How Art Expression Can Help To Heal Trauma

07:21

07:21

How Art Expression Can Help To Heal Trauma

by Hannah Westphal

Rated

4.8

Type

talks

Activity

Meditation

Suitable for

Everyone

Plays

254

In this talk we will get into my experience of creativity and healing from trauma and why I, as a neuroscientist, am using art expressions such as therapeutic photography for trauma healing and embodiment. Picture from Luiz Clas at Pexels.

Art Therapy Trauma Healing Self Expression Nervous System Regulation Nonverbal Communication Mental Health Felt Sense Polyvagal Model Trauma Healing Emetophobia Mental Health Improvement Personal Journey Creative Flow

Meet your Teacher

Hannah Westphal

Koblenz, Deutschland

Meet your Teacher

Hannah Westphal

Koblenz, Deutschland

Transcript

Hi beautiful people! Today I want to talk to you about why art is so important for us to heal from trauma and how it can increase our mental health. I'm Hana, I'm a neuroscientist and a therapeutic photographer and I am trained in the FeltSense polyvagal model and I am working with the FeltSense to shift people's nervous system back to a place of safety and I'm using art and photography to help people to to shift their states and today I just want to share a little bit about my own journey with art and why I think it is so so so important for us. So to fill you in a little bit into the picture, Before I got trained as a photographer during my teenage years I suffered from a really really bad phobia called emetophobia and it's the fear of being sick and I was not able to go to school for over one year and during that time I had gotten this tiny compact camera and this camera really changed my time at home because in the mornings I would be so scared I would try almost every morning to go to school but I would fail and I would feel like this huge failure of not being able to to do life and not really receiving the right treatment that I needed at that time and I just couldn't get over my fears and I lost all my friends and I suddenly had this camera in front of me and I started to to take pictures of myself during this time and this whole thing became over the year kind of like an art process. I painted words of my body and I photographed it I expressed the way I was feeling with pictures when I didn't have words and of course back then when I look at those pictures they are not the most amazing photography art pictures but they helped me so much to express who I was what I was experiencing what my body was experiencing when I didn't have the words and neither the mental capacity and cognition as a teenager to to understand what was happening and to put that into words so other people could understand as well but through my expression of photography I was able to communicate something with the people around me that were worried about me that cared for me so then later as my studies in neuroscience continued and I got trained as a professional professional photographer I tried to combine those and I saw that when we work with things like the felt sense or we're doing psychotherapy or any type of meditation being in flow and being in a creative state brings the body to a moment of safety we cannot create if we are not feeling safe and equally if we're not feeling safe we can create to produce small moments of feeling more safe so when we work with the felt sense we're trying to move the nervous system to a state of safety and usually mental health problems phobias addictions trauma related symptoms are all connected to a nervous system being stuck in states of fight flight or frozen and getting in touch with creativity and creative ways of expressing this free state can loosen that up a little bit without needing the words to explain why do I feel like that what happened to me to justify my reaction all these type of things sometimes that we feel social lives ask us to to tell or to show and it's sometimes really difficult to navigate because we don't know necessarily ourselves why we are reacting that way why we're feeling that way right now but art can be the perfect embodiment of just showing to people what we're feeling and art is something that does not even need to be shared it can also be representative for you to look at and be like yes that's me and I'm embodying my emotions personally it helped me really to stand with me and what I was experiencing was valid and true and today I just want to encourage you that if you feel stuck and things seem really difficult right now to think about some sort of artistry that attracts you whether that is painting sculpting working with clay photography maybe you like to work with wood or you like to make beautiful flower bouquets like there's so many different types of how you can interact with art and today I just want to to inspire you to try and make a piece that reflects the way you feel right now and do that a little bit over and over again see how you feel after some time and really embody who you are with that art and let your emotions flow into this art so that they have a release that can come out and you have a little bit of relief I see in my photography clients a lot the relief when they created something so big and beautiful that is that captures their really big experience in life at this moment so please go out there and create and don't let whatever is happening to you let that state of play and creativity dry out I hope you're having a wonderful day today and I hope to see you soon bye