FORUM
POWER IN THE PRESENT: VALUING THE ARTS NOW

On 19 May, 2026 the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA) held a National Forum, continuing our advocacy work to secure artistic practices within and outside the university as fundamental to a healthy and thriving society.

In context of the national and global events which have questioned and challenged the place of arts in our societies we take as our focal point what it is that we gain by understanding artistic thinking/doing/being as irreducible to our collective thriving on this planet.

Part 1 of the event included four guest speakers who spoke for 10 minutes each on the key theme. The four speakers were:
Marianne Wobcke (Griffith University);
Justin O’Connor (Adelaide University, ACPRA);
Robert Walton (Melbourne University);
Naomi Sunderland (CARI, DDCA Board)

“

View the recording here:

DDCA NATIONAL ONLINE FORUMPOWER IN THE PRESENT: VALUING THE ARTS NOW On 19 May, 2026 the Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts (DDCA) h...

22/05/2026

I'm looking forward to the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia - PACFA's Council meeting tomorrow where I get to represent all the wonderful work being done by the College of Creative and Experiential Therapies (CCET).

Over the past six months, CCET has continued growing as a professional home for Creative and Experiential Therapists within PACFA — strengthening community, advocacy, professional identity, research, visibility, and connection across the sector.

CCET’s growth reflects the ongoing contribution of our volunteer Leadership Group, our engaged members, our presenters, collaborators, and the many practitioners working creatively and experientially across mental health, disability, education, arts and community contexts.

I’m proud of what this community is building together.

Thank you to everyone contributing to this work — especially our committed Leadership Group members:

Deputy Convenor Tara Harriden, CPD Coordinator Sandy Buchanan, CCET Exchange Networking Coordinator Cody Fisher, Online Community Engagement Coordinator Fiona Hocking, Webpage and CCET Gallery Coordinator Alana Stewart, and regular members of the CCET Membership Assessment Panels, Janeen Lorraine Cameron and Diana Sands.

As Convenor of CCET, it continues to be a privilege to help cultivate this growing professional community.

Here’s a snapshot of some of our recent activity and growth.

21/05/2026

ART IS A LANGUAGE.
THERAPY IS THERAPY.

We can use art in many different contexts, to communicate different things.

Like talking.

We can talk in private with our friends and family for fun. We can talk at work to collaborate and get things done. We can talk to learn, pray, advocate, stimulate political change, or to convince, manipulate, perform power, or to sell.

And we can also talk in therapy, for personal development and healing.

However, we wouldn't usually say "I was in a social conversation yesterday at work - how lucky am I to be doing therapy at work?"

Yet, in a meeting I attended last week, someone actually did say "We did a paint'n'sip session yesterday at work - we are lucky to get a bit of art therapy".

If we consider art to be a language, a way of expressing and communicating, we can better understand that this form of communication can be used across many domains, while belonging exclusively to none of them.

The contexts and the domains themselves are different, and hold different purposes and intentions.

So, let's clarify something...

YES - creativity contributes to wellbeing across many domains,
AND - therapeutic practice is a distinct relational, ethical and professional context.

Because therapy involves:
responsibility, confidentiality, safe relational holding, ethical decision-making, scope of practice, responding to distress, relational accountability, and professional obligations.

A paint-and-sip facilitator is not typically holding:
cultural safety, trauma sensitivity, neuroinclusive practice, duty of care, self-harm and su***de risk, relational rupture, ethical documentation, or clinical supervision.

Just as:
a friendly conversation over coffee is different from psychotherapy, even though both involve talking.

So, while a paint'n'sip session may well be an an enjoyable social event, so is going out for lunch - but that doesn't make it therapy.

18/05/2026

Good morning! Another week is waking, stretching out its arms, having a yawn and about to get out of bed and start happening!

I’ll be showing up online every morning this week Monday - Friday at 9.30am in the Creative Flow Open Studio.

I would love to welcome a couple of new members into the space this week to practice alongside.

Creative Flow Open Studio is a deeply simple concept. We log in to a shared online virtual space, each from our own real places, I do this for half an hour at the same time each day - others join as frequently as they choose to.

Once we are together, for 2-3 minutes I guide a gentle grounding and mindful movement to help us land in the here and now, and to generate a collective field. This ritual also serves to strengthen our creative muscle memory, so that each time we arrive and go through this process, we are able to enter into the process with continuity and ease.

After this brief guided welcome, each of us moves into spending the rest of the half hour working on our own creative projects in our own space. We simply keep each other company in shared presence. There’s no talking, no instructions, no tuition, just company to be creative. Yes, it’s body doubling for creativity.

A minute before it’s time to finish, I let people know and invite a moment to notice the effects of this creative time, and to witness each other’s creative work - not by talking, just witnessing.

It’s a simple process and the depth of it is in the commitment and dependability.

I’m committed to showing up, and you can depend on me being here.

I’d love you to join me.

