Clients’ positive and negative experiences of experiential art therapy group process

•5 negative, 7 contradictory and 8 positive themes of experiences are identified.•Clients’ contradictory experiences indicate art therapeutic change processes.•The quality of contradictory process can hinder or aid art therapeutic outcome.•Negative experiences can facilitate change when integrated with self-reflection.•Clients’ positive experiences dominated in all the phases except in the beginning.

This article analyses participants’ narratives of their experiences of the experiential art therapy group process using computer-aided qualitative content analysis. The research material has been collected from 8 different groups, and consists of 36 narratives which participants have individually written at the end of the one-year-long art therapy process. So far, systematic qualitative research on art therapy user experiences has been rare. The aim of this research is to understand the kind of processes participants experience during different phases of an experiential art therapy group and find common ingredients in their descriptions. The research question is: What kind of positive or negative experiences are participants confronted with during the different phases of the experiential art therapy group process? The results of the study present three levels of content analysis from which five negative, seven contradictory and eight positive themes of clients’ experiences are identified. The contradictory themes, which contain both positive and negative intertwined experiences, were discovered during analysis and it was noticed that they often indicate the participants’ descriptions of art therapeutic change processes. The quality of the experienced processes in the contradictory themes seems thus to be critical in either aiding or hindering therapeutic outcomes.