Speaking Out

One of my long time friends has been kind enough to share her personal story with us, about an emotional and traumatic time in her life. She will talk about how she used art therapy as an outlet for her eating disorders, depression, and emotional disorders. She now is vocal about how Art Therapy has saved her life. Although art therapy is not for everyone, I believe that the action of creating emotion or recreating one's feelings is more powerful and "safer" than communicating with a therapist through words.  There is something about the physical act of holding a medium in your hand and actually drawing, painting, or sculpting your pain, fear, and/or emotions. Seeing what you feel on paper is powerful and it says more then words could ever say, i n my opinion. I think of art therapy as an art critique. You create this piece of art and then you hang it up on the wall for all  to see, to merely talk about. In art therapy you are putting your feelings and thoughts on paper and sometimes without even saying a word at all you feel a sense of being healed or a sense of relief. The people who are critiquing your work take nothing with them outside of the art room except for the experience. The private interaction and drawing stays with the artist and then they are either free to share their work or to destroy it. Having that choice can do wonders for people who seek art therapy. People with EBD have an emotional or behavioral disorder(s) that is affecting their schooling and/or their life and not to mention their friends and families lives. Without scolding a child, sending them to the office, giving up on them, turning your head, or getting mad, just ask. Asking them what is wrong sometimes does the trick, simply because they think that no one cares. If you know of someone who is not willing to talk and you feel like giving up on them, reach out to art. Art therapy heals, allows for creative expression and most importantly art therapy does not judge.

"Art Therapy Saved My Life"

     I started therapy when I was 14. I don’t even remember my therapist’s name so that should tell you how much effort I really put into my sessions. I’m not even really sure why my mom sent me to her to begin with, I think it was for cutting. She diagnosed me with anorexia, and warned my parents about my debilitating perfectionism. I decided to stop seeing her.  Or maybe my mom stopped sending me. Who knows.

    Anyway, as my high school years went on I went through different cycles of restricting my food and binge eating.  Soon after my eighteenth birthday I purged for the first time. At the time it seemed harmless enough, and when my mother sent me to another therapist, I spent the entirety of my sessions lying through my teeth and waiting for the hour to be up so that I could hit the McDonalds closest to her office and binge on the way home. Even if I hadn’t lied about what was going on, I probably wouldn’t have known what to say. Over the years I had convinced myself that my eating disorder was just something I did, not some deeply seeded emotional issue.

    Anyway, I stopped seeing that therapist as well when I moved to Bloomington for my freshman year of college. At that point I still felt in control of what was going on. Within a few weeks of the move I was bingeing and purging from the time I woke up until the time I went to sleep, or until I got my hands on some vodka to drink myself to oblivion. Only a few people really knew what was going on, and I made sure to push them as far away as I could to protect my eating disorder. My parents had suggested inpatient therapy, and even after a failed suicide attempt which left me with some pretty massive kidney damage, I just screamed at them and went right back to my now completely ritualistic habits.

    Luckily, or unluckily, it only took a couple of months and a trip to the hospital for malnutrition and dehydration for me to finally admit that I needed help. My parents found an eating disorder treatment facility in Anderson called Selah house. I went in for an interview with a smile on my face that faltered only when the admissions director told me they wanted to admit me immediately. I begged her to let me wait until after Christmas, to which she hesitantly (and not without argument) agreed. I spent the next few weeks trying to hide all of the fear, anger, and millions of other emotions that were building up as my check-in date approached, and revved up all of my already out-of-control habits of fasting, bingeing, purging, and abuse of laxatives and diuretics.

    The day finally came (I think it was December 31, 2007) for me to be admitted to the inpatient program at Selah. I reacted as I always did, I smiled, I turned on the charm, I made sarcastic comments, I did everything I could to give off an air of “I’m fine! No, wait, I awesome! Everything’s fine!” It took the treatment team weeks to get me to open up about anything. Slowly I started letting down my guard, but still had (and still sometimes have) a really hard time actually verbalizing how I felt about things.

    That’s where the art therapy comes in. Art therapy is part of the treatment regimen at Selah. For our first exercise, the RC that led the group tore off a long piece of butcher block paper for each of the 3 girls, taped them together on the floor, and set out craft paint. We were instructed that she would read an emotion off the list she was holding, and we were to paint it without using our hands. The result was 2 paper lanes of very neat finger paintings of relatively literal interpretations of emotions like “anger” and “shame” accompanied by the 2 anorexic residents with a little bit of paint on their fingers, and one lane completely filled by colors mixed and swirled together (in what I liked to pretend was a very Pollock-goes-to-kindergarten masterpiece) and me completely covered in paint up to my elbows. When I talked about the exercise with Mel (the art therapy group leader), she pointed out that anorectics will often paint very carefully and neatly (as demonstrated by my housemates) while bulimics literally “purge on paper.” This is the first real “breakthrough” I can remember in the 4 years I had been in and out of therapy. I remember writing in my journal about how much I loved the activity, and I have since developed a joy for painting without brushes. We did it again about a month later when a few more girls had been admitted, and the exercise got so emotional that many of us ended up crying and my future best friend got mad at me for the first time (I had invaded her side of the paper when I ran out of room on mine). After each activity we would all talk about what had happened, how we were feeling, etc. and you would be shocked at how much came out of it.

    There were several other art-based exercises we did at Selah, the most important being body image group. For this we also used the butcher-block paper on which we laid down while one of the staff marked our head and feet (or traced us for positive body image, which we worked on after we had burned and said goodbye to the negative one). Negative body images all look different, we could do whatever we wanted to convey what it was that we saw in the mirror. This is an especially powerful exercise that really helped each one of us understand how we really felt about ourselves rather than using the word “fat” (which is a big no-no in ED therapy…because “fat is not a feeling”). My negative body image was a life-size drawing of a voodoo doll. Before negative body image group I had never really considered the fact that I had been using my body as a punching bag. This really helped (and still helps) me realize that I probably wasn’t as “fat” as I thought, and was a great starting place to help me work through my body image issues.

   I could probably write a whole book on my therapy/recovery experience, with several chapters devoted to art therapy, but I won’t. It didn’t cure my eating disorder, my depression, my anxiety, or any other of my mental health battles, but it has been a huge tool in my recovery. It both helps me externalize my thoughts that I otherwise have an almost impossible time verbalizing, as well as gives me something to do when I have urges to engage in “ED behaviors”, self-mutilation, or other self-destructive actions which I learned to rely on. I am currently studying psychology and plan to be a therapist for other girls struggling with eating disorders, and plan to incorporate art therapy into my program.

   Below are a few examples of drawings and paintings I’ve done for therapeutic purposes. I primarily use oil pastels and paint because they are both really hard to have complete control over. This helps me let go of my perfectionistic tendencies and just, for lack of a better phrase, “go with the flow.”

"My Artthurrrrpy"

Thank you so much for sharing your story.

You will ALWAYS have a friend in me :)