The Double-Edged Sword of Art as Therapy

 

During the years psychiatrists attacked my mental distress, bipolar, and all the symptoms those encompassed with drug after drug, combined with this drug and that drug, the part of me that accesses creating art for self-exploration and focus deflated, sucked into grey flatness, a dimensionless, endless plain.

When the psychiatrist stopped the meds combination I’d been taking for 3 years (quetiapine, lithium, benztropine, gabapentin, desvenlafaxine, pramipexole, naltrexone) without taper, my mind freaked out. After weeks of manic psychosis, insomnia punctuated by graphic nightmares, and lonely despair, my head cleared, and my brain yelled out to make sense of it all.

I needed something, but what, I didn’t know. However, I started leafing through my old art, stuff I’d drawn in journals while pursuing an art degree, paintings and photos of paintings I’d given away or sold, and etchings and collages packed up in a box. To be honest, I never considered my art to be worthy, my relationship with it always contentious. Thought I should have worked harder on it, thought I should have done something with it, thought it was too odd for anyone but me, thoughts on and on like this, and yet I’d always picked up a brush or pencil and tried again. That is, until psych meds numbed me to the experience, which is what art is really about and not the final product. Despite tries, the realm of color and form, sparked by imagination, that magical place where physical body and nagging responsibilities vanish, eluded me behind a barrier solid and unmoving. Nonetheless, I poked around in my past art, partly because I’d become a bit incapacitated by the toll drug withdrawal took on my body, and partly out of renewed interest.

In taking another look, I appreciated myself. My years of drawings revealed patterns of thought and building of personal symbolism as I’d obviously freely thrown my struggles into journals and onto paper and canvases. And now I had a new tool, the computer, so I started playing with cutting and pasting and filtering and manipulating what I’d done in the past to bring it into the now. I’d opened a portal. Images followed into my dream states, into my thoughts and writing, helping me sort through the bedlam of unresolved issues, pain that for too long I’d let psych treatment try to handle over fear of handling it myself head on in an established trust with my ability to cope and pull back the reigns when it all rushed in.

And the process has indeed been an aid, even pushing me forward to create new art, slowly, but it’s happening when I speculated it might never again.

However, using art as therapy, my way, isn’t about happy images, not floral displays, couples gazing into sunsets, serene beaches, or playing dogs, but more along the lines of dark rooms, trapped people, bewildering landscapes, and self-portraits that morph into sharks. It can be scary there. Before I reach the part of resolving a certain problem, I hit days of anxiety or depression or such anger that I want to burn it all, strike myself down, leave it behind in bloody fragments flaming down to embers, only charcoal patterns on the ground as indication of its ever existing.

I must accept that devastation in the midst of coming to better, have to remember that this process hurts but also brings me to loving memory of my mom replacing the hate I’ve carried there, or anger at myself for wasted time, so much time, instead being admiration for the richness of how life leads from one place to another to another.

This is why I see art as a double-edged sword. Yes, it’s good therapy and reaches into places I can’t otherwise find, and yes, it’s also indiscriminate, providing a horror show as easily as gentle breezes on a quiet walk by a babbling brook. All of it means the world to me.