Art Therapy

My homework this week from my first counselling session was two fold:
1. Give up some of my church responsibilities in order to find space to engage fully with my counselling between sessions
2. Use art materials to express my emotions about mum

At first hearing this I thought finding time would be easiest, and I've definitely made a start; but an afternoon of creativity was actually easier than I thought.

We found a large canvas and some old oil pastels in the garage so I sat in the garden for an hour of pure emotional creativity.

I really didn't know what I was going to express, feel or create; but I just took colours and let it flow.  I used my fingers, my hands and some paper towel as felt right and quickly I started to feel strong emotions. 

Grief
Anxiety
Anger
Fear
Pain
Depression
Confusion
Release
Calm
And by the end, peace.
That's when I knew it was time to stop.

I was sweating, exhausted but somehow lighter and the picture speaks to me on many levels.

I've annotated this photo of the painting below, it might not make sense to anyone else but it does to me. 

The purple burst is mum; a powerful force in the middle which both sucks in and emits energy.  A vortex around which her and my emotions flowed - affecting my emotions hugely as well as her own.  I've sometimes thought of mum as a tornado; a beauty from afar, something to be admired and chased; and yet get too close and the forces take your breath away and can rip all you know to bits.

I know I have the same power within me, we all do somewhere when it comes to those we love; but I've learned to tame the strong forces of my fear and loathing, to calm the winds of emotion.

I am in this picture - I was touching the emotions of my small child and there she is on the right hand side - touching the natural world I felt so connected to and devoid of my own colour. 

That area is only coloured by the finger prints of the colours elsewhere - it was where I literally wiped my fingers as I was creating.  Those colours feel like the emotions I was constantly receiving and processing and watching out for, I was on high alert a lot of the time checking that mum was ok.  The literal fingerprints on the painting are like the emotions I grew up so aware of, on my mind and heart - fingerprints of memory.

There's also a shape of a gate or an arch or a tunnel in that area - a doorway - a way to calm and light beyond all the strong colour and emotion. 

I felt so strongly that that area of the picture wasn't meant to be filled in, but left in its complexity.  Perhaps that's something about the healing I'm going through, or the not yet formed understanding of my inner child; I'm not sure but there's something in that to think through some more.

I've never done anything like this before, never really thought that I could express such raw emotions without thinking about them and then so clearly see them in the creative output.  Perhaps I'm looking for signs which aren't really there, I'm not sure, but it's been a hugely helpful undertaking and I'm looking forward to discussing it with my counsellor.

Just out of interest.  This is a painting I painted wildly in mum's last week.  We came home from the hospital one evening and I couldn't sleep so I painted, having never done that before.  Rachel thinks this image is similar to the bottom right of the piece I created today.