Healing More Than The Physical
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Summary: The author embraces creativity as a pivotal part of their healing journey, inspired by figures like Carl Jung, Alice Miller, Gabor Maté, and Stacy Solodkin. Rediscovering art through therapy, they find solace and expression. Now engaged in an abstract painting course, they explore self-love and potential life purpose through joyful creativity.
At the moment, I am really called to being creative. Art, more specifically creating art, is calling my name. I see this as a good sign. As Rachel Remen highlights, there is a deep connection between healing and creativity. I believe that the divine source inside ourselves is naturally creative. As I heal and become more of my authentic self, I reclaim those creative parts of myself that have been absent or denied.
As I welcome this part of myself back into the fold, I am drawn to thinking about people I have come to know about during my healing journey that have also used art and creativity to heal themselves…
Carl Jung
I know that, as the psychoanalyst and healer Carl Jung proceeded along his healing journey, he became highly creative. It didn’t only result in the impressive volumes of psychiatric theory that still influences nearly all areas of psychotherapy today. It also resulted in Jung’s magnus opus – the Red Book. The Red Book is a beautifully decorative and artistic book of his journey into his inner world as he transformed himself, his healing and his relationship to his spirituality. Art was a central component of his healing and life’s work.
Alice Miller – Psychoanalyst, Author and Artist
Alice Miller trained as a psychoanalyst in her early thirties. She worked successfully in the field for twenty years. However, in 1987, Alice announced her outright rejection of psychoanalytic practice in a German magazine called Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today). She felt that the theory behind psychoanalytic practice actually prevented survivors of childhood abuse from being able to recognise and reconcile their abuse, instead holding the parents as sacrosanct and blaming the child for their fantasies.
Having turned away from psychoanalysis, Alice Miller found healing in art. She painted a multitude of paintings in the latter half of her life and published the book “Pictures of My Life” as an expose of how she reconciled her own trauma through artwork.
Gabor Maté: Scattered Minds
Stacy Solodkin – Cancer Survivor and Artist
Stacy Solodkin is an actor, artist, wife, friend and cancer survivor. She first came to my attention through the Heal Community. (There’s a great interview here on her journey.) What particularly interested me about her healing journey was how she returned to her artwork, transitioning back to a place where she was making her artwork for herself and her own soul.
My Own Healing Journey
My own history with art followed a long and unpredictable route. I loved to draw as a young child. I was truly creative, more interested in doing arts and crafts than most other forms of play. As I became an older child, the play and genuine love of all things arty was replaced by a realisation of inadequacy, incompleteness, just being ‘not good’ at it. My older brother was a natural born artist. He could draw beautiful portraits and still life in a way that, even in my memory today, astounds me. In retrospect, I guess I could look back and say that he was the Leonardo da Vinci and I was more of a Picasso. I just didn’t understand that they were both beautiful forms of art.
So I lost my way with art and stopped doing it. I grew up and became serious. I lost my sense of play. It wasn’t until I was about a year into therapy that my creativity woke up. I was struggling in therapy. I had hit a wall. I couldn’t express what I was trying to say in words. No words seemed to match my experiences so I took to art to try to express my depths. I recovered a part of me that gave me joy, expression, meaning and focus. The pictures were usually dark and difficult to sit with, but they provided me with such relief. The pictures that came to me at that time didn’t feel like they came from me. They were already complete when they entered my mind and it was purely my job to replicate them on the paper in front of me.
After I finished therapy, I didn’t feel drawn to do much art. I enjoyed doing various crafting projects but that was about it. But, recently, as I have been focussing more intently on my healing work, the passion for art has reawoken in me again. I am currently working my way through an abstract painting course that I bought online by the Australian artist Tracy Verdugo It is really good fun and I’m getting a lot of fulfilment out of it!
Maybe art and creativity will also become part of my life’s work. I don’t know. All I know is that I am drawn to it (pun intended!) and I am enjoying it. I truly believe that joy is a true healer so any way that increases the joy further in my life is welcomed. I’ll see where it takes me from here!
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Natalie is a blogger with Type 1 Diabetes. Natalie's special gifts are questioning the status quo and being a rebel. She is using these gifts to question medical 'knowledge' and find a true cure for Type 1 Diabetes.