Follow this link for more info and to book in:

https://carlavanlaar.com/creative-flow-open-studio/

starts today at 9.30am - just $10 to drop in casually, or $25 for the whole week. 😊

16/05/2026

I’ve just uploaded my recent series of four Creative Flow paintings to my online gallery The East Coast Arts Trail

Follow the link to enjoy viewing - and remember to contact me directly for your 30% discount off listed prices if you fall in love and wish to purchase any of my artworks.

https://www.theeastcoastartstrail.com.au/artist/carlavanlaar

13/05/2026

Yes. Arts and Cultural engagement slows biological aging - meaning it increases health, independence and quality of life, reducing the burden of disease and aged care on public health systems, national budgets and tax payer pockets.

In the face of overwhelming evidence for the efficacy and value of the arts and culture as a preventative public health resource, any national budget that ignores, omits or neglects to mention arts and culture is not only deeply underwhelming, but harmfully artsphobic.

🐢 “Our study provides the first evidence that arts and cultural engagement is linked to a slower pace of biological ageing.”

The arts are demonstrably, measurably, biologically good for us.

A necessity, not a luxury 💜

07/05/2026

What do you see?

Two spaces where people come seeking care, support, and change.

One is commonly associated with "intervention" - a medical theatre. The other is my creative therapies studio - a space I associate with containment, relationship, reflection, imagination, and creative process.

Across mental health and therapeutic discourse, the same language is often used to describe the very different kinds of care that occur in spaces like these.

Why?

Let's critically and reflexively ponder on the word “intervention” for a moment.

What assumptions about power, expertise, and healing are embedded inside that word? What does it imply about who the expert is, and who is doing what to someone else? Not with, but to.

When we slow down and really feel the worldview embedded in the word, it reveals a particular kind of power relationship:
Someone intervenes upon someone else.

The word carries assumptions of expertise, correction, management, and control.

What gets lost when relational, creative, and experiential practices are described through mechanistic or medicalised terms?

What becomes invisible when we assimilate descriptions of our practice into the vernacular of dominant paradigms?

Many words like "intervention", "treatment", "assessment" and "regulation" have entered our therapeutic professions through the institutional languages of medicine, bureaucracy, behavioural science, and professionalisation itself.

These words are adopted to perform legitimacy within systems that value measurable action, replicable techniques, hierarchy, and standardisation.

Sometimes, they can be seen as an expression of artsphobia - the socially constructed fear and marginalisation of the arts and creativity - internalised as professional insecurity. Those common words fail to describe what many therapists, artists, educators, and community practitioners are actually doing. They perform an epistemic injustice by rendering what we really do invisible.

In Creative & Experiential Therapies, so much of our work is not linear or top-down.

We sense.
We relate.
We create.

We improvise responsively within relationship.

We design spaces where imagination, expression, flexibility, and meaning can take shape.

Our work is so very different to “delivering an intervention.”

What we really do is our strength, and worth describing with care, using words that reveal and make visible the combined power of the arts & creativity along with a therapeutic allied health relationship, to support health, promote healing, strengthen connection and enhance life.

So, how do we choose words that contribute to epistemological repair?

It's not that hard - "therapeutic intervention" becomes "therapeutic response". "Assess" becomes "understand". "Treatment plan" becomes "Therapeutic plan".

What are some words that you choose, to better reflect what you really do?

06/05/2026

Your friendly fortnightly reminder that Supervision Studio is coming up again this Sunday 10am - 12.30pm

Supervision Studio:

Holding our work with care - Where values meet practice.
The Supervision Studio has been running consistently since 2019, bringing together creative and experiential therapists, counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers, and spiritual care practitioners from across Australia.

This is a small online group space for practitioners working in trauma-sensitive, relational, creative, and more-than-verbal ways. A space to reconnect with practice, creativity, meaning, and the parts of ourselves that can become stretched or lost within the contexts we work in.

Sessions include:
• guided experiential arrival
• creative inquiry and art making
• reflective group process
• witnessing and creative responses
• spaciousness for insight and meaning to emerge relationally.

Groups are capped at six participants and many people return regularly, while others join when they need support, reflection, or reconnection.

🗓 Every second Sunday
⏰ 10am – 12.30pm (AEST/AEDT)

🆕 New additional sessions:
Last Friday of each month
⏰ 12.30pm – 3pm

Online | PACFA-recognised supervision hours

New members are always welcome.

Contact Dr Carla to join carla@carlavanlaar.com

05/05/2026

Not a class - but it is a group.
Not a workshop - but it is a space.
Not therapy - but it does support wellbeing.

So what is Creative Flow Open Studio?

Sometimes having a consistent time and a bit of company is enough to help us show up to the parts of life that nourish us.

If you’ve been curious about Creative Flow Open Studio, this FAQ gives you a clearer sense of what it is.

A simple, shared, online space to spend half an hour in your own creative practice.

Weekday mornings.
Join from anywhere.
No experience needed.
You’re very welcome.

Learn more and join at the link below - or scan the code at the end of the FAQ.
https://carlavanlaar.com/creative-flow-open-studio/