The Alchemy of Art: Creative Expression and Healing

The Alchemy of Art:

Creative Expression and Healing

by Douglas Eby

Creative expression can transform our painful reactions to traumatic situations, providing renewed strength of our identity and a way to give voice to difficult feelings.

Art that we create - or even made by others - can remodel our inner realities.

Some think art needs to have that kind of impact to be worthwhile. Franz Kafka wrote, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.. that affect us like a disaster... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Clinical and forensic psychologist Dr. Stephen Diamond says creativity “is one of humankind's healthiest inclinations, one of our greatest attributes,” and explains in his book, "Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity," that our impulse to be creative "can be understood to some degree as the subjective struggle to give form, structure and constructive expression to inner and outer chaos and conflict... for meeting and redeeming one's devils and demons."

A number of actors and other artists have talked about this kind of “constructive expression.”

Meryl Streep has said acting “has to do with working out private passions that are almost inscrutable to me.. I just get to work out all my murderous thoughts and my weaknesses and my failures and things I don't want to do as a parent or work out on the family.

"I need [acting] as an outlet. I love it. It feeds my imagination. It connects me to understanding.”

Sally Field was 17 when she won an audition for Gidget and later said, "Before, I had always felt so trapped. Acting saved my life."

Charlize Theron as a teen saw her mother shoot her father in self defense, reportedly after he had threatened to kill them both with a shotgun.

She said in a 2004 interview with Diane Sawyer for Dateline that her work has helped her deal with it.

"I think acting has healed me. I get to let it out. I get to say it and feel it in my work and I think that's why I don't go through my life walking with this thing, and suffering."

In a later newspaper interview she added more perspectives on her experience.

“I don’t know how to say this without sounding strange,” she said. “But I feel like having this tragedy at such a young age has given me a leg up from other people. Because, man, from 16, I knew the value of life and I knew how quickly it could be taken away. And from that moment on, I made a choice to either swim or to drown, you know?”

Theron commented on other misconceptions surrounding her attitude to the tragedy. “People want to think that I am this tortured soul, that my work is drawn only from this one well.

"And though I would never sit here and say that it didn’t mark me, or mould me into the person that I am, my life has had many painful journeys and heartbreaks since my father died, many of which I draw on for my work.”

[From Charlize Theron on playing a self-mutilating sex addict in The Burning Plain, by Kevin Maher, The Sunday Times, March 12, 2009.]

Like a number of other powerful actors, Charles Dutton has prison experience, in jail at 17 for murder. He developed an interest in theater, and after his release was accepted at the Yale School of Drama.

Speaking of prison, in her book Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential, Marylou Kelly Streznewski says that gifted people “form a disproportionately larger portion of the prison population, perhaps as much as 20%... in contrast to the 3 to 5% of the general public. Is the conflict created by being ‘different’ connected to antisocial attitudes and behaviors? Do they get into trouble because it is fun? Or interesting? Or a clever game? Does crime have its roots in deep hurts?”

Those “deep hurts” can also fuel creative projects. Director Allison Anders made her film "Things Behind the Sun" as a way to deal with her rape.

Native American painter Roxanne Chinook has had personal experiences of trauma, including rape and family violence.

She says her art helps healing from the traumas of her past: “The process of creating strengthens and restores my spirit.”

[From the page Healing and art.]

Rosanne Cash deals with the deaths of both her mother and father, Johnny, in her album "Black Cadillac," and noted in a Los Angeles Times interview: "I'm not the first person to make an album about death; I'm not even the first person in my family.

"My dad made music about his own death coming. He was an artist, and he could use his own life in an unsentimental way to make art. He was unafraid. For the rest of us that could be hard. But I understand it. And I learned from it."

"An artist makes art to save her life."

HEALING THE CHILD WHO DIDN’T SPEAK

Marlene Azoulai writes, "I was first introduced to Art Therapy while in a psychiatric institution. There, I learned that when there are no words, there can be pictures.

"I learned that an artist is not necessarily someone who has studied art, but one who has something to say, and the courage to say it. I learned that an artist is someone who makes art to save her life.

"I have Dissociative Identity Disorder - DID/MPD, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. I am also bipolar. I do not consider my being a multiple to be a disorder, however. I see it as an elaborate system that my/our psyche devised, in order to deal with severe trauma."

She goes on to quote a passage:

"If you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." --Jesus, from The Gnostic Teachings.

Azoulai adds, "I do a lot of what I call 'shadow-work', both in my writing and art-making.

"I find my self/ves identifying and owning my demons. Creating my/our mythos, out of the icons we have un-earthed from within our selves. This culture we live in exiles demons, without getting to know them...

"The Persian poet Rumi said, 'Be a full bucket, pulled up the dark way of a well, then lifted out into light.' This is what telling the truth means to me."

Marlene Azoulai - from her essay "On Telling the Truth" on her site.

