CREATIVE
SPACE
CREATE A CHARACTER
Creating a character to represent
our mental health conditions can...
encourage us to see our mental health difficulties as something outside of who we are.
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help us practise helpful recovery skills such as compassion, patience and self-love.
I first created Olivia in 2016 when I was really struggling with OCD. OCD made me feel like I was a bad person, it made me feel sad, lonely and sometimes very frightened. Creating Olivia to represent my OCD allowed me to realise that I wasn’t a bad person. It taught me that OCD was something I HAD, not something I was. It helped me realise that I was a whole person separate to OCD. And knowing that made me feel much better.
If you’d like to read a more detailed introduction to Olivia check this out! Although please note this may not be suitable for you younger readers.
Olivia also helped me practice self-kindness and self-compassion. When my OCD was bad, or I had upsetting thoughts, I tried to imagine it was Olivia who was struggling and thought about what I’d say to her to help her feel better. I used what I’d learned with Olivia to practise showing myself compassion and it really helped my recovery.
I created an Olivia for everyday OCD symptoms but I also created a different version, one that represented my very upsetting and frightening OCD symptoms. This allowed me to practise showing compassion to something that didn’t look cute and that frightened me a little.
Pics of both
We now draw onto an ipad to create Olivia but she used to be hand drawn, here’s what she looked like!
ME AND OLIVIA
MEET SOME OTHER CHARACTERS
You can design any sort of character you’d like.. monster, animal, alien, person.
Here are some of the other characters we’ve developed over the years.
DESIGNING YOUR OWN CHARACTER
DRAWING
Here are some questions to help you design your character.
When I designed Olivia, I chose features that represented both OCD and Anxiety.
If you’d like to you can include characteristics that resemble your condition in your character too! I also chose her to be cute so she didn’t look quite so frightening when I was already feeling a bit frightened.
remember you can also add an alternative version for when
So I chose for her to have big ears and eyes so she could listen out for danger, and looooooong legs so she can run away quickly. I have blue eyes, so i gave her the same feature. I like art/crafts, sports and music. So I sometimes include her doing hobbies like that.
WRITING
