This blogpost is written in honour of the courageous and beautiful people of Mexico as they suffer through the ravages of their second killer earthquake in as many weeks.
Art is the ultimate therapy. I just co-facilitated an art session with the rec therapist at one of my worksites for a client of ours. She was the only one to show up but that was fine because she got all the greater individual attention. It was a great conversation and then I raised the idea of art therapy for world leaders.
Imagine, President Dump, the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office, sitting down in a nice locked ward somewhere out of harm's way with crayons and a colouring book (we wouldn't want him to be handling sharp objects, now, would we, Gentle Reader? Especially if his roommate is Rocket Man, the fat little dictator of North Korea. Ah, the schadenfreud, Dump and Kim bunking up together in a locked ward for the criminally insane!)
But seriously, folks. Art has a huge therapeutic value, and some of the most traumatic experiences produce some of the most wonderful and beautiful works of art. Look at the artistic legacy of Mexico, with the huge traumatic and blood-drenched history of that country, and the visual art, the colours, the images, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and many others, creating an olla podrida (literally, a big rotten stewpot) of such images, colours and forms all riotously derived from combined Aztec, Zapotec, Mayan, Olmec and European ancestry, just like the people of Mexico.
The Mexican people, like other Latin American nations, are collectively traumatized. The violent and bloody birth of the Mexican nation, the cruel enslavement and exploitation and attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples, the violent warfare and revolutions, the summary executions and tortures for the smallest crimes, and more recently the huge drug war that has claimed more than one hundred thousand lives in ten years. Art, music, literature and so much more in the creative disciplines, has become even more than all the clinical services that all the psychiatrists of Latin America or the rest of the world could provide, to help foster the healing of the people and to staunch and bring redemptive meaning into the great pain that they suffer.
Art, the whole creative impulse, I believe, can combine with our organic capacity for addiction and then we have a real addictive treasure, cheaper than crack, with none of the toxic side effects and you wake up in the morning feeling better. Art is calming, inspiring, it can challenge, exorcise demons and organize our disordered minds. It can teach us how to see all over again and can open our eyes to a world that is always new, healing and beautiful.
The creative process is a joyous experience and I think that if we can created and foster such conditions as to encourage people who suffer to get happily lost in creating, we will see opening before us new paths of healing, neural pathways, and pathways of life.
Art was one of the few things I still had to cling to when I was deeply traumatized some eighteen years ago. Without it, I might be now taking medications and finding myself in and out of hospital. But that fate has not befallen me, and I think it can be argued that I was able to paint my way to healing and wholeness. And this legacy I want to pay forward to all the people whose journey of recovery I am privileged to participate in.
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