Category: Therapy

Perfectionism and the Burden of Control

Are you a perfectionist? If so, you may have a hard time relaxing and enjoying making art just for its own sake. Expressing yourself can be extra hard because of the need for the results to be amazing. 

Yet it is the wild and wonderful nature of life (and art) to be unpredictable, wayward, and unforeseen. We cannot control it and it can never, ever be perfect. 

For those of us imprinted with the burden of having to seem perfect at all times, art projects that are designed to be experimental, exploratory, and a little bit messy can be very liberating. We don’t have to control the outcome perfectly because chaos is supposed to have a role. 

I share the following three activities hoping you may recover a little bit of your right to not know what exactly is going to happen. No one should have ever given you the impression that you could or should control life completely. It cannot be done, and if it could, it would be a shame, really – life would be pretty boring. 

Have fun!

Abstract Collage

What You’ll Need: 

Construction paper or brown paper grocery store bags, modge podge if you have it, or glue stick or glue 

If using construction paper, pre-select the colors you like and set any aside that you don’t resonate with today. 

The Process:

Begin with letting yourself rip up many, many pieces of paper, into different sizes and shapes, with the rule that you must tear with your hands and not use scissors. 

If you are able to, enjoy the process of tearing up paper. This activity can be therapeutic in and of itself.

When you have a large pile of shredded paper of different sizes and shapes, start gluing them onto a large blank piece of paper in whatever arrangement feels right to you. Go piece by piece, intuitively adding pieces where they seem to want to go. It can be helpful to use a brush to smear the glue over the top of the pieces to keep them matted in. It’s done when you say it is.

Washes

What You’ll Need: 

Watercolor pencils, watercolors, ink, and/or water-soluble markers. The thickest paper you have, ideally watercolor paper, can also be cardstock or cardboard. Brown paper bags will also work well enough if you don’t have any other thick paper.

The way to find out if a marker is water-soluble: make a mark on a piece of scratch paper and then dribble some water over the mark. If the ink bleeds, you’re good to go. If the ink is impervious to the water, choose something else. 

The Process: 

Make many expressive, intuitive marks on your page with your water-soluble mark-maker. The suggestion is not to draw anything in particular, but rather to have the line indicate how you’re feeling. You might think of it like a polygraph – the line expresses your state of being. 

Leave a fair amount of white space between your lines – don’t fill the whole page.

Using a brush dipped in water (or watercolor or watered down ink), generously distribute water over your whole image, so that the colors bleed and drip. You can change the direction of the drip by tilting the paper if you like and turning the image around.  

A fun experiment is to use coffee instead of water or ink, which gives it a pleasant stain. Again, it’s done when you say it is.

Ink Blot Butterflies

What You’ll Need: 

The largest paper you have and relatively thick paint, such as acrylic, oils, or gouache.

The Process:

Fold a large piece of paper in half and then open it up again. Squeeze or thickly paint some color onto the left or right side. 

Fold the paper back over, and squeeze the two halves of the paper together, pressing firmly until all of the paint has been squished flat.

Unfold the paper. Some of what you did on one side will be imprinted on the other. It may look like butterfly wings or a Rorschach ink blot. 

Dropping the need for it to stay symmetrical, work the image further. If it looks like something specific to you (such as a face, a tree, whatever), feel free to develop the image in that direction to bring out the resemblance. Again, allow yourself to sense the moment of it being done, and trust that.

Art is Always a CoCreation

Art is always a collaboration between us and life. It is never just “me” making art. This means I  also don’t have to take it so personally if it turns out “bad” – both life and I are responsible for the outcome! May these exercises feel freeing. 

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with perfectionism, and substance use, consider treatment at a holistic program that is designed to heal the whole you—body, mind, and soul. Reach out to us today to learn more about how we incorporate art therapy exercises into our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Creative writing, like any art practice, can be used also as a therapy to help you heal your psyche. 

When it is used primarily for a non-artistic goal, the point of the writing becomes the process itself, the effect it has on you.

You may find yourself writing a piece you really like, but the emphasis is on creating bonds of connection with yourself. 

Here are a few Writing Therapy exercises that you may want to play around with. For the side of you that resonates to poetics, stories, and the wonder of language! 

1. Freewrite

The simplest writing exercise is the freewrite. As the name implies, there is no rule to what is written, but there is a rule that whatever comes out, you keep flowing and do not stop writing for the entire time.

How to do it: 

Set a timer for seven minutes and write the entire time. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, sense, meaning, or beauty – if you keep writing the whole time, you have done it correctly. 

Why do this? 

