On Art and Healing

The first time I visited a mental health professional, I was highly reluctant and resistant to the process even though some part of me knew it would be wise to attend. It had been eleven months and two weeks since I received my MS diagnosis and twenty days since my last stay in the all-too-familiar medical surroundings of the UC Denver Anschutz hospital. But I was on a new disease modifying treatment for the MS that finally seemed to show promise and my physical and occupational therapists were enthusiastic about the progress that I was exhibiting in our near daily sessions. If I was willing to invest time, energy, and resources in OT and PT, shouldn’t I give emotional therapy the same degree of consideration?

And so, feeling flushed, tired, and tingly, I rolled my tennis-ball clad granny walker from my apartment to the stairs, from the stairs to my mom’s car, and from her vehicle to the basement office of a local art therapist who specialized in medical trauma. Frankly, her creative emphasis was the only thing that finally convinced me to book a session. Having grown up digesting the 90’s pop culture mentality that counseling signified a sort of personal weakness, I felt highly anxious about the endeavor. The fact that I had to tackle yet another set of stairs in order to show up at an appointment I already was bitter about attending was another obstacle to the probability of this yielding a positive outcome. 

But I was stubborn and I told myself I would go and so I did.

I largely remember four things about my time in art therapy:

1. I was greeted by the sweetest therapy dog, a permanently smiling goldendoodle who immediately softened my stony exterior and gave me a heartwarming target to whom I could express my woes and vulnerabilities.

2. I learned that individuals who have lived through medical trauma can be categorized in one of three roles: the victim, the survivor, the thriver. While the therapist cast me as the victim and encouraged me to be a survivor, I vowed to fall into the final group. I would be a thriver.

3. The only times I was able to fully open up about the fears, anxieties, pains, and wounds that I held within my scarred nerves and wearied bones was when we were in the midst of a creative project like painting or crafting an eclectic collage from health brochures and magazine clippings.

4. The therapist and I were not a good match. Her style was overly compassionate and sympathetic, often making me feel like a victim of circumstance rather than the unassailable fighter that I was determined to be.

As beneficial as the practice of art therapy may have been, the patient-therapist relationship was not conducive, resulting in less than two months of counseling in all. But I took away a handful of practices that I was able to self-employ, tools that I could turn to on those dark and stormy nights of the soul when my health obstacles felt smothering, oppressive, insurmountable.

Collaging became a regular practice. I would cull through old catalogs and fashion magazines and the quarterly newsletters delivered to my mailbox from the Rocky Mountain MS Center, InforMS, slicing renderings of brains and neurons and snipping out aspirational images of the life I wished I could lead, jumbling them into a comprehensive whole. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how the cutting and pasting practice was a visual arts version of directing a play, converging the research, words, and creative offerings of others in service of a grander creative vision.

Theatre and dance served as another form of therapeutic practice, one that exercised my body and my mind as I analyzed dramatic literature, moved around the stage, and committed lines and actions to memory. Having studied dance since a young girl, I was concerned that the artform was lost to me after my string of debilitating relapses from the summer of 2014 to the winter of 2015, but the allure of a fifties era musical theatre production in 2018 motivated me to return to the dance studio and to work longer and harder than I ever had before on remembering and executing ninety minutes of stylized choreography.

If musical theatre was the hare in my artistic race to healing, journaling and creative writing are the slow and steady tortoise, the calm and insular practices that allow me to access a lifegiving, heart warming arts-based form of sustained therapeutic care.

And, through it all, I have found solace in the moving melodies of music, the poignancy of poetic lyrics, the crescendos and swells of a classical symphony, the crooning of a Golden Age songbird.

The benefits of the arts in my lived experience is backed up in data. Research acquired by the Wyoming Arts Alliance indicate that exposure to the arts:

• Reduces pain, lowering prescription pain relief

• Improved physical, emotional, and psychological health

• Reduces anxiety, depression, and emotional distress

• Boosts the immune system

• Shortens hospital stays

All this being equal, I’ll end with what I regularly share with young theatre artists that I have the good fortune of collaborating with: the arts are therapeutic, but they are not therapy. My life is better because of the arts, my mental health more stable. However, even with that being so, I still sought out a new mental health practitioner after a few years away from therapy, a licensed family therapist who approaches my care with a straightforward emotional tenor that works best for me. I found the couch where I belong, and I continue to create in all of the ways that give meaning and richness to my life. For all of this, holistically, my world is better.