The language of expression
Most people are trained to treat words as the primary language of experience. We learn to explain ourselves through speaking and writing, and that matters, verbal processing can organize experience, increase insight, and strengthen communication (Pennebaker, 1997; Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016).
And yet, words are not the whole story.
Human experience is encoded and communicated through multiple “languages”—sensory, imagistic, embodied, relational, and symbolic. When someone says, “I don’t know how to explain it,” the experience may be real and emotionally organized, but not readily available in verbal form (Bucci, 1997, 2021).
Expression comes in many forms
A useful way to conceptualize expression is to recognize several channels operating at once:
Verbal–symbolic: speaking, writing, naming, narrative meaning-making
Nonverbal–symbolic: image, metaphor, symbol, gesture, music
Subsymbolic/embodied: sensation, tension/release, rhythm, impulse, posture, breath
Multiple Code Theory and the referential process framework describe how emotion can be held in subsymbolic and nonverbal symbolic formats that are only partly connected to words, meaning a person may feel something clearly without being able to articulate it linearly (Bucci, 1997, 2021).
Why many people live mostly in verbal expression
Modern life privileges cognitive-verbal output: school rewards essays, workplaces reward meetings and emails, and social belonging often depends on coherent narrative. Over time, many people become highly fluent in explaining their experience while becoming less practiced in sensing it, symbolizing it, or allowing it to emerge without immediate “sense-making” (Bucci, 2021).
This verbal fluency can also become a bottleneck when emotional experience is rapid, diffuse, shame-guarded, somatically encoded, or implicitly stored. In these situations, staying exclusively in language can unintentionally keep therapy in the realm of description rather than transformation (Schore, 2022).
How the arts can reach the unconscious more fully than cognition alone
The arts, drawing, painting, clay, collage, movement, music, do not simply “illustrate” what someone already knows. They can surface material that is emotionally active but not yet verbally formulated (Weinfeld-Yehoudayan et al., 2024).
A consistent finding across creative arts therapies scholarship is that artmaking supports therapeutic factors such as embodiment, concretization (making the internal tangible), and symbolism/metaphor, which can externalize experiences that are not easily verbalized (de Witte et al., 2021).
Why art accesses implicit layers of experience
Artmaking is often:
Embodied: sensory-motor engagement (pressure, texture, rhythm) shapes affective regulation (de Witte et al., 2021).
Associative rather than linear: images connect by felt meaning rather than logic (Bucci, 2021).
Symbolic: metaphor can carry complex emotional truth without immediate verbal precision (de Witte et al., 2021).
Integrative: the nonverbal can later be translated into language, without forcing premature closure (Bucci, 2021; Weinfeld-Yehoudayan et al., 2024).
From a clinical planning standpoint, the Expressive Therapies Continuum (ETC) provides a widely used framework for how different media and directives engage kinesthetic/sensory, perceptual/affective, cognitive, and symbolic levels—helping clinicians match art processes to therapeutic goals (Hinz, 2019).
Words and art are partners
This is not an argument against talk therapy or reflective writing. Expressive writing has a substantial evidence base, including meta-analytic support for small overall benefits with meaningful variability by context and individual factors (Frattaroli, 2006; Pennebaker, 1997).
Rather, the clinical value is often in sequencing and integration:
Create (nonverbal): allow symbol, image, and sensation to emerge without over-explaining (de Witte et al., 2021).
Witness (relational): have experience received and held, supporting regulation and meaning-making (Schore, 2022).
Name (verbal): translate implicit experience into language when it is ready (Bucci, 2021).
Practical ways to explore the “languages” of expression
1) Five-minute symbol
Choose one feeling you can’t explain. Make a single image for it (shape, line, color). Give it a one-word title. Symbolic externalization is a documented change mechanism across arts therapies (de Witte et al., 2021).
2) Two-channel check-in
Write one sentence: “My mind says…” Then draw for one minute: “My body says…” Notice differences without correcting them (Bucci, 2021).
3) Metaphor collage
Select images that “pull” you without planning. Arrange them. Afterwards ask: “What does this collage know that I haven’t said out loud yet?” (Weinfeld-Yehoudayan et al., 2024).
Trauma-informed note on pacing
Because the arts can bypass verbal defenses, they can also activate intense implicit material; pacing, grounding, and containment are essential (Schore, 2022; de Witte et al., 2021).
References
Bucci, W. (1997). Symptoms and symbols: A multiple code theory of somatization. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 17(2), 151–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/07351699709534117
Bucci, W. (2021). Overview of the referential process: The operation of language within and between people. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 50(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-021-09759-2
de Witte, M., Orkibi, H., Zarate, R., Karkou, V., Sajnani, N., Malhotra, B., Ho, R. T. H., Kaimal, G., Baker, F. A., & Koch, S. C. (2021). From therapeutic factors to mechanisms of change in the creative arts therapies: A scoping review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 678397. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.678397
Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 823–865. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.823
Hinz, L. D. (2019). Expressive therapies continuum: A framework for using art in therapy (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429299339
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00403.x
Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening up by writing it down: How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain (3rd ed.). The Guilford Press.
Schore, A. N. (2022). Right brain-to-right brain psychotherapy: Recent scientific and clinical advances. Annals of General Psychiatry, 21(1), Article 46. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12991-022-00420-3
Weinfeld-Yehoudayan, A., Czamanski-Cohen, J., Cohen, M., & colleagues. (2024). A theoretical model of emotional processing in visual artmaking and art therapy. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 90, 102196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2024.102196
