Reclaiming Our Feelings and Restoring Our Health Through the Arts
As a child, I was captivated by the taste and feel of existence. The simple fact of my being-ness was enough to inspire my wonder and awe. Life was an enchanted playground, and I revelled in the magic I saw all around me. I had a rich imagination and spent a lot of time in day-dream; fathoming the secrets of the cosmos and coaxing new worlds into being. Music, in particular, invoked realms of intense emotion. I was in love with feeling. I was at home in my body and I rejoiced in its sensual, passionate, and primal nature.
I soon discovered, though, that my appreciation of the emotions and my attempts to express them were not always welcomed. As children we are taught that ‘big boys and girls don’t cry’, we are ridiculed at school if we are seen to be emotionally sensitive or ‘weak’, we get into trouble for expressing anger, and as adults we feel like we should have everything sorted out and under control. Throughout our lives, we are inundated with messages and models of what ‘appropriate’ feelings look like, by our parents, our education system, our peers, and the media. These cultural beliefs and social restrictions have created an environment that is often hostile to emotional vulnerability and expression.
By the time I was a teenager, my open-hearted playfulness and childlike wonder had been stomped out of me. Trying to fit in with the society that surrounded me, I adopted the mindset that rational thought and logical problem-solving were the keys to success, that emotional expression and sensitivity were weaknesses, and that imagination and fantasy were childish habits that got in the way of more important and productive work.
We are educated to believe that creativity and play are time-wasting activities, and that the use of imagination and make-believe is not in our interests as it obscures the true nature of reality. At school, I was taught that there is one correct answer to every problem, and that this answer is available to be found in the external world, if only I look hard enough and use the correct approach. Whether it’s a maths problem, a question of historical fact, or a health problem, there is one enduring truth that only needs to be uncovered. The implicit suggestion was that only the ‘real’ external world is worth our attention, and we must learn to understand it through the adoption of so-called ‘objective’ methods.
This emphasis on rational thinking and objective truth has arisen out of our cultural history and a long tradition of Western philosophy. Perhaps the most crucial figure in determining this trajectory was the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes. Paving the way for the ideals of the Age of Reason (or the ‘Enlightenment’) in the 17th and 18th centuries, Descartes developed a mechanistic world view that separated nature into two distinct realms; that of the mind, and that of matter. For Descartes, the only way to reach truth and scientific certainty was through rational mathematical thought, everything else, including the sense impressions of the body, was unreliable. Although this mechanistic world view is no longer supported by discoveries at the forefront of contemporary science,[1] the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter is still represented in our attitudes to life today. For example, think of the well-known and frequently used motto ‘mind over matter’, and consider the way in which we divide our healthcare system into physical healthcare and mental healthcare.
In a society that values (and, in my view, over-emphasises) these principles of materialism and rationalism, we have learnt to neglect our inner worlds. The realm of feeling, emotion, and intuition is seen as unreliable – or worse, undesirable – subjectivity is seen as the antithesis to truth. In ignoring our internal worlds, we are running away from our feelings. We anaesthetise them with drugs, or medicalise them into pathological problems that need to be cured by a health professional. But in not allowing ourselves to be emotionally true, and to feel what we really feel, we actually create a larger problem. We are missing out on the richness that experiencing life through the subjectivity of the human body brings, and it is causing a spiritual crisis, and an epidemic of mental illness.
At the age of 13, I suffered with a very sudden onset of severe insomnia which lasted for over a year. Quite often I would go for 48 hours or longer with absolutely no sleep at all, and when I did manage to get some shut eye it was never for more than two hours at a time. Over the course of that year, I developed a band of suffocating tightness beneath my ribs, and a permanent crushing sensation settled over my chest. My breathing felt constantly restricted and I started suffering from debilitating panic attacks. All the colour and vibrancy vanished from life, it was like living in a black and white horror film.
I visited my GP on a number of occasions with the hope that they could determine the cause of my symptoms. Each time, my personal narrative of what was going on for me and what my symptoms felt like was dismissed as irrelevant, I was simply examined and subjected to a series of tests and each time, the conclusion was that I was perfectly healthy. Biomedicine could not find anything wrong with me because no ‘proof’ of my suffering could be found. The distress that my symptoms were causing me was almost completely ignored. I was basically told that I was mistaken, that I was not ill, and that my feelings and sensations were not real. I was essentially invisible.
I continued to suffer in this way throughout my teenage years and I reached the age of 21, and a bout of suicidal depression, before I was finally referred to a mental health professional. Initially I was relieved. I finally felt as if I was being listened to, as if my suffering was being acknowledged, and I was hopeful that I would eventually be able to make sense of the hell I was living in and that I would recover. However, these feelings of relief and hope were short-lived. The psychiatrist prescribed me anti-depressant medication and booked me in for sixteen weeks of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT). This therapy did help me to start to gain an intellectual understanding of the origins of my suffering, yet I felt as if I was being cajoled into accepting my pain, with suggestions on how to ‘control’ my emotions, memories, and behaviours. It seemed to me that I was, once again, encouraged to supress my feelings, to hold myself together, and worst of all, my physical symptoms were ignored almost completely. I felt caught between two paradigms of health care, the biomedical (physical) and the psychological (mental). Neither adequately addressed my suffering; I was falling through the cracks.
