Celebrating 20 years. This article appeared in the first issue – ANZJAT, volume 1, number 1, 2006.
Open Access
Published: October 2006
Issue: Vol.1, No.1
Word count: 5,653
About the author
Passage through grief
Suzanne Calomeris
Abstract
The following article is a subjective account of the author’s art-making as essential to understanding her experience of sudden loss. The story unfolds with descriptions of the ten artworks that were completed over three years, five of which accompany the text. Special attention has been given to the creative process itself as redemptive and self nurturing, leading to a heightened awareness of ones emotional truths, with the artworks serving as signposts along the way. The unconscious stream that feeds these springs of awareness is accessed through art-making and the increased sensitivity to ones intuition that results, thus driving the soul’s journey home, towards healing. For this author, ‘art for art’s sake’ becomes enriched in meaning as the benefits of personal process permeate life and work.
Keywords
Art therapy, grief, self-care
Cite this articleCalomeris, S. (2006). Passage through grief. ANZJAT, 1(1), 25–29. https://www.jocat-online.org/a-06-calomeris
Art-making as self-care and as a marker of personal process following bereavement
“In every parting there is an image of death.” – George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans (Potter, 1988)
As an art therapist, I subscribe to the notion of art as inherently healing, a concept at once simple and complex. For within this experience of art as healing lie a number of elements essential to the therapeutic process. These include those referred to in many art therapy texts as: externalisation – the separation of ‘the conflict’ from its source thus allowing for safer, less self-conscious reflection; containment – the safe holding of feelings within the form of the image which may otherwise overwhelm the subject; catharsis – an unburdening of emotional material leaving one feeling detoxified or cleansed.
Simon (Hill, 2001), states that ‘bereavement art’ is an attempt to work through the conflict of loss and usually occurs in three overlapping stages. The first consists of the expression of the conflict bringing closer to consciousness the feelings that lie behind the sense of stress. In the second stage, the art provides a safe holding space that enables the suffering of the expressive stage to find containment as it is slowly converted to mourning. This second stage leads to the third and final stage of resolution of the grief process, where suffering has been transformed, personal meaning(s) are derived and a peaceful acceptance of events has been achieved (p.7).
After the death of a close friend (whom I have called Lucinda for the purposes of this paper), I was to discover firsthand additional therapeutic benefits intrinsic to the creation of visual art. Attending to the soul via the art-making process can be a profoundly nurturing experience, resulting in increased compassion for the self, which may then be extended to others. In addition, the unconscious has the power to generate imagery so revealing and insight-provoking that it even surprised me, as an art therapy practitioner. More dedicated creative practitioners may take this more in their stride as Melbourne artist Mirka Mora (2005) indicates, “Painting can be a kind of oracle”. Furthermore, by accessing the language of visual symbols, personal art expression enabled me to reach a more complete resolution to the painful grieving process than I could with words alone. This capacity for insight would perhaps be less accessible to the non-artist/therapist. The specific skills of the art therapist would be necessary in mediating the relationship between maker and artwork in order for the maker of that a ark to benefit fully. Each image underwent stages of review and processing over a three year period. This pacing was necessary in order to allow the conscious mind time to “catch up” with the meaning of images generated by the unconscious. The enormous presence of the unconscious engine driving the entire psychic process from behind the scenes became very apparent.
Aspects of grief have been identified by many authors. These can include sorrow, yearning, helplessness, guilt, crying, exhaustion, anger, shock, denial, panic and relief. Preoccupation with the image of the deceased and guilt relating to the deceased or the circumstances of the death are common to the grief reactions of many (Lindermann in Hill, 2001, p.2) and certainly characterised my experience. Cooper (in Starhawk, 1997) writes that the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance, can be intensified and prolonged in the case of suicide. Simas (Starhawk, 1997) states “Loss can deepen or diminish us. Grief can intensify our connection to life, or drain our vital energy. To grow from our grief, we need to understand and honor the grieving process” (p.271).
