Creativity and Trauma
Attachment styles, repatterning, and a return to self through art
The Moon Studio is facilitating The Artist’s Way later this month! You’ll receive weekly encouraging emails around each weeks’ theme, as well as weekly co-creation containers that begin with a brief energetic ritual, movement, or meditation to get you into flow. There will be additional workshops from writers and artists, and additional supplemental materials to keep you engaged and supported. You will rewire your patterns and habits around your creative process and make friends and creative community along the way. Complete a project or series! Experiment! Make major creative progress and breakthroughs by the Equinox!
Patrons and Substack paid subscribers receive a deep discount, at $99 with a code.
Enroll here.
A few years ago, a friend of mine, a writer and writing coach1, asked me if I’d ever be interested in developing something to help creatives heal their trauma.
She noticed that whenever a client had a breakthrough in therapy, some creative breakthroughs soon followed.
I joked that if I could figure that out, I’d be a millionaire.
While I haven’t *yet* begun my official curriculum around this subject, my work circles around these concepts frequently. (I am a public creative and a trauma survivor, after all.)
There’s a link between creativity and trauma.
Creativity is inherently intimate and vulnerable. In its highest form, creativity is the song of your heart. It is pure expression.
Trauma is a rupture. It’s a disconnect, an abandonment, that often leads to inner abandonment—and inner and outer conflict.
The opposites of trauma are safety and security.
The opposite of disconnection is connection.
The opposite of abandonment is deep presence.
Flow states and play states require foundations of security and safety.
It’s a paradox, but risk requires an element of safety. To feel safe, you must feel like you’ll be ok no matter what happens. A certain level of resource and security is required to push out into the unknown.
(If you have a history of not being ok, then your subconscious can conflate that with you not being ok. What I want you to remember is that one of the reasons you are still here is, in part, due to your creativity. Survival is inherently creative.)
To invest in yourself, you first must feel worthy of investment. You have to believe that your expression matters. At the heart of this lies belief, trust, and an inherent belonging.
Those of us who have trauma must stitch ourselves back into the web of life we often feel cast out of…have been cast out of. We must undergo a defrosting and dissolving process while simultaneously mobilizing ourselves toward expansion.
This is underworld voyages and invisible excavation work. It’s death work and life work: a painstaking process of weaving the self back into the present, back into the breathing material world and the benevolent etheric universe. Back into connection and belonging.
Trauma work is deeply spiritual work; we connect with forgotten aspects of our psyche, call back aspects of our soul, and often, dialogue with those in the realm of the unseen: ghosts, deities, ancestors, dreams, and guides. We metabolize not only our own individual shame and pain, but also the sorrows of our ancestries and the shadows of our collective.
Healing trauma is deeply creative; we’re using imagination, instinct, and intuition to create new worlds, timelines, and aspects of existence.
The places inside ourselves that we access when we are in our most creative states are our inner child, our higher self, and the greater consciousness/source: a holy trinity. If we are to channel something greater than us, our vessel—our nervous system, body, and aura—has to feel safe and secure enough to hold the frequency of the transmission.
If you’ve felt a rupture around your creativity, it’s not your fault. Our culture’s preoccupation with perfection and performance add a level of tension that is unnatural. We’re taught that creativity is frivolous, that artists can’t make money and because of that, art-making isn’t valuable. It gets turned into a competition circus where creatives are pitted unfairly against one another. We’re taught that if you aren’t a genius right out of the gate, then it isn’t worth it to even begin.
But we must stay with something long enough to be bad at it, for “bad” art is a precursor to resonant art. My favorite statement on this is from Jordan Peele:
“When I'm writing a first draft I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
Our first draft, our first 20 paintings or vases might not win us any awards. But repetition creates proficiency; there have even been studies done about this.2
Quantity leads to quality.
So shovel that sand: experiment, fill endless notebooks, make endless voice memos, affix endless sticky notepads onto your wall, or computer, or floor. Keep going.
If you’ve felt unmotivated about the prospect of restarting a creative practice, that makes sense as well: exhaustion, fatigue, and too many inputs (in the form of our digital devices and the onslaught of media the average human is faced with) aren’t conducive to the energy required to relight a pilot light that went out some time ago.
The antidotes to this are experimentation and consistency. Mix it up: if you usually paint, try collage. If you mostly write poetry, try narrative non-fiction. Get off the internet and onto a pad of paper. Fun fact: all my workshops and every Many Moons start out as scribbles on a huge notepad.
Consistency breeds familiarity, and familiarity is what rewires our anxiety and fear.
Practice creates evidence that we are safe and ok enough to create.
Over time, our creative practice becomes something to look forward to, and that relights the pilot light within back up.
Most likely, your creative practice matches your attachment style. If you tend towards avoidance/disassociation, you might avoid your practice, or put it off until the last minute, after all your obligations and chores are done.
If you are anxiously attached, you might overwork your art, or rely too heavily on collaborators or praise from others.
If you are disorganized/fearful avoidant, you are a mix. You might oscillate between intensity and disregard, between excitement about your projects and deep shame/vulnerability hangovers. (It’s fun over here, I know!)
Chances are, if you struggle with codependence then you put unnecessary pressure to make your work incredible all the time, or you feel most comfortable creating work for other people. A bad habit I’ve gotten into is placing more value on how I can serve others through my creativity and gifts than on what I make in order to impress or please myself.
The fantastic news is that a consistent creative practice can repattern and heal certain patterns and attachments that have accumulated over the years.
This summer, I’m committed to a creative practice that is more intimate with myself than it’s been in a long time.
I’ve been afraid that I do not have the capacity to go deep, to experiment, to express more vulnerable aspects of myself, I’ve succumbed to the inner critic in my head that anything I try will be futile, it’s been too long, I’m too old, it doesn’t matter…but I also know that we build capacity through practice. And that my inner critic is a protector part who makes up stories about what is possible because they think it is safer to hide than to be seen.
Lately, I’ve felt both performative and far away from some pieces of my core self, because I’ve entangled the need to produce with the need to make money with the need to serve. There’s definitely some untangling to be done!
In response, I decided to get off social media for the summer and invest in The Artist’s Way.
I’ll also be committing to nervous system practices and subconscious repatterning protocols that I’ll be introducing to the group I’m facilitating. I don’t often hear trauma discussed in the mainstream manifestation/self-help world, whether it be Atomic Habits style of self-development or the War of Art style of artistic self-help. It isn’t necessarily about powering through, it’s about creating conditions to be with, and feel safe enough to try.
Subconscious work, nervous system regulation practices, energy healing, and exposure therapy is how we repair trust and felt senses of safety in the body, energetic field and psyche. This is how we come back to self and our creative spirit. Our creativity, in turn, creates repair and reconnection.
The Moon Studio’s facilitation of The Artists Way starts July 24th.
Sign up here. (Subscribers and Patrons, you’ve received the discount code.)
That writer and writing coach will be leading one of our workshops! Stay tuned.
Here’s a link to a study about art and fear and ceramics. That sentence-LOL.