Hope, Healing, and Suffering: A Creative Expression
Embarking on Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and his thoughts on creativity and language have given voice to those who have little words for the trauma they have experienced. When trauma happens to our bodies and our minds, the first thing we lose is language. Words are lost when describing abuse and trauma and survivors are left grasping for an understanding of what has happened to their bodies, especially from childhood trauma.
The work that’s being done in the Eastern Orthodox reading group has centered around language and creativity. While it’s somewhat easy for survivors to report their abuse, with little or no emotion behind their story, inviting survivors to creatively explore their emotional affect through writing, music, art, and even embodied movement like dance, can unravel the language and emotions that were tangled around their trauma.
As future clinicians, therapists, pastors, leaders, and artists, we have the blessed privilege to walk with others through their trauma, to journey with and help bring significance to the moments in their lives when emotion and language have become muddled. We will be privileged to their story and the work of bringing meaning to stories that have been repressed so far down into darkness that meaning has been lost. We will have the opportunity to help our clients explore and be curious around the events in their lives that have caused harm and pain, and van der Kolk argues that art and language is the road to expression around what has been formerly repressed.
Likewise, Stephen K. Levine, in his book Poiesis, engages the idea that whatever creativity or art a client brings to us is just as complex as the client themselves. As clinicians and those working with people who have experienced trauma, inviting creative expression is imperative for unfolding a traumatic journey, but should be welcomed with a nuanced lens, understanding that there is no good or bad in art and creativity. The beauty in inviting artistic and creative expression is giving new language to someone who has lost all language around their trauma, yet it must not be analyzed with a critical lens. Rather than interpreting the art and deeming the expression “right” or “wrong,” it’s far more important to simply experience the creative process with the one creating.
We cannot know the meaning of art for our clients, but to simply bring about curiosity and wonder around what has been created.
As clinicians, pastors, and artists, we embody hope, healing, and suffering and invite those we work with to do the same. This trinity of the human experience cannot be split apart. You cannot have hope without healing and suffering. Likewise, you cannot experience suffering without eventual healing and the hope of a new way.
So, how have you invited creativity into your experiences of trauma? How do you embody hope, healing, and suffering? Is there a part of you that has cut off one or another? These are questions we must ask of ourselves first so that we can be a conduit of healing for others.