The three emergent themes of art as self-care, the unconscious as catalyst for the whole process and art as an inclusive (symbolic) language of visual expression all made a profound impact on me. Moore (1982) speaks to the efficacy of art as self care, “therefore, the very tangible productions of art, and even the pleasure one derives from art are means of nourishing the soul” (p.34). While I engage more passively in other forms of creative expression, visual art has been my natural preference since childhood, balm-like in its ability to soothe. However, this is the first time I have used it so deliberately. I was in particular need of soul nourishment and self-care at this time, not only because I had lost my friend, but because my disconnection from others grieving for Lucinda served to intensify my isolation.
In my quest to understand what I was going through as a result of her unexpected death, I sought the support of new friends and colleagues. While this further processing was comforting and may have been instrumental in readying me for deeper processes involving visual expression, it alone could not provide what I needed in order to move through the grief. As Claremont de Castillejo (1990) comments “Formulation in words is essential for clarity of thought, though the most subtle the most profound truths can only be expressed indirectly in images and symbols, in poetry, in music or in color” (p.142).
My understanding of the unconscious, a concept which defies easy definition, is a part of each individual that is complete, perfect in itself, all-knowing and connected to everything that exists, and perhaps, has ever existed.[1] By making visual art, an artist can access this dreamlike realm. Comforting in its tangibility, an artwork is a catcher of dreams; the creative process opens a window to the unconscious, and the work provides a rendering of the view within. Neumann (1952) in Claremont de Castillejo (1990) writes:
A creative artist is a person who in spite of the pressure of education and the need to adapt to a society based on focused consciousness, succeeds in never losing [her] contact with the field of diffuse awareness where the unbroken connection of all things still reigns (p.21).
The work
My friend’s story has its roots in abuse, culminating in domestic violence and ultimately her untimely death. The first three images I describe were made prior to this sad event and involve my reaction to some of her experiences. The ending of our relationship was unnegotiated, brought to a sudden and shocking conclusion, some would say, by an error in judgment. What follows is the account of how I came to terms with the loss of my friend and the loss of a friendship.
Psychoanalyst and renowned author Rollo May (1990) has indicated that creativity, the expression of which takes many forms and has the diffuse realm of imagination as its source, may well be the spring from which all human possibility emerges. Art is not just a leisure-time activity enjoyed after serious work is done or a by-product of civilisation.. This consideration assumes greater importance for me as I pondered the contents of my imagery, imagery born of intangibles. Thus I re-create meaning (and solace) from the harshness of my experience. The image thus served to recreate my experience. For me, art-making became an agent of transformation.
Figure 1. The Killer Inside.
The Killer Inside
Upon hearing the news from afar of Lucinda being brutalised at the hands of her batterer, I made this collage on painted background (Figure 1). I was very much in touch with my horror and anger and found photographs which, for me, make reference to the internal saboteur, the part of the self invested in effecting failure, or at worst, wholesale self-destruction. More self-preserving parts (as represented by the lizard and turtle) are miniscule and ineffectual in relation to this formidable aspect of the personality, bent on self-annihilation. Of course, these parts may also represent my own sense of myself as ineffective in being able to help her or to influence the direction of the dangerous path she’d set out upon. In his work on grieving, Stephen Levine (1979) talks about the importance of ‘making space’ within oneself in order to move through difficult feelings “...when I could make room in my heart for me, I could accept my anger or frustration without being threatened by it, and could allow it the space to pass away” (p.93–94).
I had witnessed Lucinda engaging in self-destructive behaviours over the years – her life threatening habits and her catastrophic attempts on her life. I felt, she’d attracted some one into her life who may potentially act out the part of her destroyer.
Figure 2. Effigy 1.
Effigy 1
Not long after producing The Killer Inside, I became attracted to images of the female figure encased, framed or compartmentalised. Looking from left to right in Effigy 1 (Figure 2), there are two children (for me, atypical subject matter) within a window frame, a barrier made by an upright coffin with a cloaked woman standing next to it, a vertical space. another upright barrier and outside this, a woodcarving, possibly African. This linear progression culminates in the effigy possibly representative of spirit, inanimate, unfeeling, and wooden. While it seemed Lucinda was easily overwhelmed by the intensity of her feelings and often chose to anaesthetise herself, I too required some respite from the spiral of negativity that seemed to characterise her life. When I look at Effigy 1, I see my own resistance (impassivity at times) and my being out-of-reach to Lucinda at such a distance.
