Does your art always help/support your healing?
Yes, I can't even say how much. Incredibly.
Art is my higher power. When I first told my therapist that, she misunderstood and said, yes art absolutely connects us to a higher power. I had to say, you've misunderstood - art
is my higher power.
It's a major way that I express things, understand things, endure things, change things and work towards things. Seeing other people's art connects me to beauty and hope.
Outside trauma work, doing decorative art is very soothing for me. Also, going to see art with a friend is one of the few threads that have kept me from withdrawing completely from the world. I'm extremely lucky to have a "gallery-going friend" - our thing is going to see art together and talking about it.
Have you always been an artist?
I wish I was an artist! I've done a foundation course (one year preparation for a university course) and I still can't draw. But I really love collage. I also do mixed media and printmaking and I want to start doing some abstract art.
Sometimes I can't control what comes out in my art, does that happen to you?
I follow the guidance (hunches or feelings) that I get when doing collage, and the result can be really different from my first idea - sometimes the opposite.
For example when I was doing a collage about being entangled with someone else who was also traumatised by the same people, my intention was to make it about the entanglement. Somehow it became all about him and his trauma. I was using a horse to represent him (I use a lot of animal symbolism) and as I flicked through all my pictures of lovely, healthy horses, I fixed on one that was dead. Great. It got even better when the deadness was apparently not enough and I felt inspired to add horrible wounds. I had no idea when I started that this was going to be anything but a normal horse as part of an overall image. When I'd finished, the whole image was about his injury.
It works the other way too, though. At one point when I was working in therapy on something bad, I made a collage about how broken I felt. That collage kept coming out differently. I'd amended the figure in it (representing me) so their arm was smashing into pieces. Somehow, it looked like those pieces were coming back together instead of flying apart. I had an animal head (love using animals to represent aspects of people) with it's mouth wide open swallowing a cockroach - this represented my degradation. Whatever I did, it looked like that cockroach was being regurgitated and spat out. It was the first comment my therapist made. The second was that it looked like my arm was coming back together and healing. Wow.
Sadly, I'm not an artist. But using art for healing - definitely.
Sometimes my art is very dark and it creeps people out
Some of my art creeps
me out! All my trauma/healing art has to be in one of two sketchbooks - one small and one large. Not on loose pieces of paper. This is part of the containment for me. I seriously need to be able to close the sketchbook, and I also then put it in a zip case and padlock the zip closed.
My first therapist didn't do art therapy as such, but was more than happy to talk about what I brought and it was helpful. There were times I caught her initial gasp as I showed her what I'd done.
My second therapist was actually an art historian before she became a psychotherapist. She had then trained in art therapy together with other things. Which was wonderful. But I was still very happy with how my first, non-art-therapist could engage with what I'd done.
my T, she always seems to understand, even though she's says she can't draw ha she has an artists heart
LOVE this. I'm liking your therapist a lot. :)
Thank you soo much for your feedback, it means so much to me!
It means a lot to me that you haven't run away never to be seen in this thread again after I posted!
How about you, Sally sue? Would you like to share anything about how you feel about art and how it helps? I'd love to know. I think art can be so healing.
Does other people's art help or inspire you?
