How I Used Art to Get Through Trauma

For me, music helps me deal with my problems in life but after reading your article it brought me to tears, just want you to know this was a beautiful peace.

When my husband was waiting for his heart transplant and I became his full-time caregiver, I sat down one day and began a painting of our daughter. I had never painted a portrait before, but it helped me "escape" from the nightmare that had become my life. From that day on, I have continued to use art as my therapy, my safe zone. I believe art has saved my life many times over.

Expressive Arts is the foundation of the Owl & Panther program in Tucson, Arizona that works with refugee families impacted by torture, trauma, and traumatic dislocation. It's been a privilege to witness resilience in those who engage. The Tucson Museum of Art has twice shown the work of the participants. What an incredible validation of a process that heals. owlandpanther.org

Thanks for sharing. I valued the advice at the end to only show your work to those who feel safe, empathic, and compassionate. I think some readers might benefit from reading about the work of Peter Levine on trauma: https://traumahealing.org/.

This is called Art Therapy. It is a mental health and human service profession practiced around the world. Professional Registered, and Board Certified Art Therapists work with people across the spectrum of ages, disabilities, environments, medical, social, and mental health challenges. Work is done individually, with families and groups; in prisons, in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, private practice, shelters- you name it! Often, there are no words when someone has experienced a trauma, and so art-in it's many forms- can be that vehicle to help a person address a distressing event, resolve an issue or conflict. Please visit the American Art Therapy Associations website to learn more: arttherapy.org/about-art-therapy/

I wish I could say this technique helped me move beyond my experiences as a victim of crime (armed robbery), but despite my extensive work with "art therapy," my PTSD has only gotten worse throughout the years. I've also been the victim of hospital abuse (sexual, physical) and it hasn't helped me with that, either. Sometimes nothing will completely erase the bad experiences. If it helps someone to draw/paint/write away a traumatic event, then more power to them. However, everyone is different. In the end, I realized my PTSD was elevated every time I focused on the memory--including when I wrote or painted in an effort to get rid of it.

I took an art class last winter while grieving several terrible losses. First I tri3d a writing class because i have always been a writer and found solace there. But writing and peer interactions made me miserable. I continued to ruminate on all I had lost, all I was grieving. Then I took a mosaics class. It may not be easy to be a good mosaic artist, but it's easy to get started. "You just glue junk to junk," my teacher said. So I did. I love falling away from words and going into a world of line, shape and color. I am absolutely transported. One night I dreamed about a piece of glass that was causing me trouble. I woke up to find I had turned a corner in my sadness. The new love I feel for doing artwork has changed me.

It would be nice to have art, music and drama therapists paid through 3rd party insurance payments.

This is a profound example of ancient wisdom: Beauty transforms pain into wisdom.

My “art” is gardening, which I have read it referenced as the world’s slowest form of performance art. It is truly rewarding to me to nurture life in my garden and helps me forget the brutal disease I battled along with the rough, aggressive medical treatment required to treat it. It is a panorama of the progress of life, from the long lived trees to the short lived but lovely annual flowers. Find your art and throw yourself into practicing it, and you will find your moments of peace. It may even lead you into a state of bliss.

Making art is like a meditation, it quiets the mind and gives you a place to rest. I step out of the chaos and into the quiet, returning with a profound sense of peace and greater perspective. You become both spectator and creator, dwelling in a place outside of time and place. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow, I call it the quiet in the center of the universe. As an artist, I know art can heal and fill the well again.

The arts saved my life - many a time. Thank you for your instructions at the end of the article. May I add one? Keep funding for the arts and arts programs for youth.

Playing and composing Music is also very therapeutic. When word are not enough to express our traumatic experiences or feelings of suffering, nonverbal art forms are incredibly helpful to releasing the unspeakable and usher in healing. Thank you for sharing your artwork and your journey with us, and for introducing Dr. Ursano. The recommendations in this piece sound practical and accessible for those of us living with PTSD.

I appreciated the focus on "being able to forget..." Several years ago I did a series of art pieces based on episodes of physical and emotional abuse from my childhood. My young mind had conflated them with some odd but coincidental events into a jumble of dread, grief, helplessness, and anger. Through working on those pieces- which I have shown but few have been purchased (not a big surprise) - I have taken the sting out these events and they recede in memory. I can recall them now, unemotionally but not numbly, if I want to but they are just things that happened- they have lost their power to crush me.

Translating your story into art provides distance, and perspective. Eventually you may focus more on the mechanics of the piece, and less on the content.

I teach photography and video to boys at-risk. Most of the boys have done, or are doing, sex work. Many have HIV. The struggles are breath-taking and awesome. Each kid is given a camera. The camera can do both forms of self-expression. It's impossible to come away from any of their works of art and not have a deeper understanding of who they are and what they face as human beings. I photograph, therefore I am. Collaboration happens. So does bonding. Learn it, do it, teach it. Relationships flourish. I am always knocked out by their visual voices. I have never met a single kid in this group who has not been sexually abused somewhere, somewhere out there. They arrive as injured fragments. Their most prolific work symbolically features the men who pay to have sex with them. The relationship of art to sex is inescapable as are the fears and violence perpetrated against them. While sex work can be considered as a viable form of survival among adults, survival sex itself consumes teenagers like animals one molecule at a time. They are horrifically exploited. This is not an issue of sexuality. It is a characteristic of a culture of consumerism that eats away at an adolescent's sense of self when confronted with his objectification and monetized fundamental health. "Go take pictures," I tell them. And so they do. We show very little of what they make in a public context. Peers are the real audience. Empathy is the result. The power of art to heal is extraordinary.

I am sorry you stopped writing: this piece is very good, and the drawings/paintings are very good, too. I believe you were my student at some point, in The Waldorf School. You were a classmate of one of my daughters. I write, too, and have an irrepressible urge to write -- have published twenty-one books, and have two more contracted. You have something to say, so say it, no matter the medium.