Effigy 2
In Effigy 2, there are separate collaged pieces floating through space; flames, a boxed Kuan-Yin (the Chinese goddess of compassion) and a bald wooden doll in a box with an open bottom. The box is deliberately open-ended suggesting a way out, a breaking of the reins, a letting-go of compulsivity, order and restriction. To where from here, the destination is not clear. Surrounding structures are dismantled, and the doll nearly drops out and down.
I am linking these two collages to what I perceive as my friend’s own limited state, her self-limiting actions and beliefs. The boxed Kuan-Yin refers to the restriction she imposed on her own affective responses (in spite of some woeful experiences) in the misguided hope of attaining a ‘spiritual’ state of equanimity. I now see this as a defensive numbing of the senses, a natural state for the mind/body under threat. But of course, the real struggle with limitation, as represented by these pieces, is my own. My inability to act, aid, encourage or dissuade shows my powerlessness in relation to her and our felt powerlessness as individual women in relation to the prevailing misogyny. Many researchers including Shlain (1998) attest to the universality of this tear and hatred historically under patriarchy, which ranges from the denial of basic rights to women through to contemporary crimes resulting in mutilation, disfigurement and death (pp.364–387). In Effigy 2 she manages an escape from misery and self-imprisonment into... oblivion. The black and gold background depicts infinite space, the cosmos. It represents the physical distance between us, and a growing values-based distance born of having made very different choices in our lives. Perhaps I needed a way out of dealing with events in her life that seemed to point to her destruction.
These two collages presaged what was to follow. In less than a year, she is dead, leaving her children parentless. Her body has been buried, dealt with in a manner incompatible with her own beliefs and wishes. In light of the mortality rate for women as a direct or indirect result of domestic violence, this outcome is shocking but not without precedent.
In contemplating these first three images, I am made aware of my ambivalent feelings: I want to prevent her pain but do not want to witness it too closely. These three pieces were completed prior to her death. During the six to eight week period of making Killer Inside and Effigies 1 and 2, I had little idea of the depth of their content. It was by looking at them over time, being receptive to their message, that they ultimately yielded meaning for me. This is not always a matter of deliberate interpretation but more of ‘being with’ the image until ‘light suddenly dawns’.
Ophelia
Following her ambiguous suicide, which the courts ruled an ‘accidental death’, I felt the need to re-create her likeness from a photograph. The art process moved from painting to collage (dried flowers), to finally adding layers of tissue paper, giving the impression of a film or barrier between the subject and the viewer. Her hair is moving freely around her head, as if submerged in water. Once completed, this piece put me in mind of a slide presentation by renowned Jungian, James Hillman, on the ‘anima’ featuring a painting of Ophelia [2] who is visible under the surface of a shallow creek. At the time of making this image, I was engrossed with Lucinda’s natural beauty or tangible form. She invariably seemed uncomfortable in an embodied state, preferring the more dissociated ones, induced by substances both illicit and prescribed. At the same time she went to great lengths to maintain an attractive, if not stunning, physical appearance. She spent much energy on her ‘surface presentation’.
Re-creating her image demonstrates my need to make contact with her as physically as possible under impossible circumstances. It was all I could do at the time. While I was clinging to the likeness I had made of her as the last vestige of her being, the image itself became a springboard for further art-making “For the creative person, the [created] thing is only the residue of the past, a record of the journey to date. It is a point of orientation and a point of departure. Wonderful as a marker, never a destination” (London, p.185).
Figure 3. Death Mask.
Death Mask
Continuing to obsess about her physical passing, I made this painting (Figure 3) (with some additional application of patterned paper) while experiencing a trar1sient health issue. The resulting death mask surprised me, as my own condition was far from life threatening. I had been preoccupied with very graphic thoughts of Lucinda’s physical decomposition, of her flesh wasting through natural processes of decay. I had been loath to discuss these preoccupations very openly. After all, this was my friend! In fact, around this time, I woke suddenly in the night with the horrifying realisation of her death, screaming aloud, “No!” in complete denial and disbelief. Her not-being-ness has become acutely palpable. For her, death always held a magnetic fascination. Albeit an unknown world, it held the potential for reunion with others gone before and the promise of release, which her day-to-day existence had long failed to deliver.
