How conflicts can be transformed into growth and renewal through creative group processes

Conflict Is Not Necessarily a Sign That a Group Is Broken

These days, I am preparing for an upcoming workshop for the Danish Association of Expressive Arts Therapists (Kunstterapeutforeningen) on creativity, conflict, and group dynamics. This work has got me thinking about how quickly we tend to view conflict as something that must immediately be resolved, removed—or simply ignored.

Human beings are different. And whenever we come together in a group, tensions will naturally arise. The interesting question, therefore, is not just how we avoid conflicts, but how a group can contain and hold them long enough for them to spark positive transformation.

This is where I believe art and expressive arts therapy possess a very special capacity: A great piece of art rarely consists of sameness. Music does not become interesting when every instrument plays the same note. A painting comes to life through contrasts in form, color, rhythm, and intensity. And literature would be quite dull without opposing forces.

Art has the ability to hold multiple positions, emotions, and truths simultaneously within a safe container. We can utilize this in groups. When conflicts are given a tangible form—in a painting, a movement, a sculpture, a role-play, or a collaborative creative process—we can explore them before we even attempt to explain or resolve them. We can begin to notice the roles we step into, the projections we cast onto others, and perhaps also what we personally need to reclaim and bring back home to ourselves.

In this way, our differences can become the raw material for transformation, rather than a threat to the community.

Over time, I have come to view healthy group processes as a distinct movement:
From unconscious unity and conformity → through differentiation and conflict → toward a new and more differentiated wholeness.

The ultimate goal is a community that has grown spacious and accepting enough to embrace the fact that we are not the same—and that we are actually enriched and strengthened by that very truth.

This is some of what we will be exploring together when I facilitate this workshop for the Danish Association of Expressive Arts Therapists in Copenhagen on October 3rd. It is also likely one of the main reasons why, after more than 30 years of working with so many different people in groups, I still find them endlessly fascinating.