[LAUIL601] Secondary Research: Podcast - Women in Depth Podcast #92: Reconnecting with Our Creativity

92: Women in Depth Podcast - Reconnecting with Our Creativity Notes

Emma Cameron, art therapist and psychotherapist in Essex, England working with sensitive women to help them heal from their trauma. 

Also paints and draws herself. Practising artist for many years with many solo shows. 

Emma will be talking to us about reconnecting with our creativity, a connection that many of us forget to gain and reconnect with in our later years.  She'll talk about how this disconnection happens and how we can reconnect with our creativity and it's benefits. 

• Emma grew up in a family where it was considered good to paint and draw. Went to art college in early twenties in London, practicing artist for many years painting and drawing. Integrates all parts she was interested in including helping people. Bring out out their own creativity. 
• Vitalising and expansive
• Art therapy helps people to access what talk therapy cannot. You're tapping into different parts of your brain and different parts of yourself quite deeply when you're using art materials. Talking is important as well. It's experiential. In therapy, connecting to your feelings and connecting to a deep sense of self can be healing and profound and the arts are a great way of doing that. 
• It's such a release. Energising. 
• What does it mean to be creative? All of us have an inner urge to grow. In psychotherapy it can be called different things. This urge to live and grow and change. The more we tap into it we can feed our life. It's a basic part of being human. It's a basic part of people. There's a false idea that you're either creative or you're not. It's a very left-brain way of thinking. We need to allow a more right-brain way of thinking which is to consider the whole, consider that you can be creative and think in different ways. People tend to have "art wounds" or "art scars." I've noticed that people who say that they can't draw or paint, they have a bad memory where a teacher shamed them. Those experiences cut very deep. This creative way of being is then blocked to them which is very sad.
• People tell themselves stories of why they aren't or can't be creative. The way our brains are built is to make stories. Underneath there is shame that is much harder to talk about so we look at things such as money and time and break those down. It falls under this idea that there's a right way to be creative. We just have to allow ourselves to play in small ways. We have to allow ourselves to make mistakes which is so crucial. Use the mistakes to take us on a different journey. Benefit from your own mistakes. 
• "There's no external force that will tell you this is done and that you've done this right"
• "Art is a metaphor or a parallel for life"
• Letting go of judgements and goals and allowing yourself to sink down into something and an inner kind of knowing. More experimental curious playful way of being. 
• It's a place we yearn for but we are so uncomfortable with"
• "It really helps us to get so used to our own intuition"
• How do the benefits of creativity translate into the therapeutic container. How is creativity beneficial in therapy? Creativity in therapy can be more than just a painting. It can be about envisaging things, metaphors, puppets and a sand tray with objects in, postcards, play dough, stones, natural materials. Art as therapy - connecting to art outside of sessions and discussing that and what it brings up. 
• Exploring through photographs and postcards and connecting through imagery, exploring dreams, relationships in the sand tray with figures and objects. Revealing to themselves. Layers. Helps to verbalise.
• "The Unthought Known - things you've always known but never been able to put into thoughts"
• Puppets to explore parts of themselves. Someone who is really struggling with anxiety and overwhelmed use the puppets to give them profound wisdom to help them see they have parts of themselves that are strong, comfort them. Lost touch but the puppets help to reconnect with the qualities.
• How can we begin to reconnect with our creativity? A guided visualisation. Eyes closed, breathe, imagine you're in a peaceful place perhaps beside water or the mountains. Rise and fall of your belly as you breathe. Visualise art materials next to you. Describes various materials with beautiful words. Imagine touching and holding the materials. Smell. Sounds. Intuitively picking up and freely working and shaping with the tool. Meditation exercise. Whole creative process? Vague? Clear? Early stages? Trail that's worth following. What you might want to try in real life. The practicalities. Things may happen in your life to allow this happen!
• Emmacameron.com what is art therapy? Article on my website