In hindsight, I believe that it was the fact that I had no power or agency over my predicament that did me the greatest harm. There were no other options available to me, I was not even aware of ‘alternative’ medicine at this point in time, and I was never pointed towards it by a (bio)medical professional. It was only after a great deal of painstaking personal research that I started to find practitioners of ‘alternative’ medicine and therapy who were able to help me. In our culture, we rely so strongly on the expertise of the biomedical profession when we feel unwell, that it often hinders our ability to even be open to other options and possibilities.
Our current definitions of health, and the methods we use to maintain it, are too narrow – we look after the mechanical body, we analyse our thought processes and behavioural patterns, but we neglect our inner worlds of feeling and intuition. Even the mental healthcare profession works largely on a rationalistic problem-solving basis where the therapist or psychiatrist holds the authority, prioritising treatments such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and medication, over more self-exploratory, relational, and empathetic options. Patient-oriented and humanistic therapies such as gestalt therapy, person-centred psychotherapy, and arts therapies are slowly gaining recognition and popularity, yet these too rely on pre-established psychological frameworks. For the arts therapies, this means that a surrender to the full healing power of the creative process is often hijacked by these psychological principles. As expressive arts practitioner and therapist Stephen K. Levine notes: ‘As a result, the arts are not valued for their own intrinsic capacities but are seen primarily as instruments to enhance existing psychotherapeutic practices’.[2]
Personally, it is outside of the ‘clinical’ setting that I have had the most powerful healing experiences. Meditation, breathwork, psycho-kinesiology, and shamanic healing practices have all had a huge impact on my healing journey. The treatment of soul and body (or the Cartesian notion of mind and matter) as a unified entity, and the acknowledgement of all of our emotions, sensations, and feeling states as valid responses to the fabric of our lives has brought me self-understanding, self-compassion, emotional release, and symptomatic relief. But it is in the arts, and in music especially, that I have found true solace.
In healing work, the arts give us agency. Rather than relying on the infallible expertise of a medical authority, we can seek our own interpretations of pain and suffering. When biomedical methods fail to explain our ailments and offer us relief, the arts are able to provide an exploratory realm where meaning is created, but never fixed in stone. In exploring suffering through the arts, we do not try to remove it, numb it, avoid it, or even cure it. Instead, we embrace it, dialogue with it, hold a space for it. This ability to be present with pain and to allow our feelings, however unpleasant, to fully surface and move through us is crucial to the healing process. In fact, it is when we try to avoid or numb our feelings that we suffer the most. Paradoxically, it is by taking no action to remove pain, and by inviting pain to reach its full manifestation, that change and relief occur.
Through my own creative practices, I have learnt the art of surrendering control, of allowing feelings to show up as they are, and of welcoming back that sense of childlike play. The creative process involves the ability to let go of preconceived ideas, and to accept the notion that any expressive articulation could be the beginning of a revelation, of a healing moment, or of a great piece of art. Imagination and experimentation are at the forefront of this process. Judgement and criticism are forced to take a backseat. In this state of openness and surrender, a profound sense of flow can arise. When writing poetry or song I have often had the impression that the poem or song is writing itself, as if a divine spark is shaping it, and I am simply a vehicle for that expression. The arts afford us the agency to make our own meanings and interpretations, yet simultaneously teach us to trust in the uncertainty of the creative moment – to surrender to the flow of each unfolding instant, without needing to be clear about the outcome or result.
In attending to our inner realities without any notion of how they ‘should’ be, the arts may offer a route back to health, on an individual and social, emotional and spiritual level. The arts make no claim to absolute truth. They celebrate ambiguity, interpretation, and subjectivity, as there are always many possible meanings behind any work of art. Art is so much more than just the self-expression of an artist. It requires a witness, and it invites interaction and participation. Meaning emerges out of encounter, from the relationships between creator, art-form, and perceiver. Art reaches into the spaces between our individual experiences; it is an intersubjective endeavour.
Our subjectivity matters because it is fundamental to our experience of life as embodied human beings. It is the only experience that any conscious, knowing, and perceiving entity can have. Every perceiving being views the world through their body – through their subjectivity. And so does it really make sense to talk about an ‘objective world’ or an ‘objective truth’ when these things can never be experienced as such? Any attempt to grasp such an objective world or truth requires a subject to do the grasping.
It’s time we included the subjective voice in our vision of health and health care. Human relationships and interactions are just as crucial to our sense of well-being as care of the mechanical functioning of our bodies. Having our pain and suffering heard and validated by another human being is vital to our ability to recover from illness, whatever form that may take, whether it can be ‘objectively’ proven or not.
Instead of avoiding pain, or running away from conflict, we need environments where we can safely explore and experience these feelings and be met with support and compassion. In their capacity to create a space and time for expressive experimentation, the arts provide the perfect platform for such explorations and experiences. The arts are able to provoke feeling, to generate resonance between people, to allow us to see our collective humanity. Art involves a meeting between inside and outside, the personal and the collective, and it always says more than we can consciously express. It has a tendency to shape itself, it asks questions of us and gifts us with multiple perspectives. We can’t change socio-cultural attitudes towards emotional expression overnight, but through the arts we can create a space right now where we can experience intimacy, connection, and vulnerability. And as the arts reflect upon and are influenced by our life experiences, life is also shaped and altered by art. Through creating and practising emotionally vulnerable art, perhaps we can gradually change our socio-cultural reality for the better.
[1] See Capra, F. and Luigi Luisi, P. (2014). The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Levine, S. K. (2005). ‘Introduction’, p. 9. In Knill, P. J., Levine, E. G. and Levine, S. K (eds). Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy: Toward a Therapeutic Aesthetics. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.