The book Emotional Alchemy by Tara Bennet-Goleman is about dealing wtih negative thoughts and emotions that “disturb our inner equilibrium,” as the Dalai Lama writes in the foreword.

Psychologist Bennet-Goleman says the antidote for such disturbance "is mindfulness, which involves being aware of our emotions without being ruled by them."

Creative expression, like psychotherapy and spiritual development, can be a way to become more aware, and also deal with high sensitivity.

Among other experts, Linda Kreger Silverman, PhD, director of the Gifted Development Center in Denver, says gifted and creative people tend to be emotionally sensitive throughout life.

That kind of intensity and sensitivity can lead to strong passions like anger in response to abuse.

Dr. Diamond says there is "a very strong correlation between anger, rage and creativity. Most of us tend to view anger or rage negatively, associating it almost exclusively with destructiveness and violence. Certainly this correlation exists. But anger can also motivate constructive and creative behavior."

He continues, "The more conflict, the more rage, the more anxiety there is, the more the inner necessity to create. We must also bear in mind that gifted individuals.. feel this inner necessity even more intensely, and in some respects experience and give voice not only to their own demons but the collective daimonic as well."

In his book, Dr. Diamond writes about painter and sculptor Niki de St. Phalle, who was able to find "a fertile outlet for her ferocious rage toward men - and the dominant masculine art establishment” - in the creative expression of violence in her work.

"Her famous 'shooting paintings' resulted from firing live ammunition at paint-filled, white-washed balloons mounted on a blank, virginal canvas.

"Thus, rather than becoming a crazed killer or vengeful victimizer of men,” Dr. Diamond explains, “de St. Phalle's fury -- some of which stemmed from having been sexually abused by her father -- fostered a fecund creativity, that served her well throughout her prolific career."

One of the consequences for many children and adults, of any gender, who suffer abuse and trauma is a corrosion of their self esteem.

Halle Berry revealed in a CNN interview last year about what motivates her to support and work with an organization that helps women who escape violent homes.

Berry said she recalls being terrified that her violent father, who physically abused her mother, would turn on her, adding, "I think I've spent my adult life dealing with the sense of low self-esteem that sort of implanted in me. Somehow I felt not worthy."

She explained, "Before I'm 'Halle Berry,' I'm little Halle...a little girl growing in this environment that damaged me...I've spent my adult life trying to really heal from that."

[From article: "Halle Berry on Her Past: Traumatic Childhood 'Damaged Me' - popeater.com]

Berry commented about acting in her intense movie "Gothika" (2003): "Although physically I would feel exhausted and tired, my back would hurt, my arms would hurt and my feet would be raw from running through all the stuff, there was still something about it that felt good, like I had a cathartic experience. I got a lot of stuff out of me that was pent up in little corners of myself, so I felt good at the same time.”

Judith Orloff M.D. in her book Positive Energy, says creativity is “the mother of all energies, nurturer of your most alive self. It charges up every part of you. When you're plugged in, a spontaneous combustion occurs that 'artists' don't have a monopoly on. This energy rises from your own life force and from a larger spiritual flow.”

In her article Giving Life to Carl Rogers Theory of Creativity, Natalie Rogers writes that "using the expressive arts gives people a safe place to explore their shadow side…The shadow is the part we have repressed in our lives. Some people have denied their anger and rage for a lifetime."

Referring to expressive arts therapy, she says "The creative process is a life force energy. If offered in a safe, empathic, non-judgmental environment, it is a transformative process for constructive change…Using movement, sound, color and drama offer opportunities to first become aware of one’s shadow, and then to explore it fully through many media."

Natalie Rogers, Ph.D., is an author, artist, psychotherapist, and founder of the Person-Centered Expressive Therapy Institute. She is the daughter of Carl Rogers.

In her article Telling without Talking: Breaking the Silence of Domestic Violence, Cathy Malchiodi writes about art therapy and notes "Art breaks the silence of domestic violence."

She explains, "Art therapy, which formally began as a field and treatment shortly after World War II, continues to be widely adopted to help battered women and children deal with their physical and emotional scars.

"Art as a healing force does not come easy for those whose lives have been controlled, are accustomed to betrayal and punishment, and have learned self-hatred."

But, she continues, "inevitably when it does, creativity and imagination restore a sense of possibility, identity, and reconnection with parts of the self that were silenced in order to survive the violence."

She adds, "While survivors often feel shame in talking about abuse, talking about their artworks is an experience of finally coming home."

Her Psychology Today profile says Cathy Malchiodi, PhD is an art therapist, visual artist, independent scholar, and author of 13 books on arts therapies, including The Art Therapy Sourcebook.

Even if you aren’t an “artist” - or don’t want to be identified that way - you can help improve your emotional health through creative expression: perform in a community theater play, write a memoir, take a watercolor class, or do something else to express your demons in positive ways.