The faint overlay of patterned paper holds the outline of two figures mirroring each other. This paper also forms tear shapes that are echoed in the organic form under the eye-socket at the left. I associate the organic shape with a foetal form, representing the start of something new. This notion of rebirth is to develop in subsequent images. This shape is related in form to that of the tears, seeming to forge a connection between grief (tears) and rebirth (transformation and renewal). The two figures facing each other across the skull remain somewhat enigmatic. Are they spirit guides supporting her passage across death’s threshold, or do she and I face each other still, despite the apparent barrier of death? Perhaps the figures represent balance or restored equilibrium. As her struggle ends by “shuffling off her mortal coil”, so ends my discomfort as unwilling witness. But now a door opens upon the new challenge of her loss. Again, Moore (1982) states that, art provides the means for accessing parts of the psyche not easily reached, “They ritualize and map psychological worlds which are impossibly irrelevant and misguiding to the scientific mind, but significant for the soul” (p.34).
Figure 4. Farewell.
Farewell
At the time of this painting (Figure 4), I was generally mindful of the various losses relating to people in life; the comings and goings of relationships that suddenly break or simply fade out of existence. There had been many ‘goodbyes’ as a result of my relocation two years earlier. The waving hand is signalling departure. There is a fading figure and a butterfly in flight. Months were to pass before I connected this image more specifically to my friend. The time spent enabled me to listen to my feelings and move through them. Claremont de Castillejo (1973) asserts: “All art, and art is the search for truth, is the result of listening, even visual art” (p.142). In fact, the effectiveness of “talking therapies” is directly attributable to the function of therapist as attentive listener. In this painting, the human form is skeletal and was made in part with my own blood after accidentally pricking my finger in the process. After considerable “looking” and “listening” to what the image might offer up, I realised the addition of my blood expressed the guilt I was carrying.
Working as a mental health therapist I had become somewhat accustomed to carrying out suicide assessments, although not usually under crisis conditions. At last contact, she had answered my routine questions leading to an informal assessment of low risk. But my denial got the better of my judgment and seriously impaired my objectivity. I didn’t want to believe my friend would act on her ideation and promptly put her history of (not recent) attempts out of my mind. Inevitably, this would lead me straight into a maelstrom of unanswerable questions, such as ‘what if?’ and ‘if only’. While traces of guilt will probably always remain, the intensity of this feeling has diminished considerably. The internal dialogue that comprised much of the processing around this image involved clarifying issues around the extent of my responsibility in relation to her demise. Responsibility for others and the misguided notion of control (or even influence) over the lives of others, remains under scrutiny.
The white hand in the foreground is a gesture of farewell and an image of death drained of life-blood. The butterfly, one of several age-old symbols of transformation makes reference to the spirit in flight. This is an acknowledgment of death having within it the potential for rebirth, a questioning of finality. Again, Peter London’s assertion that art is a point of departure is relevant. It became evident to me at this point that I was embarking on the difficult process of letting go; I had a ‘marker’ for the development of my grief process.
Our final farewell takes place at a train station. We wave to each other across the tracks. Through a veil of tears, I promise to call her before leaving the country in the next few days. I have been living in the U.S. for a few years and have returned home for a short vacation. I have stayed with her a few days, and she drops me off at the station following our brief reunion. Days later, the mail brings a gift from her which I don’t open until my return to the U.S., where I also play an audio cassette that has arrived while I’m away. These posthumous communications heighten my confusion and denial following news of her death. There she is in voice (permanently disembodied) anticipating my visit, and with the gift, thanking me for it. The accompanying card is of a cherubic, sleeping angel. In my dreams she will continue to visit me.
