Why Therapy is Awesome for Artists

07 Dec 2011 ⋅ by Linda Esposito ⋅ 15 Comments

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Guest post by Alison Gresik, a fiction writer who coaches creatives to spend more time making art, happily. Visit her website, Design Your Art-Committed Life, to learn more. You can follow Alison on Twitter at @AlisonGresik.

For years, I’ve been trying to convince this artist I know to go to therapy. Let’s call her Willa.

Willa has a constant low level of anxiety and pessimism with a dash of resentment for good measure. She’s always fretting about one drama or another — jealous of another artist’s success, blocked and cranky about her latest piece, furious with her partner for dumping an extra job in her lap.

She also makes wicked-cool art. Her output is small, but everything she produces is stellar and well-received.

Willa has all the usual excuses to avoid therapy. She doesn’t have the money, she can’t find a good therapist, she doesn’t want to re-live the past.

But what she won’t admit to herself is a dark secret reason, one that she shares with many creative people.

We are afraid that we can’t make good art unless we’re suffering

Willa gets her best ideas from childhood wounds, daily injustices, and petty revenge fantasies. And she uses pain to motivate herself to create — the pain of failing, falling behind, living an insignificant life. She flogs herself into working with the cane of fear and panic.

So Willa wonders, if she’s happy, where will her material come from? She looks around at the insipid, one-dimensional art that sells like gangbusters and wants to retch. Is that what comes from being well-adjusted? No thanks.

And if she’s content with her life, where will she get the nerve to risk everything in her next edgy piece? Where will she find the drive to push past complacency?

So when I wax poetic once again about the wonders of therapy, Willa smiles and agrees, and then she never does a damn thing about it.

The myths of the mad artist

There’s an illustrious history of artistic geniuses whose tortured lives were almost a badge of honour. The perceived tie between art and madness is intriguing enough that research like this has investigated its validity.

And Willa’s own experience tells her that her art comes from suffering. Of course she wants to hold on to both.

So if I could make one last-ditch argument to convince Willa — and perhaps you? — that therapy is awesome for artists and creatives of every stripe, here’s what I would say.

1. Less neuroticism = more flow

Neuroticism is one of the Big Five personality traits, associated with emotional instability and negative moods like anger, worry, and depression.

In contrast, flow is a state of immersive engagement in an activity, marked by positive feelings of openness and joy as one loses self-consciousness.

In a recent study, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues found that “neurotic participants experienced less flow across multiple domains in their daily lives.” (See Who Enters Flow? at Psychology Today for more details about the research.)

It makes sense that these two states would be somewhat exclusive. If you are bringing negative feelings to your studio, you will resist or find it difficult to enter the more positive experience of flow. If you’re regularly getting flow-induced highs, bad moods have a harder time gaining a foothold.

My own history bears witness to these findings. Pre-therapy, my writing life was marked by operatic and at times crippling levels of anxiety and self-doubt, culminating in a clinical depression diagnosis. The more hampered I became by negative thoughts and moods, the harder it was to write, and the quality and quantity of my work went down.

As I learned how to manage my emotional life through therapy and take better care of myself, my enjoyment of writing and the time I spent in the studio went way up. Flow is now a regular occurrence for me — I know how to enter that state easily and consistently.

2. Consciousness = more artistic control = higher quality art

This is more of a hypothesis than point #1, but here’s my reasoning.

Therapy brings us higher awareness of our personality traits, thought patterns, and instinctive behaviors. It gives focus and perspective to how we respond to people and events in our lives. In short, it wakes us up to all the ways that our history and DNA have shaped the way we are.

This is valuable data for an artist to access from the inside, not only for changing one’s own experience for the better, but also for understanding the characters and images we create in our work.

When we can recognize our own shadow, we are in a better position to manipulate the shadow elements in our art.

Perhaps you’ve been seduced by the romance to the unconscious artist, the idiot savant who acts from intuition alone and has no idea how to control or shape what pours out of her. And maybe there’s a reluctance to look too deeply at your creative process for fear of breaking it.

True, there is a time for developing unconscious competence in one’s craft, when years of practice feed naturally into effortless skill. But first one must move through conscious competence. I’m glad to know how to work with my negative moods, drawing on them for inspiration or channelling their power rather than letting them rule me.

3. Meaning and pleasure

I could go on about how therapy can increase your sense of meaning and purpose, which bolsters your drive and energy for creative work.

I could talk about the pleasures of the therapeutic process itself, as you collect the source material of memory, find connections and patterns, identify physical expressions of emotional reactions, craft metaphors to explain yourself, and envision new ways of being.

Therapy requires a level of humility and authenticity that is actually very empowering. As you gain authority in your inner world, you naturally begin to make changes in your outer world too.

I believe in the practice of guided retrospection that takes place in therapy

As a coach, I bring aspects of that self-reflective practice to my clients. I’ve developed a process for creators to personally explore their body of work for patterns, identifying the truth and beauty that makes their vision important.

The Field Guide to Truth and Beauty leads you on a two-hour retreat, browsing through and journalling about the creative work you’ve produced. Do take a look if you’ve gotten stalled in your creative life or want to take a more conscious approach to working with your artistic themes and styles.

Author J.M. Coetzee has said, “Always move towards pain when making art.” I believe this, but I would add a caveat.

Move away from pain in your personal experience so that you have the strength to move towards pain when making art.

You do not need to live in pain to create from it. Most of us have already suffered enough to give us a lifetime of material.

Guest post by Alison Gresik, a fiction writer who coaches creatives to spend more time making art, happily. Visit her website, Design Your Art-Committed Life, to learn more. You can follow Alison on Twitter at @AlisonGresik.

{Photo: Scarleth White}

How has therapy affected your creative life?