Content warning: mentions of intrusive thoughts.
The power of creativity and communication lead to a vital improvement in Karim, a service user at The Nest. Karim is a university student who self-referred to The Nest to better support himself as he navigated issues with previous trauma and intrusive thoughts. With support from The Nest, Karim developed his social skills and better strategies for challenging critical thoughts about himself and others.
First relocating without his parents to the UK in 2020, Karim found it difficult to communicate and open up to others. Although ambitious and professionally driven, Karim often dealt with critical thinking of himself and others, and used social media excessively. He requested support and advice from practitioners at The Nest to improve his time management and social relationships, and for an opportunity to speak about his anxiety.
Over a four-month period at The Nest, Karim engaged in a range of creative methods to visually identify his location of self, events and related emotions. Initially, Karim and a practitioner from the Nest focused on building a trusted therapeutic relationship and exploring Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) techniques to provide structure and guidance. These allowed Karim to clearly express his goals, his needs and his boundaries, simultaneously allowing for practitioners to best understand how to support him. Later, the two focused on creating strategies to develop his social skills and challenged the critical thoughts Karim had reported feeling about himself and others. Karim attended Dance Movement Therapy, using creative methods to better understand himself, significant events in his life and the connected emotions that might come from said events.
Alongside The Nest’s practitioners, Karim used his artistic skills to engage in a variety of creative counselling methods. Karim had the opportunity to create collages and timelines to better understand himself and his experiences, visualizing and subsequently navigating his feelings.
In addition to these, Karim used the “small world” visualisation method, using small figurines to illustrate his relationships. All part of a tailored approach by The Nest practitioners, these creative strategies allowed Karim to visualise his internal world.
By the end of Karim’s four-month plan with The Nest, Karim reported feeling “proud” and “not feeling empty”. Where Karim had previously experienced moderate psychological distress prior to The Nest’s intervention, he reported feeling his level of psychological distress had returned to a healthy range by the end of the intervention. Speaking to a practitioner, his body language and verbal feedback suggested he was comparatively feeling mentally better than he had done pre-invention. Reflecting on his growth and improvement in self-confidence, Karim stated that the “talking” was helpful, and expressed changes in his social life outside of work and education.
Although throughout the four month period he was often busy with work and university, Karim began going to weekly social events and to church, for the first time since being in the UK.
In total, Karim attended nine total sessions at The Nest Southwark. His professional ambition remained strong, and he said he could see himself studying to be a therapist. Karim’s journey with The Nest highlights the importance of clearly communicating, setting and implementing boundaries and therapy goals. The impact of this tailored approach was clear – through their communication with Karim, practitioners at the Nest could match his support needs.