Freewriting gets out the crusty goop. Imagine turning on a tap that hasn’t been used for a while – the first things that come out mainly just need to be blasted out of the way so the pure water can flow. 

2. One Minute Story Starts

One Minute Story Starts are another way into the fountain of words within you, and are especially good for sneaking past the Inner Critic, because the short time box is too fast for judgment.

The result will be several writing starts (like plant starts). Not all of them will be great. But the point isn’t to make good writing but to get into the thick abundance of ideas that’s always within you.  

How to do it: 

Set your timer for 1 minute, and start writing a story.  When the timer goes off, start a completely new 1-minute story about something else entirely. Do this 12 times (12 minutes total). In 1 minute you will likely have a small paragraph of a couple of sentences, tops, so at the end of the 12 minutes you have 12 short paragraphs – the opening paragraphs of 12 different stories. 

Why do it? 

It’s important when doing any kind of creative practice to get past the self-editing urge (editing can happen later). The Inner Critic shouting judgments in our ears is what makes us get tight & end up with no ideas at all. To sneak past the Inner Critic, sometimes the best approach is to run and cannonball into the water.

3. Lists

How to do it:

For each category I name below, list 12 things that belong in that category. Don’t overthink it, it’s ok if you have “Big Bird” and “hummingbird”, and “Larry Bird” in the bird category – that all works. The goal is to get 12 things down, as quickly as possible. 

• 12 mammals
• 12 plants
• 12 inanimate objects from nature
• 12 activities a person could to do
• 12 colors
• 12 shapes from nature (the shape of a fern, etc)
• 12 very big things
• 12 human-sized things
• 12 very small things
• 12 birds
• 12 things in the sky
• 12 moods a person could be in

Why do it?

Similar to Exercise 2, this is an exercise that focuses on quantity over quality. You are looking for a high number of distinct ideas – whether those ideas are good or not doesn’t matter.

4. 777 Poetics 

How to do it:

Using your answers from exercise 3 (your lists) as inspiration – just the jumping off point – make up 7 similes, 7 metaphors, and 7 personifications.

Similes compare two things using like or as. “Life is like a box of chocolates.”

Metaphors equate two previously unrelated ideas by saying one thing is another thing. “It is the East, and Juliet is the sun.”

Personifications take human qualities and ascribe them to inanimate things. “The flower shyly turned her face to the sun.” 

Your lists can help provide an interesting mishmash of ideas. “A hummingbird (from the bird list) is like an asteroid (things in the sky list)”. 

Why do it?

The psyche loves poetics. Using them nudges us into dreamy, image-soaked creative reverie, a state that saturates us with depth and color. 

5. All Together Now

How to do it:

Look over everything that you have written across all 4 previous exercises. With a highlighter, pull outlines, words, and portions of text that seem worth exploring further, and write these out on a new piece of paper or in a new document. 

The only criteria for choosing is if something is curious or interesting to you. With all your excerpts on a new page, see if you can come up with a new piece that integrates all or most of these selections. It can be a poem, song lyrics, a story, an essay – just let yourself weave your ideas together. 

Why do it? 

This is the stage when you get to enjoy all the weird, unexpected, delightful things you came up with. Integrating them into one piece is just another creative frame for thinking in a new way. 

Have fun!

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use or a history of trauma that continues to affect daily life, reach out to us today to learn more about our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Unlock Your Creative Self with this Easy Art Therapy Activity

Looking for an inner wellspring of happiness? Unlock your Creative Self. 

Your Creative Self is a reservoir of riches. Creative Self will help you feel better when you’re down and ground you when you’re happy. 

Most of us locked Creative Self away at some point during the education process, as we gradually learned to stiffen and repress the unpredictable, spontaneous aspects of our nature. We did this to fit in with society’s expectations and requirements of us, which generally involved making us more boring and docile. 

But now we’re grown up, and we can revive Creative Self for our own reasons – because we miss our juicy aliveness, the surprise and delight of play, and the satisfaction of self-expression. 

The following easy activity can help you get in touch with your Creative Self. It’s important not to judge or have high expectations, because Creative Self doesn’t like that, so make sure you make it an ego-free zone as best as you can. It doesn’t have to be good art. Just doing it is the point.  

Expressive Mark Making: This Easy Art Activity Unlocks Your Creative Self

What you’ll need: markers, crayons, pencils or pastels and paper

1. Let Your Body Choose Materials 

Choose some mark-making tools, such as markers or crayons. Test the tools and see which ones you want to use. Rather than choosing from the mind, see if you can let your body sense decide what colors and materials it wants to play with today. If you listen, body sense will have very clear preferences.

