Creativity: The Healing Agent
“Hi, you’ve reached Caroline. I’m not available right now, so please leave a message, and I’ll call you back as soon as possible.” Voicemail. Again. “Hey Caroline, just checking in. Would love to chat and see how you’re holding up after your grandfather’s funeral. Just give me a call back when you can.” I hung up the phone. This was the 10th time I had called her that day, without her ever picking up. She hadn’t responded to any of my text messages either.
Caroline’s grandfather had just recently passed away from an unexpected illness. In the aftermath of the funeral as the shock evaporated, grief settled in, seeping deeply into her everyday life. But instead of expressing her grief verbally or physically, she expressed it through creativity.
Caroline created out of her grief. Day in and day out she would lock herself in her tiny dorm room and just paint, transforming any thoughts that came to mind into brush strokes on a piece of paper. I would visit periodically to keep her company, and by the end of the month, her room was full of dozens of little paintings. Paintings of childhood memories. Paintings of meals she enjoyed. Paintings of people who were important to her. Bewildered by her prolific creations, I inquired as to the motive behind all these paintings. I asked her one simple question: “Why did you make all of these?” She responded: “I don’t know; it just makes things feel OK.”
For Caroline, being creative was a way to cope with her loss. Creativity can be an important source of healing after challenging or traumatic experiences. While creative activity may not be an effective healing agent for all people, it’s benefits have been proven time and time again, as seen through the powerful results of art and music therapy programs. With that said, grief is not only something that can be eased with creativity, but also something that may elicit creative behaviors, as a disproportionate amount of creatives experience trauma. Thus creative activities may be both a symptom of trauma and the healing solution to trauma.
For a more in depth discussion of the link between creativity and healing, read the following studies:
For more information, please contact me at sfd9@georgetown.edu. To read more, you can purchase my book, “When Birds Swim” on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.
