Exploring Entitlement through Art Therapy

Next quarter we are starting a new Art Therapy group to address the high risk factor for sex offenders of excessive entitlement.  We ran a pilot session with a group of patients and asked them to draw a time they felt excessively entitled and how they handled it. They were all able to think of an incident right away, and a few of them were able to relate feeling entitled to committing their crimes. Other examples included one patient who wanted to cash a check at a bank, but was told he had to wait until it cleared, so he got angry and yelled at the staff until he was asked to leave, and another patient who plays sports and feels entitled to take his anger out on other players. We asked the patients for feedback on how to make the group more appealing to patients since it is a challenging topic and many patients may be in denial of being entitled. It was helpful to have actual patient input, and to see how well the patients could do with the topic.