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Processing Trauma

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Why somatic art therapy for children with traumatic experiences?

“I watch the boat as it moves away towards the horizon. A cold, tight fear grips my belly. I have the sensation of being upside down. Nausea. Tears flow freely down my cheeks. A familiar instinct wants me to jump forward, to hold on and not lose sight of the boat. There is a voice in the background. Soft and gentle. The words aren't important. It is the sound of the voice that calms me. Now I know what it feels like to be held. The cells along my back calm down. They can feel the chair supporting me. I'm in a cradle. Safe. The boat disappears from sight in the mist. I wave weakly and feel the fear turn to excitement, the tears to laughter and I turn in the direction of the voice, meet her eyes and smile. I say: “I thought I could say 'yes' only when I had learned to say 'no' but, here, the time had come to say goodbye to the old, because I had said 'yes' to the new. I had felt it and embraced it. It was just knowing that you are here with me, that in this space and time you would hold me and that no matter what happened, you would not allow it to overwhelm me. Only thanks to this, was I able to let go and say goodbye."

 

"The little girl sits to my right on a high stool. She is about 6 years old and in front of her there is a large wooden box full of clay: the "clay field", a sensorimotor art therapy technique. With both hands she is holding a bulky sponge soaked in water and is slowly and firmly pushing it over the surface of the clay, smoothing it. She turns to me, “Take a sponge too. You do it too. Together we can do it. Together."

 

The first passage describes a moment of my personal therapy with a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, a moment in which I let go of an old body scheme. The scheme had been dysfunctional but had allowed me to feel protected against life experiences that had taught me that assault and threat would inevitably and unpredictably arrive where I least expected it to. As I began to trust my new space of safety, the need to pre-emptively attack the other to preclude danger disappeared and my therapist invites me to push the boat away: a symbolic point of no return to my previous behavioral patterns.

 

The second passage describes a moment in my private practice in which, as a sensorimotor art therapist, I assist a little girl at work in the clay field as she prepares herself to contact her emotions buried beneath the surface of the clay. She has good reason to have locked herself out of her body for the past two years; it's a place that has become too painful to venture into alone. Here she is preparing herself, exploring the surface of the clay, as if it were the surface of her skin, and it is important that we do it together, impossible to do it alone. "

 

The text above is an extract from my chapter "Why art therapy with traumatized children?" published in the book "Art therapy with children: the creative process as a tool for growth, support and care" (Carocci). In this chapter, I explore how psychodynamic and sensorimotor art therapy together with Somatic Experiencing can be used to process the following aspects of trauma:

 

The relationship: the authority that failed to protect us ​

 

Impotence: the choice we never had ​

 

Anger: the defense that we experienced as helplessness

 

Shame coupled with anger: trapped in a learning of self-ineffectiveness ​

 

The conflict: restoring harmony 

 

The personal narrative: examples of 3 narratives in the 3 different modalities of the creative process

The cognitive-symbolic narrative: processing feelings of guilt

The perceptual-affective narrative: processing separation

The sensory-kinesthetic narrative: processing fear

​

The chapter concludes with the following paragraph:

"Healing trauma means restoring safety: safety in the body and safety in our relationship with the outside world. Artistic materials in the art-therapeutic process become a subject in their own right that responds to the person who uses them and enters into a dialogue with them; in Deuser's terminology (2020), they can represent both "me " and "not-me". In order to allow this transition to occur safely and effectively, the gradualness of the process is fundamental. The sensorial and metaphorical aspects of the interaction, based around shapes and forms, protect the child from requests to access potentially retraumatising explicit memories (Rothschild, 2021).  As each new emotion, learnt belief or body scheme emerges to be transformed in this long process, the art therapy setting offers a range of sensations, qualities, possibilities and methodologies that allow each individual to choose their own path and their own solution: a choice that was denied them during the traumatic event."​​​​

 

Why somatic art therapy for adults with traumatic experiences?
One of my users responds with her testimony...

When I contacted the Women's Refuge Centre a year ago, I was a different person than I am now. I was scared, desperate, very confused and tired of living in a state of uneasiness that was getting worse every year. The assistant opened my eyes to the concept of violence and my inability to recognize it as such, and proposed introspection and personal growth activities. I confess that I would have agreed to do anything to get out of the situation in which I found myself. I simply couldn't stand feeling bad anymore. Everything I had tried up to that point, including a course of analytical therapy that lasted years (decidedly too many), had failed to produce a significant effect on this "feeling bad" that had become the distinctive feature of my daily life.

 

I came to the first art therapy session without too many expectations, I confess. I had no idea what art therapy was, but I trusted the Women's Refuge Centre. I trusted those who seemed to truly understand how deep my pain was, a pain that had led me to live in a situation of pathological and violent (non) love. Yet in this new art therapy setting, I discovered a whole new world. In the space of a few sessions, decade-old blocks that the analysis had not even touched on in the slightest were removed. I didn't immediately understand what I was doing, but I felt deeply that the work that was proposed to me, with patience and delicacy, had the ability to reach all those key points that were at the root of my inability to distinguish between love and possession, between a behavioral pattern that respects my individuality and the violence that has marked my history.

 

Each new material/activity that was proposed to me, following the ideas of the themes that we were gradually identifying, moved a block, brought to the surface little pieces of me that I no longer knew or recognized.  Through this path that combines different therapeutic practices and approaches (I am not able to be more precise, but in essence it is not only cognitive work, but also physical and tactile work aimed at an integration between mind and body and therefore - I believe - more effective and tangible) I began to recognize the emotions I felt, but not only from an intellectual, cognitive point of view: I learned to recognize the effect of emotions on the body, how I instinctively behave in relation to happiness, anger, fear... .

 

The work of identifying, even sensorially (through the manipulation of clay or the use of colours and paints or other mediums) the consequences of trauma, has slowly allowed me to distinguish between different emotions. And all this is possible thanks to the work with the body, and with the senses. In the art therapy studio, there are infinite materials available and just as many ways to use them to express oneself: from the possibility of breaking those clay objects that I myself created and which symbolized moments of my life that no longer have any sense of being now, to creating representations of moods and visualizations. It has been an extremely  powerful, cathartic and transformative journey. I was amazed at how much compressed anger there was in me and I was helped to transform it without it devouring me.

 

Working with Rebecca, I slowly began to rebuild myself, to listen to myself, to see myself and to trust myself, my abilities and potential. This path has given me a new life, which like all lives has and will have its ups and downs, its happy and sad moments, but what I have discovered is that I can choose, or rather not only can I, I have the right to.

 

I discovered that I too, as a woman and as an individual, have the right to make my voice heard.

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