Books by Dr. Cathy Malchiodi
Cathy Malchiodi, PhD, Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process
Learn More About Dr. Malchiodi
Presentations & Trainings
Cathy is an internationally sought-after speaker who has given over 750 invited keynotes, workshops, and courses around the world. She has trained thousands of professionals in the fields of mental health, healthcare, and education in expressive arts therapy, traumatic stress, and somatic and sensory-based practices. Cathy’s experience includes over 35 years of work with interpersonal violence and adverse childhood experiences; posttraumatic stress and complex traumatic stress; medical trauma; disaster relief; and the impact of trauma on neurodiversity and neurodivergence in children, teens, and adults. Her work is widely recognized for integrating creative, relational, and body-based approaches in ways that make complex clinical concepts accessible.
Publications & Media
Cathy has authored numerous foundational texts in expressive arts therapy, art therapy, traumatic stress, arts in healthcare, and innovative approaches to self-care and wellness. She has served as editor for leading journals and has published more than 100 articles and book chapters. Her articles on Psychology Today Online have reached over 6.5 million readers, covering a wide range of topics in the arts and health, trauma, creativity, neuroscience, and integrative health. Her YouTube Expressive Arts Therapy Channel is a widely viewed source for contemporary, innovative, and creative practices to support trauma recovery. Her writing and media consistently bridge rigorous scholarship with accessible guidance.
Approach & Philosophy
Cathy’s work as a psychotherapist emphasizes the restorative benefits of arts-based approaches in trauma recovery and health and wellness. Her research on innovative practices has led her to develop programming and models of care that support regulation and resilience through expressive arts therapy and sensory integration. Dr. Malchiodi has developed several trauma-informed frameworks including the Circle of Capacity, a concept that reframes trauma recovery a process of expanding regulation and recuperative experiences. Her work with caregivers and children emphasizes Restorative Attachment™, a framework for integrating expressive and sensory processing strategies to support healthy attachment throughout the lifespan.
Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process
This seminal book is the defining manual on expressive arts therapy and traumatic stress, deeply informed by neurobiology, research, and decades of clinical practice. It synthesizes the breadth of research on trauma and the brain and presents an innovative, practical framework for treating trauma through the expressive arts. It illustrates how sensory-based and creative strategies support safety, regulation, embodied awareness, resilience, mindfulness, meaning making, and posttraumatic growth.
Handbook of Expressive Arts Therapy
This authoritative and comprehensive volume explains how to integrate movement, sound, art, play, imagery, drama, and other multisensory practices into psychotherapy. Cathy Malchiodi and other leading experts demonstrate ways to combine a wide range of expressive approaches to help clients explore somatic awareness, feelings, and thoughts that are often difficult to access verbally. Rich case examples illustrate what these modalities look like in action, providing practitioners with strategies they can readily apply in work with individuals of all ages. The book interweaves theory and research with practical recommendations for implementing expressive arts therapy to enhance communication and to support regulation, attachment, trauma recovery, and sensory integration.
Creative Interventions with Traumatized Children
This seminal text is rich with case material and artwork samples and demonstrates a range of creative approaches for facilitating children’s emotional reparation and recovery from trauma. Contributors include experienced practitioners of play, art, music, movement and drama therapies, bibliotherapy, and integrative therapies, who describe step-by-step strategies for working with individual children, families, and groups. The case-based format makes the book especially practical and user-friendly. Specific types of stressful experiences addressed include parental loss, child abuse, accidents, family violence, bullying, and mass trauma. Broader approaches to promoting resilience and preventing posttraumatic problems in children at risk are also presented.
“Malchiodi is a widely read and well-respected art therapist whose work on the treatment of childhood trauma is exemplary. This book addresses the rich array of therapies to which terrified youngsters respond. For the newcomer to the field who wishes to learn how drawings, doll play, music, relaxation, and storytelling may be used after devastating events–or for the old hand at working with kids who wants a good review of what’s new–this is just the book.”
–Lenore C. Terr, MD, author of Magical Moments of Change
What to Do When Children Clam Up in Psychotherapy: Interventions to Facilitate Communication
Therapists who work with children and adolescents are frequently faced with non-responsive, withdrawn, or completely nonverbal clients. This volume brings together expert clinicians who explore why 4- to 16-year-olds may have difficulty talking and provide creative ways to facilitate communication. A variety of play, art, movement, and animal-assisted therapies, as well as trauma-focused therapy with adolescents, are illustrated with vivid clinical material. Contributors give particular attention to the neurobiological effects of trauma, how they manifest in the body when children “clam up,” and how to help children self-regulate and feel safe. Chapters conclude recommended practices for engaging hard-to-reach children that therapists can immediately try out in their own work.
Creative Arts and Play Therapy for Attachment Problems
This book vividly shows how creative arts therapies and play therapy can help children recover from experiences of disrupted or insecure attachment. Leading practitioners explore the impact of early relationship difficulties on children’s emotions and behavior. Rich case material brings to life a range of therapeutic approaches that utilize art, music, movement, drama, creative writing, and play. The volume covers ways to address attachment issues with individuals of different ages, as well as their caregivers. Chapters clearly explain the various techniques and present applications for specific populations, including complex trauma survivors.
“When children are ‘captured’ by living in a traumatic environment, it takes the efforts of a brave and knowledgeable therapist to help release them from their psychological bondage. This book brings that insight to fruition in an approach to attachment-focused play and arts therapy that is grounded in knowledge of developmental neuroscience, and it does so with insight and wisdom. It should be required reading for any professional who steps into the world of children exposed to the dark side of human experience.”
