Breaking Free Through Art: Healing Beyond Trauma

Sensitive Topics Ahead: Please read with caution, or skip ahead to the section on using art for healing.

Beyond the Shadows

There were many moments I didn’t think I was going to make it this year. I thought I would end up in the psychiatric ward or I would end up dead, having killed myself. I didn’t think I had the strength to make it at many points and more scary than that, is that I didn’t want to.

It’s…retraumatizing to realize that I have been so abused and so neglected in my life that I actively wanted to die so I didn’t have to deal with it anymore. No more pain, no more expectations, no more fear, no more, just no more.

I have been suicidal to larger or lesser degrees for the majority of my life, but I always blamed it on the events surrounding those moments of desire to just not be. The reality is that those moments were simply triggers of a much larger problem and I have been fighting my whole life to pretend those problems were not real so that I could go on loving my family in as uncomplicated a way as possible. 

Funny how life gets more and more complicated as we grow older and our problems grow exponentially in all directions. Especially those of us who shoved our inner child into the smallest, most protected bottle we could. Our problems already encompassed our whole world from the time we were young and only served to broaden our universe of struggles as we too managed to grow.

Early Warning Signs

When I was in fifth grade my teacher introduced my class to creative writing and it was an incredible power to wield to little 10 year old me. The next summer, or perhaps the one after that, I had written a poem about Death and entered it into an online poetry contest, as a naïve little girl. I didn’t understand the idea of a vanity press at that time, but I soon received mail praising my poem and offering to publish it in their anthology for a fee I’m sure. The real problem for me was that my mom opened that bit of mail and my poem about Death was printed right there on the page for her to read.

Perhaps there wasn’t really a good way for her to broach the subject. I have only a vague recollection and of course, memories can be quite faulty. She came to me with the mail in hand and asked me if I thought about death and if it was because I wanted to die. Of course I reassured her immediately that I didn’t want to die. Of course I didn’t want to die…I was just curious. And I’ve held on to that idea for most of my life because I didn’t want to think about the fact that I thought about death and had passively suicidal thoughts at such a young age. It’s fucked up and I didn’t get the support that I needed.

Escape Routes and Resilience

It’s easier to admit when I think about how I was at least two or three years younger than that when I first started thinking about running away from home. I remember sitting on my bed up in my room and making a list on paper of toys that I thought I could maybe sell for money. I knew I would need money for food and my fisher price karaoke and tape player made the list. I remember thinking about how I could sneak into my church through the side door when no one was around and use the showers in the basement and use any of the variety of rooms to sleep in and perhaps sneak food from the kitchens.

I still feel guilty for even wanting to run away, like it’s my fault and I am the bad child for thinking that I might be better off somewhere else. I feel guilty for making my mother worry that her child might be thinking about death at such a young age. And I feel guilty knowing that my mother probably feels guilty for not getting me therapy as a child, or her other child who did commit suicide at the age of 24.

I am positive she never told my father about the poem. There would have been a blow up if she had. When I was 18, already graduated from high school, but still living with my parents until I could leave for college I tried to get help for myself. I went to the doctors office and started crying and asking for medication to help me not feel so depressed all the time. I had been going back to the doctors because I was just exhausted all of the time and could barely function. 

I still don’t understand why my doctor sent a reply about my question about my fatigue by mail, but they did. My father opened it on my behalf and I came home oblivious from work to be yelled at for taking antidepressants. That stereotypical, “What the fuck do you have to be unhappy about?” still fills me with some level of bitterness. I remember that being one of those times where I just shut down as quickly as possible and brushed past him to go up the stairs to my room to hide, not saying anything, trying to keep my face as neutral as possible and him yelling at me the whole way up the stairs. Once my door was closed, his yelling continued at no one in particular with the usual slamming doors.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like to experience that as an eleven year old girl, though there are enough similar instances that make it pretty clear that it would have been devastating, that every one of these incidents were devastating to my mental health and emotional wellbeing. I never received a single apology from my father and my mother was the bury your head sort. She may have apologized on behalf of my father here and there in the privacy of our home after we would hear the rattle of his truck leaving for work, but by the time I was an adult she had accepted his behavior and I was as much at fault for his and my disagreements as he was in her mind. In my mind, I had stayed for her and kept the peace as much as possible, for her. I wanted to run away at seven years old. Her defense of his behavior now hurts more than the behavior did in the first place. Permissive abuse. Confirmation of my laziness, how fat I am, how I wouldn’t amount to anything because being book smart isn’t everything. All of it was confirmed by my mother’s defense of his actions.

