Using Art-Making In Your Healing Process
Process art can be the language of the soul and body. It can help our feelings find a voice. Using colors and shapes on paper gives us a non-linear and creative way to express the unexpressed. It is engaging a journey into and through our unconscious and honoring what is there. It is a way to process our human selves in wholeness.
When we welcome the unconscious onto paper, we are saying to the hurt parts of ourselves, “There is a place for you. I want to know you. Show me.” What a relief that can be. Finally, a place for all that anger, grief, sadness, etc. to be externalized and validated. There it is, right on the page, in deep reds, blues, brown and orange.
This is how I help people use art-making to externalize what their body and soul needs to say.
It is an invitation. After reading this, I hope that you will be able gather your art materials and begin. I use oil pastels because they’re messy and can be blended with fingers. It is an art medium that feels like emotions— hard to control and full of saturated color. You can use other art materials too. Just use what you have right now and get some other art materials later if you feel like it.
First, get quiet and close your eyes and notice. What’s going on inside? What are the sensations or feelings in your body? What are the thoughts or memories in your mind? There’s no judgment, just noticing. You can name it quietly to yourself if you want. This part of the process can take several minutes of quiet listening within.
“When I close my eyes and look within, I see a shape like a blue boat. I imagine it sits within the tightness in my chest. It is heartbreak.”
Once you have noticed what’s inside yourself, you simply open your eyes and reach for the color that your are most drawn to. Then you put that color on your page and start making a mark. You have no real idea where this is going or what’s going to come next. That’s good. The unconscious needs a wide open field in which to speak.
“I reach for my dark blue oil pastel and start making a curved line. I feel like making it bigger and rounding it and coloring it in.”
Once you begin making marks and shapes, you just keep going. When you feel like switching colors, do that. If you feel yourself getting “stuck,” just ask yourself, “What color am i drawn to, and what mark do I feel like making on the page?” Follow that. Allow the process to unfold. You are now on the road of the unconscious, and it is leading you back to yourself.
In my art-process groups, we do this mark-making quietly for 45 minutes. When I do this on my own, I just go until I feel myself coming to a natural stopping place, usually after about an hour.
Keep adding and adding to your page. Trust your process. When you get to a place where one page seems complete, turn to a new page and keep going. You can come back to previous ones any time. I often do that.
I have done this process with myself and others over many years. What happens is a very similar process of when someone is processing a trauma using EMDR or other therapies in a therapy session. You begin in the narrow field of the pain. Over the process of expressing and integrating your feelings through expressing them and letting your neural networks unwind, a shift begins to happen. You don’t have to make it happen, it happens naturally. We are wired for this healing. Suddenly, there are more resourced thoughts that start coming in. This is the process.
In trauma terms this process could be called “memory re-consolidation.” In other terms it could be called the work of human wholeness. Before formal therapy ever existed, there was dancing, singing, drumming, ritual, ceremony. This is what our psyches are designed to do with life’s pain. Process art can be one of the ceremonies in your wholeness and healing.
“My boat shape is surrounded by dark blue-black colors, like a rough and stormy sea. It feels closed in, like doom. I feel the tightness in my chest more intensely. It suddenly occurs to me that I want a silver line. I grab my white pastel and start adding lines. The white lines turn into a smeared path, like a moonlight road. I imagine that my boat shape has a way to cross this sea. I feel the tightness ease in my body. I’m not trying to make any of this happen; I’m just following my impulses as they arise. A new way of thinking is following what’s happening in me, naturally. I keep going with my silvery lines.”
