When you’re making art, something happens that goes so much deeper than words.
“Not everybody knows how to articulate their experience,” said Susan Hedlund. “For some people, talk therapy is great — but not for everybody.”
And sometimes, she added, it’s the most articulate folks — those comfortable putting their problems and feelings into words — who need to find some way to heal that goes deeper still.
“If we are using our left brain all the time to logically talk about things and solve problems — well, there are some things logic can’t fix,” Hedlund said. “There are things like sadness and fear and loneliness and a sense of isolation and helplessness.”
That’s why Hedlund, an oncology social worker and the manager of patient and family support services at the Knight Cancer Center at Oregon Health & Science University, is a big fan of psychological healing through creativity and the arts.
“The research I’ve seen talks about how it frees up things that get stuck,” she said. “There are things going on inside of us that we may not have words for or may not be able to wrap our logic around. The creative process can free up those things. It allows people access to a different part of themselves, a different source of information.”
None of which means you must be Michelangelo — or, anyway, Georgia O’Keefe — to experience that kind of healing. Technical skill, brushes and canvas isn’t the point; the point is the way your art, whatever it is, reaches inside of you and unearths what needs unearthing.
“We do collages on our retreats,” Hedlund said. “When we say we’re going to do art, that means wielding a pair of scissors and some glue and a pile of magazines and posterboard.”
So the materials and techniques are intentionally simple enough to allow those deep truths out. “Don’t overthink it,” Hedlund said. “The theme is usually transformation. How has cancer changed me or not changed me?”
Usually, she said, breast cancer patients and survivors on these retreats start by portraying the illness itself — but that part of the artwork doesn’t wind up being the whole or even the main thing. Just doing art where the cancer “sort of gets put in its place” is a welcome perspective and a healing experience, she said.
“It starts with the ravages of what they’ve been through, but usually it moves into something much more positive,” Hedlund said.
Cancer became a great big fire-breathing dragon in one woman’s artwork, Hedlund said, which certainly seemed insurmountable — “but she also drew this little blue butterfly and she said, ‘Cancer may be bigger than me but I can fly around its head and drive it crazy.’ ”
And a man she met who had a different form of cancer — a sinus tumor that resulted in the loss of an eye. He made a clay mask that demonstrated the difference between his inside and his outside. On the exterior of the mask’s eye patch was a graveyard, which is how everyone else saw him — a figure of horror and pity — but flip up the eye patch and inside you found rainbows and beautiful clouds.
“I’ve been freed up to see the things that are truly important,” is how he explained it. “People don’t need to feel sorry for me.”
More than mood
These things may seem symbolic and even a little precious. What do they have to do with real healing?
According to a 2013 paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers who analyzed dozens of studies of creative arts therapies and randomized clinical trials of cancer patients who were also doing art found that “creative arts therapies significantly reduced anxiety, depression, and pain and improved the quality of life in cancer patients.”
That’s not just a mood pick-me-up. Concrete data is building that “mind-body therapy” — be it picking up a box of crayons or a single pen, singing or playing an instrument, doing traditional yoga or maybe the fun new trend called “laughter yoga” — has a real affect on healing.
“Through creative arts, we are channeling our energy to have a positive impact on our body’s immune system, thus reducing the negative impact of anxiety, stress and depression,” said Elaine Smith, manager of Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s Mind-Body Medicine Department, in another 2013 publication.
Doing art “is a way of assigning meaning to what’s happening to you,” said Hedlund. “Some people might paint their way to healing or write their way to healing. For some people it can be really powerful. For some people, it’s not their avenue. One size doesn’t fit all. When I do retreats for the Pink Lemonade Project we do a whole range of mind and body and spirit things.”
That can even mean working with words, after all. Hedlund said she appreciates the research of James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, who has gained some fame for publicizing a “Writing to Heal” program — which involves writing continuously about a traumatic upheaval, 20 minutes a day, for four days. (Pennebaker doesn’t recommend writing about it forever — which can stimulate too much navel-gazing and self-pity — but sticking to four days of deep reflection in writing and then moving on. Don’t worry about grammar or accuracy or anybody else’s reaction, he’s said; this is for you and you alone.)
“Talk therapy can help us to a point,” Hedlund said. “But what he found is, people who talked about it and also wrote about it had an internal shift — not just in their brains but in their hearts. There’s a different level of healing that happens.
“Talking is a useful catharsis,” Hedlund said. “But talking and writing and doing creative work too — that leads to insight.”
