How Expressive Arts Heal Trauma: the Neuroscience
Written by Deborah Warner, BA
When something terribly overwhelming happens-or happens over and over again in your family or community-it actually alters human brain function. Feeling overwhelmed past the point of your internal and external resources to cope with it, is the very definition of trauma. So when you feel like your brain isn’t working right anymore, that something is different than it used to be, you are right! One of the ways the brain changes with trauma, is that the right and left hemispheres of the brain stop communicating in a healthy way.
The whole point of therapy is to heal from these terrible things, and regain balance in your life and relationships. Talk therapy uses language, and language accesses the left side of the brain, the side where logic rules, and where the hard feelings are not. All the emotion is on the right side of the brain, where language is not. What we want to do in therapy is reintegrate the sides of the brain by using therapeutic interventions that access the right side (through images and symbols) and the left side (through language).
Expressive Arts include Sandtray, Art therapy, Music therapy, Visualization, Active Imagination, and many more. These right brained interventions allow new meaning to be made, enable the brain to process experiences in a symbolic, language-free way, with images. Then if desired, that new symbolic meaning can be verbally processed with your therapist, uniting the right and left brains. This new meaning that is both symbolically and linguistically understood gives a new perspective to the terrible traumas we experience. When we have new meaning, we can make ourselves a new path.
Many of these right-brained interventions can be done via telehealth during these tough quarantine times. Either the therapist will provide a digital expressive arts intervention or simple art materials will be needed at home (like crayons, markers, and paper). Please call or email to arrange free comfort and care telehealth counseling for warriors, their siblings, and warrior parents.
*The information in this post is based on Bonnie Badenoch’s book Being A Brain-wise Therapist: A Practical Guide To Interpersonal Neurobiology.