SHARJAH & DEPENDENCIES – CIRCA 1972 : A stamp printed in Shiarjah & Dependencies shows Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890), circa 1972

Ever notice how many of the most creative types have suffered great pain or faced tremendous challenges? Van Gogh could not have been in a happy state of mind when he cut off his ear. Picasso’s Blue Period is one of his most moving. I don’t even want to know what swirls through the mind of David Lynch, but I sure love his movies.

Creativity as a tool 

Creativity can be an invaluable tool for overcoming trauma. It provides a “safe” outlet for painful memories and feelings, giving your mind and body the opportunity to process and heal. It can also provide a “safe” medium through which others can share your feelings, creating a healing sense of community.

When you experience a trauma, often the aftereffects can be lifelong. One of the reasons for this is that your so-called lizard brain, that primitive part of your brain responsible for much of your emotional experience, gets stuck in the trauma, making you relive it in all kinds of strange ways at an emotional, unconscious level. This is particularly likely to happen if the trauma occurred during an especially vulnerable period in your life, such when you were a child or when you were ill, injured, or otherwise unable to defend yourself. Your intellectual brain knows that the trauma is over, the danger has passed, but your lizard brain is stuck in “fight or flight” mode. This is a common underpinning of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

You know what doesn’t work for trauma and PTSD? Denial. You can tell yourself as much as you like that the trauma is past, that you are safe, but your lizard brain just isn’t listening. In fact, it can’t even hear you. It’s not particularly well-connected to your frontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for reasoning, so you can’t reason with it. Try telling yourself that the wolf spider crawling over your shoulder is far more afraid of you than you are of it. Feel better? I didn’t think so.

Unprocessed trauma manifests itself in all kinds of ways. Your body might continuously pump out stress hormones, making you excessively sensitive or jittery, anxious, and tired. You may have panic attacks out of the blue. Many people find they

unconsciously re-create former trauma. For instance, people who were abused as children may choose abusive romantic partners or may, in turn, abuse their own children.

GUINEA – CIRCA 1973: A stamp printed in GUINEA shows a picture of the old guitarist, Pablo Picasso, circa 1973

Talking to the lizard brain 

Since it won’t listen to reason, communicating with your lizard brain can be tricky, but it can definitely be done. You just need to find a back door. That’s where creativity comes in. Our creative side taps into something deep within us, something emotional, something vulnerable, something primitive.

Ever listen to a song, look at a painting, or read a poem and find tears streaming down your face? Sometimes it’s clear why you’re responding this way, but other times it’s a real mystery. Why is a poem about someone’s lost dog making you weep till you your chest heaves? You don’t even like dogs. But the author expressed their own trauma through that poem, or it triggered your own trauma, and your lizard brain is responding to it. That’s the power of the collective unconscious.

Take me, for example. My trauma stemmed from a pretty heinous injury when I was 12. I broke my hip skiing, and that made it mad. Really mad. So mad it ate my cartilage and replaced it with glue. It hurt so much just sitting on my bed made me scream in pain.

But kids don’t break their hips, so no one was expecting complications. And doctors are really good at denial. Instead of listening to me, my surgeon wrote “give this girl the whip” in red marker across my physiotherapy request form. They did. The story goes downhill from there.

My creative outlet has always been writing. Both my need to manage my trauma and my need to deny it were perfectly reflected by my chosen profession: medical writer. Sometimes I even write about orthopedics. It makes me a little nauseous.

But there is no ego in my professional writing. Typically, I’m handed a topic and told to write it up in a specific, formulaic way for a particular audience. I can practically do that in my sleep. There is no creativity in this kind of writing, no trauma, no “me”.

Personal writing, like this very essay, is different. And when denial of my trauma only triggered crippling anxiety and panic attacks, I use I began to use writing as my creative outlet.

USA – CIRCA 2001: a stamp printed in the USA shows Frida Kahlo, Mexican Painter, circa 2001

Trauma as a tool 

Trauma is a wonderful muse. Just ask anyone who has written a painful but moving personal memoir. Painters like Frida Kahlo, Picasso, and Van Gogh clearly expressed their trauma through their work. And what could The Scream be depicting if it’s not some sort of trauma?

But don’t get caught up in thinking that you must have a history of suffering to be creative. First of all, everyone has suffered. Even watching someone you love suffer is a form of suffering. Secondly, your lizard brain is definitely there and most certainly has something to say, even if it’s about suffering that doesn’t affect you directly, like the Holocaust. You don’t need to think about it; it may not even be conscious. You just need to trust your instincts and leap. If you put yourself into your creative work, people will respond (not always the way you want them to, but they will respond nonetheless).

The knife cuts both ways. Trauma can be an excellent impetus toward creative endeavors. But creativity is an excellent tool for recovering from trauma. Don’t hide from your trauma. It is, and always will be, part of who you are. Use it in your creative work, and the world will know you a little better and respond.

