About the From Beads To You Project

The "From Beads To You" is toolkit based on an existing bead stringing method. In this approach, beads symbolize specific life events, helping to process and communicate these experiences. This method was developed by Lisa Kay, an American art therapist, during her doctoral dissertation. However, due to the lack of an established toolkit, it hasn't gained widespread recognition, making it inaccessible to therapists. Even if it is used, it's often not professional or too cumbersome to implement. "From Beads To You" fills this gap, offering a tool for professionals in the helping professions who are open to projective techniques and who wish to enrich their work by incorporating preverbal content or who are involved in monodrama.

The beads of "From Beads To You" can be used in various ways. In the traditional sense, stringing the beads as an act helps in deepening focus and evokes unconscious content, providing a means of nonverbal self-expression. The activity can be further differentiated by giving specific instructions for stringing, such as "string the path of your life so far," "the process of pregnancy," or "the process of detaching from family." Additionally, the beads can be used independently of stringing, as small handheld objects that participants can arrange, group, and manipulate.

The "From Beads To You" product is available for purchase by anyone, even without therapeutic intent, as the act of selecting, stringing, and creating with the beads is a meditative activity.

Theory

The basis of art therapy is using projective stimuli and artistic activities to trigger emotional processes through association, which the patient might not otherwise encounter. This healing process helps bring to the surface, re-experience, and process content hidden deep within the unconscious, making these experiences part of everyday life. Projective, unstructured, and ambiguous stimuli are what the method works with, and these methods can be active or passive. In an active method, the stimulus might be clay, for example, which the patient shapes based on instruction. In a passive method, the individual doesn’t create anything but simply receives the stimulus. An example of this is the well-known Rorschach test, where the projective stimuli are the 10 inkblots on the cards.

We refer to surfaces, phenomena—anything that evokes inner unconscious content in a person—as projective or associative.

Returning to the bead-stringing method, this is an active projective process where the stimulus is the bead itself. The different shapes, colors, sizes, and weights of the beads are associative for people, and they also evoke tactile memories. Their ability to be strung represents linearity, allowing us to depict life paths or specific life events. Without stringing, they can also be used as small objects with various instructions, such as representing relationship dynamics, individuals, personalities, or emotions through the beads.