Gaslit But Not Defined

This year I abandoned my mother, just as she needed me most to help her through my father’s failing health and, ultimately, his death. I was no longer talking to her every day by December 2023, struggling with a variety of health and emotional issues and feeling bitter that she couldn’t support me or have any kind words for me beyond expressing her need for me to get better so I can help her, listen to her, be there for her.

I visited with my fiancé in June and saw my father and mother briefly. It was uncomfortable, painful. It felt like closure with my father. I gave him a hug and kept the peace and he couldn’t get over how beautiful I was. I’d been losing a lot of weight from my depressive episodes and eating disorder. It felt like giving him something and receiving nothing in return. I had already accepted that this was our relationship.

I went to dinner with my mother and my fiancé. It felt tense and uncomfortable from the beginning. My fiancé had to step out for a business call and my mother took that opportunity to ask when I was ever going to talk to her again. Her first private words to me in front of the Hibachi chef making our dinner were still about her need for me to take care of her. I responded that I didn’t know. I didn’t and still don’t. Her eyes at that point in time haunt me with blame and what feels like hatred mixed with all the hurt I caused for abandoning her when she needed my support most-while caring for my father who abused us all.

I haven’t spoken to her since except through my fiancé to confirm our continued existence after hurricanes and a thank you for the birthday wish on my birthday. My father died shortly after we returned from our trip. I hated hearing the devastation in my mom’s voice in that voicemail.

I think her viewpoint is that she puts family above all else. And she does, to a fault. She puts everyone she views as family in that category and nothing short of physical abuse could break that for her. She laid aside her own mental and emotional wellbeing and physical health to take care of everyone around her as best she could and put up with any abuse outside of the physical. Repeatedly she would choose the lesser between two evils and she never looked for a good option. She didn’t have the energy or time to do so because she was so busy trying to take care of everyone and running herself ragged.

When I was a child I thought she was a saint. My father promoted this idea, as did my echoing older brothers despite my mother’s protests. And she was right, and this was another form of abuse, to place her directly into the role of savior and then berate her when she couldn’t live up to that ideal.

Compassion Fatigue: A Turning Point

I fell into that same trap for a long time. I thought I had to be the saint. I had to be the golden child. I had to be the one who took care of everyone else, even at her own expense. And I took on the responsibility of everyone else’s emotional and physical wellbeing. I became a teacher, gaining the responsibility of hundreds of more children to take care of every year. And any time I choose to be selfish and take care of myself first I felt guilty. It generally took the threat of real physical illness and harm for me to take care of myself.

This past year that all came to a conclusive end. The stress I’d been building up in my body from living this kind of life made me sick. Intense panic attacks, dissociative episodes, physically ill and rapidly losing weight, I was struggling to be able to go to work, let alone be half as effective as I had in the past. I had to make major changes. I had to put myself first. So I abandoned my children at school and left teaching and I abandoned my mother when she needed me most.

There’s a lot of things I could wish about how things have turned out at this point. I spent a lot of time wishing when I was younger and then a lot of time just trying to continue existing. Wishing doesn’t really bring about what we desire though. Desires come about through creating purpose and taking action. 

Acceptance and Action

Earlier this year one of my mantras was Acceptance and Action and it feels fitting now. I don’t need wishing and empty dreams. I need to accept life as it is and move forward with action.

My desire now is to build a community of supportive and open-minded people. I want to fill the world with good emotions through art and sharing art techniques for emotional wellness. I accept that my life has drastically changed from what it once was and I embrace the ability to change my life to one filled with love and art.

If my story resonated with you, I’d like to invite you to join me in using art as a healing technique. Sign up for emails, find me on social media and join our community of open-minded healing creatives in our private Facebook group, Healing Heart Creatives, where you can share your art and your healing journey too.

Breaking Cycles, Creating Light

One of the earliest meditative art techniques I started using this year to help create calm in my mind and in my life were neurographics. Studies show that the using meditative art practices may:

• Decrease cortisol levels by 28% (Kaimal et al., 2017)

• Lower anxiety scores by 41% in college students (Bell & Robbins, 2007)

• Enhances emotional awareness and regulation in individuals with depression (Lyshak-Stelzer et al., 2007)

• Improves cognitive flexibility and creative thinking (Zabelina & Robinson, 2010)

• Enhances problem-solving skills and innovation (Hetland & Winner, 2001)

Neurographics can be as simple or complex as you like and that makes them easy to take with you on the go. My steps for creating neurographics are below, along with a few prompts to get you started.

Step One: Forming New Ideas

I prefer to start my artistic practice by putting myself in the right mindset for what I want to create, or what I want to heal from. I use a number of different ways to go about this. Here are a few options I’ve used in the past:

• Pick a song that feels right, put on the music and begin writing in my journal. I will often search for an emotion and instrumental music for this sort of thing. Sometimes it’s uplifting orchestral music, other times, it’s soft sad piano, or energetic violin (thank you, Lindsey Stirling).