It’s important for this exercise that you like how the mark-making feels. If you have very saturated pens, you may like how the paper soaks up the ink. Or you may like the waxy resist of a crayon, the dry chalk of a pastel. Ask the body sense within you to choose based on what feels interesting or appealing today.

If you’re not sure what is meant by “body sense”, imagine closing your eyes and touching two pieces of material – tin foil and velvet. With your eyes closed, how can you tell the difference between the materials? 

Feeling the differences, does it make you want to do different things with the material? Crumple one piece, or touch it to your cheek, for example? That’s the body sense that tells you exactly what it wants to do with materials, and it’s very connected to Creative Self.

2. Express Yourself 

Once you’ve chosen your mark-making tools, start making marks on your paper without making anything specific (you’re not “drawing”, just making marks). 

Just like you did as a kid, before you knew how to draw “things”, circle and move around the whole paper, following your urges of movement. Notice the sounds of your mark-making and the feeling you get from scraping your tool across the surface. 

If you start to feel an instinct to move faster or slower, to make heavy or lighter marks, go with that.

Allow yourself to create at least 3 full-page scribble creations before you stop and reflect. 

3. Look at Your Work

After completing at least 3 pages of expressive mark-making, stop and look at what you’ve done. Allow yourself to gently take in the cloudy, liminal, abstract beauty you’ve made. 

See how much speed, weight, and energy is recorded in the marks you made. Can you detect the motion, direction, and feeling of your own emotions, reflected there? What does looking at your drawing feel like to your body sense? 

4. Name Your Pieces and Find out More

Give each of your pieces a title. Now write a short paragraph from the point of view of your drawing, giving it a chance to speak to you. Start with the words “I am…” 

For example, if I named my silver, greenish bluish crayon piece “The Silver Tide”, then I would begin “I am the Silver Tide. I hold the secrets of your dreamworld, what you have forgotten but comes back to you, unbidden…”  

Try it and see what your drawings have to say to you!

How does this Easy Art Therapy Activity Unlock Your Creative Self?

When you play in the pre-verbal, pre-symbolic realm of expressive markings, you return to how you were as a young child, before writing and representation taught you to focus on abstract concepts over felt experience. This exercise, therefore, is a direct line to the Inner Child. And in the words of Picasso, “every child is an artist”. 

This childlike realm of feeling, impulse and body sense is where Creative Self thrives. 

Enjoy!

If you or an important woman in your life are struggling with substance use or a history of trauma that continues to affect daily life, reach out to us today to learn more about our treatment programs. Call (866) 950-0648 to learn more. 

Each human being, despite having only one physical body, has many different faces to their personality. We have multiple sides to us, variable moods, hidden traits that only come out in certain settings. 

If, upon reflection, you don’t already instantly agree, you might think about all the times you feel you are fighting yourself. If a part of you thinks you should get up off the couch and go work out, but another part wants to stay put, you can see already that there are two parts of you at play who apparently want different things.

In fact, this is so much the case for human beings, that psychologists have realized psyches are less like one individual, self-consistent person than they are like a group of people—a motley crew, bound together and related but not always getting along well with each other. 

In truth, put together, all the many sides and aspects of us resemble nothing so much as a family. With all the love, the fighting, power dynamics and the enmeshment with each other, these inner worlds are just like the outer psychological worlds we grow up in. 

Families are full of the same types of interactions that also take place among the different sides of our own natures: shifting alliances, avoidance of problems, in-fighting, blaming and marginalizing, addictions and troubles, as well as longing, heartache, unmet needs, and deep bonds of affection. 

Richard C. Schwartz, who developed the Internal Family Systems Therapy model, discovered that, logically enough, the inner family of parts within us responds to therapy in a very similar way that families do. 

Family Systems Therapy rests on the understanding that when we can create a good enough recognition of the fact that, like it or not, we’re all in this together, and we all need each other to co-create a family system that feels good for all, much can be accomplished and also forgiven.  

Of critical importance is seeing how each family member’s most problematic behavior exists in service to the needs of the whole family. In a very real sense, at the psychological level we do all we do “for the family”, whether we are conscious of it or not. 

Building on the remarkable insight, that inner families can be healed using the same tools that help outer families, Schwartz built his Internal Family System Therapy model into a beautiful library of thought and tools that helps create harmony and understanding among the many sides of us. 

The power of this discovery is hard to emphasize enough: were we to live in harmony within our own selves, we would not live in such a discordant and incoherent outer world. Holding peace, satisfaction, and deep connection internally, actions taken in the outer world would hold that same signature of coherence and beauty. Collectively, we could create a very different world if only we could achieve such a state of inner unity. 

