Art Therapy
What is art therapy? In my experience it is the processing of emotions through the creation of art. Back in the early 90s, my favorite therapist would tear a page from a book and ask me to create with it as we talked. The books were always mass market paperbacks - Harlequins and the like, but it always made me a little nauseous to hear the page ripping free from the glued spine.
The table we sat at had a variety of supplies; colored pencils, markers, Elmer’s white glue, and blunt scissors. She was a mental health professional after all.
The first few sessions I just doodled on the paper as I went over my issues - rapist father, drunken mother, the death of my son, and the failure of my marriage/s. Unlike therapists I’d been to before she didn’t take notes or stare at me as I spilled my guts, she created something as we spoke.
In the first session she created the ugliest unicorn I’d ever seen. After talking about so much toxicity it was nice to laugh at our artistic failures. I don’t remember what I made. It was definitely not good though.
On our third session she tore the page out of the book, but instead of handing it to me she ripped it into several pieces. She instructed me to decorate each piece as a separate entity. When I was done she handed me another piece of paper and instructed me to reassemble the page, but to do it randomly.
I am terrible at puzzles, so random assemblage was a blessing. Each of my pieces had been decorated with a rainbow of flowers and hearts and music notes. Lisa Frank would have been proud. As I began to assemble the image she told me that all the parts of the image were important - that they all had to be there for the piece to be whole. She explained that even though the pieces were torn that they were necessary.
One of the aspects of post traumatic stress disorder that I was struggling with the most was being hyper alert. It’s almost a perfect coping mechanism. You never know when your bedroom door will slide open, so your brain wants you awake, focused, prepared. This leads to insomnia and paranoia, and much more.
My therapist explained that we were not going to fix me, because just like the picture that now looked like an abstract flower garden - I wasn’t less just because I wasn’t whole.
I only saw her for about six months before she got married and moved away, but several of her techniques have stuck with me. She taught me to ground myself in my senses if I’m having a flashback. To do this I’d find five things I see around me, four things I can touch, three things I hear, two things I can smell, and one thing I can taste.
She also taught me to track my loves and hates, and to be specific about it. While I love music is a fine sentiment, I love the first line in the chorus of Desert Moon by Denis DeYoung is much better. This may seem silly, but when I learned that I could prevent certain thought spirals by avoiding things that were specific to my father you better believe that I have avoided that shit like the plague.
I have always liked crafty creative things, but the pandemic created an isolation that quickly became overwhelming. I found a mental health podcast that led me to an art therapy podcast and group.
So that’s where I am now. I work in my therapy journal a little each day, but I also just try to create a little each day. The future is uncertain and scary, but as a part of the whole it will be survivable and oddly beautiful in retrospect.
LorriMarie Jenkins Mourning Morning Journal
#mentalhealth #ptsd #cptsd #arttherapy #collage
