Copenhagen & Online
What Is Solution-Focused Art Therapy LOM ?
Solution-Focused Art Therapy LOM is a non-verbal, structured, body- and image-based method that supports people in processing emotions, trauma, anxiety, and other mental health challenges — without the pressure to explain everything in words.
How Solution-Focused Art Therapy LOM
Works
Solution-Focused Art Therapy LOM is a intervention method used within Art Therapy and researched in Switzerland for more than forty years.
A session always begins with your story, your concern, and a calm, supportive conversation around it.
What is your wish? What do you believe about yourself? What would you like to change? Which images still disturb you?
I will then invite you to find an unrelated metaphor, which we will use to transform your concern into a simple and easy-to-paint image.
Through the step-by-step painting process, you may begin to feel something shifting inside you. Emotional tension can release, new perspectives emerge, and the nervous system finds space to settle.
It is not a free painting session but a structured, guided process designed to spark change in both brain and body. The method is grounded in neuroplasticity — the brain’s natural ability to rewire itself. With each brushstroke, inner patterns that may hold you in stress, anxiety, trauma responses, or emotional overload begin to shift.
This approach does not depend on symbolic interpretation or intellectual analysis. Instead, it works directly with the nervous system through visual elements such as contour, shape, surface, and order. These subtle visual “micro-triggers” gently activate emotional release and support the formation of new, healthier neural connections.
Metaphors
In Solution-Focused Art Therapy LOM, you create so-called “metaphor images.” These are neutral, easy to paint, and not directly tied to the actual event—for example, geometric shapes, fruits, vegetables, or pieces of furniture.
The purpose of metaphors is to create a safe distance: they allow you to explore difficulties indirectly through neutral, unrelated images. In doing so, they unconsciously open access to your problem-solving resources. Abstract or overwhelming experiences are transformed into something visible, concrete, and non-threatening, and solutions become easier to visualize.
During the painting process, you connect new and positive emotions to past experiences. In the end, your paintings serve as a bridge between your inner experience and future-oriented change.
The History of Solution-Focused Art Therapy LOM
Lom-International.org describes the history of Solution-Focused Art Therapy LOM like this:
The development of LOM began in 1983 in the course "Dreaming and Painting", in which Bettina Egger and Jörg Merz discovered that certain images offer great relief, while others do not. Since then, LOM has been constantly developed from practical experiences. This process was accompanied by an intensive research process.
Further developments
Systemic work: Even in the first phase there was a specific procedure for clarifying relationships. However, difficulties we carry around with us from our families do not always manifest in a relationship; there are issues passed on from generation to generation and repeated fatefully. There are issues, such as the position one has in a family, that are cemented over and over by other members of the family system. We can paint a picture for the atmosphere of our origin and one for the atmosphere of the system that we ourselves have co-founded.
Then we can return things to the system that do not belong to us: Responsibilities that we have taken on, beliefs that no longer fit, etc. And we can strengthen our own system with what we want and what is good for us.