Grief Mask
Twelve months after her death, I spent a short vacation in southeast Alaska. I was taken by a tiny sculpture carved from seal and whalebone with horse hair added. It captured my attention with an irresistible fascination leaving me unable to exit the store without it. The storeowner calls it a ‘spirit mask’ made by an Aleut craftsman. Being mesmerised by its visage, I felt the need to re-create it in drawings over the next few months. I lived with these grimacing faces adorning the walls, until it dawned on me that this was, indeed, a face stricken with grief. The mournful eyes, the crying mouth and shock of hair thrown forward, as if in a violent sob are what had spoken to my soul directly, without my being cognizant of what exactly had attracted me initially. Another year would pass before one of these redrawn masks would be combined with another, different mask drawing, to form a more integrated image indicating my increased acceptance of her passing.
It’s Your Birthday
But before this acceptance evolved, I completed a large-scale painting (acrylic and mixed-media) on canvas. The main feature is a bald, one-winged female figure whose out-stretched arm spans two worlds, as indicated by the divided background, visible through her arm. She is touching a warm-coloured luminous globe. Her eyes are closed or inward-looking as in Eastern images of contemplation. She is surrounded by solar and lunar references, (evoking inner and outer worlds), and she is embracing the lunar (inner) form. Her lower body is amorphous; the body depicted in the active state of transformation, of becoming. This figure occupies several worlds at once: the adult, the newborn (baldness), the spirit (wings), above and below, inside and out.
This was painted at a time of great uncertainty about my career and must also be indicative of this personal state of flux. My full-time position as therapist was ending, and future job prospects looked grim. However, by the time my community mental health position ended, I’d been offered part-time work in a rural women’s shelter. It seemed fated to me that such a development should materialise. For a period of six months, I worked as a counsellor/art therapist with survivors of domestic violence and teen parents (most of whom have histories of multiple abuse). It was a sobering, painful education, elucidating many facets of Lucinda’s life’s journey. I eventually contributed this painting to a fundraising event for the shelter.
It occurs to me that this series of images has shifted over time, away from the material (organs, animals, wood, faces, bones) toward the less material or abstract, as in references to spirit, death and rebirth, and other worlds. By doing this painting, I was reminded of another I’d completed in my final year of high school. Again, a hairless winged figure (of undetermined gender) oversees with downward looking eyes, the eternal process of life-death-rebirth. There is an existential element in operation here, but in equal part, a depiction of issues particular to me, being worked and reworked over large spans of time. The ‘point of departure’ in this case is an image I made over twenty-five years earlier, triggered more recently by Lucinda’s death. This is yet another ‘marker’ in my personal struggle to understand these issues, and is at the same time, affirming and intriguing.
Figure 5. Peace.
Peace
Another found image that captivated me (to the point where I felt compelled once again, to re-create it with my own hands (Figure 5)) was an Asian sculpture in meditative state. The mask, also with (almost) closed eyes, embodies quiet reflection, a state of grace and acceptance. As before, I lived with this image for some time, turning it this way and that, at times having it rest peacefully on its side. Eventually, it was combined in a collage in vertical position with the grief mask mentioned earlier. I feel this to be a visual statement approximating an emotional resolution on my part. At last I was ready to remove the mask of grief, to reveal an image more at peace with itself. A correlating wish of course, is that Lucinda had found a similar place. Some of her last disclosures to me were of her feeling suicidal, and that she was seeking peace, a holiday. I took this to mean she needed respite from the tedium, fear and self-loathing of her existence.
Mabarosi
The Japanese film Mabarosi was equally stimulating to my grief process. This story of a man who commits suicide and the wife who survives him, ends with a final frame of a huge sky, filled with a dramatic cloud formation – fittingly, at the end of the day. It is this closing scene that prompted the next image. A stark, horizontal strip of blue ocean divides the bottom third of the picture. In the foreground, up to the picture plane lie fallow brown fields. In the distance, below the sea-line is a procession of people in dark silhouette. I responded to the inward urging to render this memory in my own hand. What resulted was of course an approximation of what I would recall, with the addition of a large goddess figure (baby at her breast) formed from the clouds. The human procession, accenting the horizontality of the painting’s bottom half, begins off the page and out of view. This is a funeral, a gathering of people in a ceremony honouring the life of one who has left the material world. This ritual acknowledgment is what had been missing for me. In this way, the painting more than sufficed as symbolic ritual, lessening the need to participate in a formal ceremony. Here, I experienced directly the ability of art-making to “... ritualize and map psychological worlds... significant for the soul” (Moore, 1982, p.34).
