Shame and the Making of Art by Deborah Cluff

Author:Deborah Cluff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351600538
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Review of my own treatment

Although this is not a clinical study, what I learned in psychotherapy factors into my approach to art making as means to heal shame. As a patient struggling with issues of identity, depression, and anxiety my therapist to advised me to “be creative.” I believe he recommended that in earnest, not imagining there could be a negative response to a therapeutic intervention that was likely successful in the past. However, for me this remedy was wholly unhelpful. I would plead with him to tell me what to do to become creative, to tell me how to find my alleged creativity. In response he would offer empathic listening and reflecting but would give me no directives or instruction I could physically implement. Eventually, I lashed out at him in frustration declaring this intervention a failure and the conversation about my creativity was archived. My incapacity to “be creative” became more fodder for self-punishment, feelings of personal failure and inadequacy, hopelessness about my ability to heal, and creative paralysis. I can see after years of training to be a psychotherapist myself that his approach was to make a safe, gentle place with plenty of space to find my own way. Like many therapists and for good reason, he avoided telling me what to do so as not to overly direct my therapeutic process. There is wisdom in that therapeutic choice. There is a threshold for how much space each person can tolerate and thrive within, beyond that, the very freedom that supports development becomes a source of immense anxiety. Space is anathema to a person shackled by shame but shame never came up in all my years in therapy. What he directed me to, without using clinical terms like dissociation or diagnostic categories like borderline personality, was a scarcely unconscious split in my personality. I was directed to name the two main players in my personality and keep a journal to track their moves. Over time, I was able to discern who I was being—or who was being me. Based on that time combined with clinical experience, I wrote the following journal entry:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.