How Art Therapy can Help Heal Trauma?
One woman’s PTSD journey…
Once there was a woman who loved colour! But then Trauma visited her door and she felt like the rug was pulled out from under her feet. She could no longer trust the world as she knew it, nor could she trust her gut instinct anymore.
The world looked grey, she dyed her hair brown, she dressed in black, she forgot to eat, everything, everywhere and everybody felt unsafe! Every time she tried to paint, her artwork turned into a muddy brown.
A year passed. Physically she was a skeleton of herself and emotionally she was fearful and anxious and her stomach never stopped churning.
One day, she discovered Art Therapy online…and her journey to recovery began. Then, she began Art Therapy sessions in person. She grabbed crayons in her fist and let the trauma begin to express itself in the colours she used and the force she scribbled with! She made a story book using symbols to express her journey. She joined an Art Therapy group and worked through her trauma in a ritual she choreographed herself with the support of the rest of the group.
These are just some of the forms of Art Therapy processes her journey to healing from PTSD took.
Art Therapy is based on Carl Jung (a student of Zigmund Freud) who believed in working with the unconscious (those wounds tucked away in the basement of our psyche hidden from our cognitive mind) as the key to healing.
Art Therapy works with the unconscious and a different part of the brain than while using cognitive therapies such as Psychology, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and other traditional talk therapies. Therefore, Art Therapy is able to bring to light and express those things that we may not either be able to verbalise or those hidden things which we may be consciously unaware of.
Healing takes time…
At the end of these two years of using Art Therapy to work through her trauma, this colourful woman, still could only paint muddy brown paintings, still dressed in black and brown, and even the bright spring flowers still looked grey to her.
The Breakthrough!
Those two years of were far from wasted…they were leading her to the final Art Therapy process that healed her heart and brought colour back into her world!
She was in an Art Therapy group working with air-dry clay. The directive was to make a pot representing our sacred self.
She thought to herself “I’ll have to make the opening at the top as narrow as possible because I have to protect myself now and not let anything in ever again”!
She proceeded to make the pot…
…and then a very strange thing happened!
Suddenly, she had this intuitive impulse to make the pot’s opening as wide as it could be. She had no idea if the clay would tear or break; she just knew that she HAD to try it!
Simultaneously, as she opened wide the neck of the pot, a sudden shift inside of her occurred. Her heart opened up to the world again. She was willing to be open, start trusting and letting the world back in!
The physical action of working with the clay in this way caused an emotional response and a wound to heal all at the same time.
Art Therapy Worx!
This temporarily colourless woman dyed her hair blonde, donned her red lipstick again, began to paint in wonderful bright colours, and, to her delight, the grey spring flowers were suddenly a myriad of bright colours!
That is when she began to truly believe in the power of Art Therapy to heal and why she went on to study it so she could practice as an Art Therapist and help others heal too.
And, just in case you’re wondering, this is her now!
And, yes, it is Fee; Founder and Director of Art
Therapy Worx. She named it such because
she truly believes it does!