As I flew across the Pacific Ocean from Australia, Lucinda had attempted to take her own version of a ‘holiday’ by injecting a lethal dose of heroin. I had tried to call her several times that afternoon, but she’d disconnected her answering machine and did not pick up the phone. I received the bad news within 24 hours of my return to the U.S., still a day’s travel from my place of residence. By the time I called her family, there had been an autopsy; she was buried within the week. These conditions precluded my achieving any sense of closure around her death, meaning, being allowed to participate in some form of public acknowledgement over a shared loss. It explains why endless footage of Princess Diana’s funeral held me riveted despite the resistance I encountered internally to viewing it. The reworking of the Mabarosi image was the necessary piece added to a puzzle I had been working on for three years. Art-making, while giving careful attention to the soul, gently facilitated my coming to terms with this loss and ameliorated the (relatively) isolated conditions of my bereavement. This visual ‘marker’ once again helped orient me in relation to my feelings, creating a greater balance or bridge within the psyche. Farrant (1989) explains this connection:
Many of our most vital intuitions are not capable of being put into words, they are things we know yet can only be expressed in images. Far from being a ‘childish’ form of expression (as it was labeled in the heyday of rationalism) the language of imagery describes for us realities that our spoken-written word fails to do, realities that are as important to our health, our mind and soul, as those of speech and the ‘rational’ world. (p.226)
Discussion
As I contemplate the entire series of images to date, I find it noteworthy that many were inspired by readymade (existent) images from magazines, sculpture and film. In this age of the omnipresence of visual information, we cannot avoid bombardment. “Television’s popularity greatly increased the power of images. Iconic information has superseded alphabetic information as the single most significant cultural influence” (Shlain, 1998, p.409). Some we acknowledge consciously while many more reach us subliminally. Despite this influx, the unconscious mind is more than adequately equipped to select only what is relevant or needed by the soul at any given time. What I am discovering is that exposure to the image alone is not itself the stuff of healing, but merely the stimulus or launching pad. The actual process of making visual images, often inspired by these external stimuli, was essential to my healing in this passage through grief. The manipulation, composition, ordering and editing, in order to make an authentic personal statement, is the quintessential process of art as therapy.
The aforementioned stages of ‘bereavement art’ (Simon in Hill, 2001) have also become apparent. The first stage is roughly illustrated by the first four images of my process: The Killer Inside, Effigies 1 and 2 and Ophelia. Here the externalisation of feelings through aesthetic representation allowed for increased objectivity from the stressful material. Death Mask, Farewell (and the purchase of the Aleutian mask) all seem to represent the containing function of stage two. Resolution is evident in the final three images: It’s Your Birthday (suggesting rebirth/regeneration), Peace and Mabarosi. The grief now occupies a less dominant place in my life, allowing me to carry on, relieved somewhat of my burden. The cathartic venting of many feelings to some degree characterised all three stages of the process and permitted my healing to take place.
At every step of the process, with the completion of each visual statement, I was able to orient myself within the grief process, not unlike the airline’s computerised image after take-off and prior to landing, indicating the plane’s exact position and status. Similarly, the art-making process feeds back information so that one may, in time, cognitively assess one’s progress.
In my physical and emotional isolation, it was imperative I have a supportive process available to me which I could trust implicitly (as I had done as needed since childhood) to carry me through the sometimes murky depths of feeling. As mentioned earlier, the impulse to make art is almost instinctive for me, and while listening to friends was an important part of the process, equally was my listening to myself through my own works
…the more we act from the heart, from that deep intuitional space, the less the spinning of the mind will interfere. The more awareness with which we do something, the more heart we act on, the more that self-acceptance will allow us to trust those acts. (Levine, 1979, p.112)
This awakening to my own truth(s) is a process that continues to unfold. I can’t help but wonder how different things would have been for Lucinda, had she had similar tools at her disposal with which to nurture her own soul. Self-care, far from being an exercise in narcissism, or even an indulgence, is the self-acceptance (love) from which the capacity to love all others springs. The modelling of self-acceptance to our children in relation to feelings and thoughts which we’re often quick to censor, is essential, as is the encouragement of the same in our therapeutic alliances, that is, in relation to our clients.