About Alison Palkhivala:

Alison Palkhivala is an award-winning freelance writer and journalist specializing in lifestyle, health, and medicine. She has provided content for some of the online health world’s most high-profile players, including WebMD, Medscape, and MedPage Today.

While Alison has written about virtually everything health-related, her main passion is helping people better understand mental illness. In that light, she has written extensively about anxiety and depression and is developing books about palliative care and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Alison’s non-professional time is largely taken up with family life. She lives in Montreal, Canada with her husband and two children. You can find more information about her on her website as well as on Facebook and Twitter. You can also check out her blog about health, wellness, and medicine.

Today, as a special treat, we have GUEST BLOGGER Denise Mozilo Frasca. Please enjoy her wonderful blog post and be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.

“…play is a catalyst…just a little true play can spread through our lives, actually making us more productive and happier in everything we do.” – Dr. Stuart Brown, author of Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

The inspiration for this writing came from a week of babysitting for my 3 (“and ¾” I can hear him say) year old grandson. He is an especially imaginative child and insists that all grown-ups participate. At the end of the first day, I realized that my mindset had gone from serious to silly and my mood from somber to joyous. By the end of the week we had baked banana bread, pretended to be human race cars, created a train community, dressed up as robots using my pots and pans, and made pretend maps which we followed to find secret treasure (usually some mommy-restricted food in my pantry!) We also read many, many picture books.

Seeing the world through his imaginative play brought to light how important play is to an adult’s creativity as well as child’s. When you play, there are no set rules, there is no self- criticism and all your efforts are rewarded, because you are the creator of that world. Play naturally leads us to think of things as they might be, rather than as they really are. When playing it is easy for anyone to imagine a world in they can fly, or be transported to the age of the dinosaurs. Imaginative play gives you permission to explore areas you may otherwise feel inept at. My grandson is one of the few humans who has ever heard me play the guitar when we pretended to be a rock band!

As an adult, play provides an opportunity to expand your creativity beyond the constraints of societal expectations. If you are “just playing”- there is no need to explain or excuse your behavior. The state of mind you are in during play is about the here and now. This has been referred to as Flow, in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book by the same name. He contends that when you are fully immersed in an activity where you have energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity, then you have the optimal capacity for creativity and happiness. This state of flow is exactly the state you are in when you are playing. A playful attitude empowers the mind to remain open to explore and imagine a broader range of possibilities when looking for answers to new experiences. When you transfer that playful outlook to work and home life, you increase your ability to creative problem solve!

The benefits of play enhancing creativity are neurologically based as well. Best-selling author Steven Kotler writes about consciousness through flow states, in his book, The Rise of Superman. He speaks of how the prefrontal cortex calculates time. When playing, we lose the ability to assess past, present, and future. Kotler explains, “we’re plunged into what researchers call the deep now.” According to Kenneth Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida and the author of Creativity and the Brain, creativity not only involves coming up with something new, but also with shutting down the brain’s habitual response, or letting go of conventional solutions. Rex Jung, a well-respected neuroscientist sees creativity as a slower meandering in the brain using the frontal lobe in a more transient way (transient hypofrontality). When you play, you are using several areas of your brain in a way they are not normally used.

Businesses have long recognized the benefits of play, which is why they have retreats and team-building exercises. Encouraging employees to play with each other builds trust and boosts cooperation.  According to Dr. Stuart Brown, author and founder of the National Institute of Play, “There is good evidence that if you allow employees to engage in something they want to do, (which) is playful, there are better outcomes in terms of productivity and motivation.”

What is play for one person, can be work for another – so it is important for you to find joy in your play. For me, doing a crossword puzzle with a friend is play, for my husband it is chopping wood and building a holz hausen with the neighbor. For some it is pretend teatime with their child, and others it’s taking an oil painting class. The important thing is that your play should be interactive, non-stressful and stimulate your creative side. So the next time you have writer’s block, or are unable to solve a pressing problem, or are attempting to learn a complicated subject, grab a friend, or a grandchild, and go play…you’ll be surprised how the creative juices will begin to flow.

Relevant links:

http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_says_play_is_more_than_fun_it_s_vital

https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/creativity-and-the-everyday-1

http://www.deepfun.com/othergames/

http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/stacking-wood-zmaz86ndzgoe.aspx

Guest blogger Denise Mozilo Frasca

Denise Mozilo Frasca is a writer, educator, wife, mother, and grandmother (not necessarily in that order). She has received the James Nicholson Political Poetry Award for her poem “Memorial Day,” and was a selected poet for Poets and Writers on War and Peace. Her poems have been published in Mother/ Daughter Duets, a collection of essays and poems about adult daughter/mother relationships, The Westchester Review, and The Manhattanville Review. She has been a guest blogger for Hillside Productions (http://hillsidehouseproductions.com/not-just-a-lullaby-denise-frasca-guest-blogger/) as well as an editor for countless colleagues. She is most happy when playing. Follow Denise on Twitter at @DeniseMFrasca.