-James Garbarino, PhD, Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology, Loyola University Chicago
“This book is a gem! Integrating attachment theory, recent advances in neuroscience, and clinical wisdom, the editors have made an outstanding contribution to the field. Contributors weave together theory, research, and practice. Readers gain a deeper appreciation for the rich nuances of creative arts and play therapy as powerful means of helping survivors of attachment trauma. Every chapter contains practical techniques for addressing a wide range of therapeutic issues, and vignettes that bring the concepts to life. Clinicians of all levels of experience will find reading this book to be enlightening, moving, and inspiring.”
-Lennis G. Echterling, PhD, Director and Professor of Counseling, James Madison University
The Art Therapy Sourcebook
This book will provide you with an overview of the field of art therapy and explain power of art making for personal growth, insight, and transformation. It will introduce you to what art therapy is, where is came from, and why it is a powerful way of knowing yourself and an equally powerful way of healing. It will also familiarize you with some of the many ways art making as therapy can help you authentically express yourself, reduce stress, confront and resolve trauma or loss, and enhance your health and well-being.
Since our ancestors began drawing on cave walls, humans have intuitively known that expressing emotions through art was healthy. Now, 20,000 years later, Cathy Malchiodi brings us a smart overview of the use of art as a therapeutic tool. In this concise and easy-to-read book, Malchiodi treats the reader to fascinating case studies and valuable pointers in helping us to open up and explore our nature creatively.
— Shaun McNiff, PhD, ATR
Throughout history artistic expression has been recognized as a catalyst for healing. Art is an expression of mind and spirit, and cannot be left out of our equation of healing. Cathy Malchiodi’s fascinating book shows how modern art therapy is being employed as a potent healthcare intervention. — Larry Dossey, MD. Author, Prayer is Good Medicine and Healing Words
What makes mankind unique is not our ability to reason but our use of symbols. Read this excellent resource and learn to communicate and experience life fully.
— Bernie Siegel, MD.
Handbook of Art Therapy (Second Edition)
Are you a professional or student looking for a comprehensive book on the field of art therapy? This is the text for you– often used by new professionals to review the major principles of the field of art therapy. This essential handbook provides a complete and practical overview of art therapy: how it works, how it can be used, and with whom. Demonstrated are interventions for children, adolescents, and adults facing a variety of clinical problems and life challenges. Case-based chapters from leading practitioners illuminate major theoretical perspectives, including psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, developmental, and other approaches. Also examined is what current research in psychology and neuroscience can tell us about the scientific basis for art therapy. Discussing applications in individual psychotherapy, couple and family treatment, and group work, the Handbook includes over 100 samples of drawings and other artwork. The process of art therapy is illustrated in helping clients manage and cope with such problems as trauma, sexual abuse, developmental and learning disabilities, drug and alcohol issues, serious mental illness, and medical illness.
Books & Media
Bestseller
Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process
“This book is at once encyclopedic in scope and profoundly poetic, meticulously observed and heartfelt—as scientific as it is creative. Malchiodi masterfully demonstrates how the expressive arts can mobilize the body and fire the imagination, and thereby help to restore vitality, self-efficacy, mastery, and self-expression.”
—Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD, author of bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score; Founder and President, Trauma Research Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts
Authoritative Text in the Field
Handbook of Expressive Arts Therapy
“Malchiodi and colleagues elegantly describe how expressive arts therapy can facilitate healing of brain, mind, and body, by fostering social connection, emotion regulation, rhythm, and play. These approaches have been used for centuries and have the ability to aid in healing traumatized individuals and communities. A ‘must read’!”
—Ruth A. Lanius, MD, PhD, Department of Psychiatry, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Bestseller
Creative Interventions with Traumatized Children
“A well-researched and well-informed book to therapists working in schools with children of displaced, disenfranchised survivors of war and disaster and those working with families around the world who are struggling to make sense of their traumatizing experiences….This book is packed with suggested activities for therapists to help restore the child’s sense of safety and ability to function creatively and spontaneously.”
—Child and Adolescent Mental Health (on the first edition)
Cathy Malchiodi, PhD, LPCC, LPAT, REAT
An internationally known psychotherapist and expressive arts therapist, Dr. Cathy Malchiodi has helped shape the field of traumatic stress through her decades of work with children, adults, families, and communities. Cathy is the author of numerous publications including several bestselling books that have become standards in the fields of expressive arts therapy, art therapy, trauma recovery, and creative approaches to clinical practice.
Dr. Malchiodi is a popular presenter, delivering more than 750 invited keynotes and workshops around the world. She is the founder and executive director of the Trauma-Informed Practices and Expressive Arts Therapy Institute, a source of education and professional development for over 30,000 psychotherapists, counselors, creative arts therapists, somatic educators, and coaches. Cathy has held seven academic appointments and is the recipient of many awards including Kennedy Center Honors, research grants, and several university fellowships.
Dr. Malchiodi promotes a capacity-focused, neurodiversity-affirming approach to traumatic stress grounded in evidence-informed expressive arts therapy and sensory integration. Drawing on principles of EMDR, somatic therapy, arts therapies, and sensory processing, she developed Bilateral Movement Desensitization and Resensitization, an innovative model to facilitate trauma recovery and restore health and well-being.
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Continuing Education and Professional Development
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