Conclusion
The importance of self-care cannot be over-emphasised. Working as I do in the mental health field, I meet many people, often women, who have at their own expense, given too much of themselves for too long. Giving myself the time to engage in this creative process enables facilitation of the same in others. Compassion for self translates more easily now into empathy for and connection with others’ suffering in various ways. I am able to rely on first hand experience when presenting ideas in a psycho-educational context that will support healing. All people and particularly women (in the role of primary parent), suffer from guilt at some time, and sometimes this can be debilitating. During the therapeutic encounter, I note that I am particularly sensitised to expressions of guilt and its often absent antidote: self-compassion. Unpacking this heavy burden involves a deep examination of one’s motivations and role in relation to others. Expanded, this needs to include: assessment of one’s responsibility in relation to outcomes; acceptance of one’s personal limits (not in resignation but as an honouring of); dealing with expectations of self and of/from others; determining when enough is enough, that is, in relation to tolerating the actions of others; recognition of one’s best efforts and in the absence of this, awareness around what may have prevented these.
Having undergone this reflective process myself under ‘life and death’ circumstances, I am better equipped to recognise similar needs (which do not necessitate similar circumstances) in others and remain present for them. I can then support the actions (new behaviours) that require integration into a client’s life and/in preparation of similar experiences to come. Responsibility to others inevitably reflects on responsibility to oneself. One’s response-ability in relation to self is a direct measure of one’s capacity for self-care. Mindfulness in navigating these boundaries can make all the difference to one’s mental health and for some, may even prove life-saving. In fact, teasing out the often invisible threads of accountability within the complex interrelations that make up our personal and professional lives is something to which I bring particular alertness in what has become a quest almost, for conscious relationship. This is in no way a guarantee for clinical or social success but more a buttress to my increasingly sharpened focus.
And just as I had practiced, I encourage both, patients and outpatients to ‘live with’ their artworks (not simply to store them away) so that they may at least be in subconscious dialogue with them, in the event their images offer up a timely message.
By bringing the unconscious to light, not just the parts which are palatable, but also those which shock, frighten and cause discomfort, we can begin to live fuller lives, giving voice to the complete self, inclusive of parts both desirable and less desirable.
This explains the artist’s state of continual conflict... [Her] art is not the result of a one-sided development, but of a greater capacity to live the whole of [her] personality; and whether [her] art sees the light of day or not, [she] has done something of immense significance, not only for [herself] but for society as a whole. (Neumann in de Claremont de Castillejo, 1973, p.21).
The close of Neumann’s assertion may not be as inflated a claim as initially appears. For when we look within ourselves, the benefits do not remain ours alone. Compassion is a common by-product of ‘selfwork’ (Allen, 1995). When darkness is raised up to light and purification and transformation (catharsis) of the individual’s experience occurs, the collective is ultimately the recipient as well.
Endnotes
This lofty claim does not fit comfortably within the dominant story about how our world works because it turns accepted notions of time and space on their heads. However, these ideas are gaining currency (as seen in the admittedly controversial film What the bleep do we know?!, 2004) by linking wisdom from age old spiritual traditions (for example: Buddhism’s ‘life as eternal stream of consciousness’) with the latest findings in quantum physics, neuroscience and consciousness studies.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia goes mad following the death of her father and her subsequent spurning by Hamlet. Her madness takes the form of singing while distributing flowers as the symbols of her grief. Soon after she is found drowned.
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Author
Suzanne Calomeris
MA ATh, ATR (US), AATR
Suzanne graduated with an MA in Art Therapy in the US in 1990. She has worked in the fields of community mental health, domestic violence, addictions, relationship counselling and private practice. She is currently facilitating art therapy groups in private psychiatric hospitals in Hobart, Tasmania.