• Use a prop to help you come up with a prompt. For my Acceptance and Action piece, I used affirmation cards that day. I shuffled the deck asking the universe what I needed to reflect on and ended up pulling two cards: Acceptance and Action. I’ve sometimes used an oracle deck.

• Choose a prompt from online. I’ve listed a few below. You can also search Pinterest for things like healing journal prompts. 

I chose to write directly in my art journal for the Acceptance and Action piece, but sometimes I’ll write in my regular journal, which I admittedly also sometimes use for art. I’ve also used canvases to write these journal prompts, sometimes on the surface of the canvas directly in marker, or paint or watercolor pencil, sometimes on the back.

As an intuitive artist, I go with what feels right at the time. So choose what feels right for you. If you need more guidance, check in with the Healing Heart Creatives Facebook group for additional prompts and ideas to get you started.

Step Two: Create your Mantra

The next step is to take what I’ve written and whittle it down to a sentence, a phrase, or even a single word. Sometimes that’s easy because I started with the words, like Acceptance and Action. Other times, it comes from what I write. Peace by Piece was like that. I talked about falling apart in my journal write, how I felt like everything was coming undone, but I could find peace in that perhaps. So my mantra as I painted that day was Peace by Piece.

Step Three: Building New Pathways

The phrase that everything has been whittled down to now becomes the mantra as you work. Slow down, remember to focus on the words and any ideas that come to you as you draw or paint lines on your work surface. They can be straight, curvy, whatever kind of lines feel right. 

As I painted Acceptance and Action, those were the words that I repeated in my mind as I worked. I chose to include three hearts, and as many lines as felt right. As each line was painted down, if I was struggling with what to think I just repeated the mantra, otherwise, I also thought about what it was I was Accepting in my life, and what it was I needed to take Action on. For me, that meant accepting the parts of me that felt broken, the parts that I had neglected to take care of for so long that they were hurting badly. The actions I needed to take are still ones I am working on actively, helping myself to heal, choosing myself first, that I have worth enough for me to love, that I deserve to create art and be happy.

The lines are the new thoughts we are creating for yourselves, the new pathways of thought we are creating for ourselves in our minds. 

Step Four: Building the Connections

Now that the lines are down, everywhere the lines cross needs to be smoothed out. While I work, I continue to think about the mantra, Acceptance and Action. I am smoothing the rough edges of my mind with this work, creating new connections in my mind about my worth, my art, and my healing path forward.

In the case of Acceptance and Action I chose to leave the points on the hearts. I wanted them to be especially recognizable as hearts. Generally in neurographic art no points are left. Every point is smoothed to a lovely curve.

There’s No One Right Way

There are a lot of different ways to do neurographic art, and while there may be a “proper” way to do it, my intuitive style is more about what feels right than what classically trained artists in different disciplines may say to do or not do. I encourage exploration, learning about techniques and then creating with and without them. Find out what works for you.

 Acceptance and Action was painted with acrylics in my sketchbook, but I love neurographics for their versatility and meditative processes. If I need a moment of calm, I can take out a piece of paper anywhere, write for a minute or two and work on creating peace for myself through a bit of art on piece of paper.

I hope you will try out this new technique and share your art and mantra in our private Facebook group, Healing Heart Creatives. If you’re not a member yet, you can request to join here.

Additionally, I would like to invite you to join my first free healing art workshop this February 18th through the 20th. We will be meeting for an hour each day for guided meditation, journaling and a guided art creation hour. You can register for the event here.

Research:

Bell, Charles E., and Suzanne J. Robbins. "Effect of Art Production on Anxiety and Depression in College Students." Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, vol. 24, no. 2, 2007, pp. 70-77.

Hetland, Lois, and Ellen Winner. "The Art of Possible: Transforming Teaching and Learning through the Arts." Teachers College Record, vol. 103, no. 2, 2001, pp. 362-376.

Kaimal, Girija, et al. "Reduction of Cortisol Levels and Participants' Responses Following Art Making." Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, vol. 30, no. 2, 2017, pp. 74-81.

Kaplan, Stephen. "The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework." Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 15, no. 3, 1995, pp. 169-182.

Lyshak-Stelzer, Francheska, et al. "Art Therapy for Adolescents with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms: A Pilot Study." Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association, vol. 24, no. 4, 2007, pp. 163-169.

Zabelina, Darya L., and Michael D. Robinson. "Creativity as Flexible Cognitive Control." Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 4, no. 3, 2010, pp. 136-143.