Letting The Dust Settle

Therapeutic self-expression…

Therapy is an interesting concept. Talking therapies are the most widely utilised, where art, music, dance and writing could become life long crutches, ones to prop up a person in pain, we even sustain codependence through talking within a ‘safe space’. The idea of therapy should be to claim safety, first in body, then mind, and then to work outwards and claim external safety too. Where talking is the relied upon method, what happens when the person you speak to becomes unaffordable, or they discharge you because of huge waiting lists and a need to make space for somebody else? There is nothing safe about perpetual reliance on a therapist.

Instead, we must train human beings to become self-reliant, especially in an increasingly unaffordable world where money determines the type of help you get, as well as the quality and longevity of it. Recovery cannot be accessed without safety first, and when a recovery becomes reliant on an external person and/or feature of the environment, it is fragile at best, and at worst, not even a recovery at all, it may even be the masking of trauma bonding. All that determines whether therapy is successful is the destination that it leads you towards, does it train to you heal, release, reprocess, as a way of life? Or has it trapped you in a codependent system that will not ever provide a key to your freedom and independence?

For me, writing is the best form of therapy, I can say anything, I can tell my stories to the page or computer screen, and time, or the delete button, washes them away… drawing helps too, but on the iPad, so that a password stands between my innermost darkness and another’s prying eyes. There is a safety to drawing that is not found when I sit to write, the self-expression can be inexplicit as my mind and body live a moment of reprocessing that is beyond my own comprehension, one full of colour and line, not sense and clarity. It is an experience beyond cognitive storytelling. When this occurs, all one must do is allow the flow state to become the experience. The second we let fear take over, the moment we hear the inward voice judging the quality of the picture, or the darkness that is inside of us, we stop healing and start retreating back into ourselves. We suffocate the part learning to speak and heal.

To find safety in the expressed arts will take a lot of time for those with complex trauma backgrounds, or other emotional and mental barriers in the way. But to sit safely with a pen and paper, was it not once our child-given right, to be exploratory, to doodle, to map out images from the imagination? Life steals a lot, but reclaiming can be the way of life once you figure out what it is that you want to reclaim – the paintbrush, your tap shoes, bare feet in puddles? The choice really is yours, if you can be brave enough to step through what sits inside of you preventing you from picking up that part of yourself… Everything you are and can ever be sits inside of you, discovering it can be the fun part, once therapy is in hindsight, and the journey becomes about reclaiming, instead of reprocessing.