The goal of Internal Family Systems Therapy is inner reunification. In another sense, it is restoration of relationship, the healing of fracture. This is a unification which allows diversity. It is not about forcing any part to subsume to another, it is no inner subjugation, but rather an agreement to co-exist and to co-create as equals. 

This is the cure for all inner and outer pain, to at last give up domination, bloodlust, control, force and exploitation, suppression and otherizing, and simply to share life together, no one having any more value or authority than another. As equals, in recognition and humility that none among us owns life, we are all only human: receivers, players and expressions of life.

This understanding is missing at the outer level of human life, as we all can see.  And what helps both external families and inner ones is the same: to create bridges of dialogue and empathy across all points of view. 

IFS as a system of thought can help us get there, by showing what it is that heals our insides and our outsides, both. What heals is to hold space for unburdening. Unburdening happens when there is true compassionate, curious interest to hear each and every true story. With no dismissal, allowing all truths into the record. 

Where does this all lead? To the understanding that we aren’t any single part of us, just as no other is who they seem to be at the moment. We are all, at any time, only expressions of certain sides and aspects of the shared one psyche we all emanate from. As streams sourcing from the same spring, we have the same essence deep in our natures. In this reflection, we can finally recognize all life as kin. 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works with thoughts, interpretations, and outlooks – everything relating to the mind. It also works with behaviors, healing the actions we take and the patterns of habit we follow. 

With both thoughts and behaviors, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps us through the “act as if” principle, also known as the “fake it ‘til you make it” method, in which you learn how to be happier through practicing the thoughts and behaviors a happier person might have. 

Over time we see that we can adjust our thoughts and behaviors to be in service of our true goals and desires. This transfers the power and agency over to us, so that our thoughts and behaviors serve and express our highest nature rather than enslaving us into patterns we did not ever mean to express. 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is effective and fast, and it is especially good for any type of suffering that essentially derives from how we are thinking about things, and how those thoughts give rise to behaviors that don’t serve our interests.  

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works both sides of the coin. Body and mind are married and you cannot work with one without the other being impacted. Sometimes one seems to be the place where the trouble is, but you can help the other side by treating them as interconnected. When healing from addiction, we work with the thoughts we have, as well as the compulsive behaviors. 

Taking positive actions will change your state, as will thinking positive thoughts. Everything is connected, even though they are distinct aspects of our humanity. A state of body, such as being tired or sick, will impact our thoughts. The reverse is also true. Have you ever noticed how if you read about an illness’ symptoms, you may even start to feel under the weather? Medical students famously sometimes think they have the diseases they’re learning about, even to the point of manifesting symptoms, just because of the way that focusing on some information can cause the body to follow along.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is powerful in particular because of the basic practice of simply becoming aware, first of all, of what is even taking place in our thoughts. Before the healing journey, most of us do not even notice our thoughts. It is more than we think we are our thoughts –we identify with them and think that they are our own. 

The essential problem with this is that all kinds of toxic and antihuman thoughts arrive in our thought-streams unquestioned. Before mindfulness, we just take them in, allowing them to create our feelings and behavior for us, without even having the chance to say whether we want these thoughts to have so much authority in our lives. 

We have all inherited anti-human thoughts from the collective, which actually create great harm to us. Harmful thoughts are such an embedded part of our own experience we may not even notice there is a difference between them and us. 

But the difference between us and these harmful thoughts is the all-important entry point for the possibility of healing. In the little gap between “I” and the part in the background who is seeing that there is an “I” at work, is exactly where Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is impactful. 

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches us to notice which thoughts are running in us and to then decide if we agree with those thoughts, actually. Or whether we might choose to think something differently, and try a different thought. 

This is how we discover that the space that our thoughts have been running around in belongs to us, and we have the right and the ability to command that space, and be in charge of it. This applies to the urges that appear right before we take an action.

We can say: “I see you, thought, I see you, urge. You are not me. I do not consent to give this behavioral pattern my energy at this time. I am going to place my focus somewhere else.” 

Through encounters like these, we gradually see that negative thoughts and behaviors have nowhere to fester if we do not give them space within us. 

This is the beginning of liberation from the tyranny of thoughts and compulsions which seem to appear out of nowhere and cause us great misery. It is the start of choosing reality-generating thoughts and ways of being in the world that make us feel happy, safe, and capable. 

Far more than just a popular treatment method, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a critical blow to the deepest causes of our suffering.