EPIPHANIES DURING APRIL SHOWERS

Westside Community Garden, April 2020

All the rain in April has finally made way for the flowers of May, which are everywhere! Along with the rain, the past month has brought a lot of time to reflect. I am grateful to be sheltering at home even as I think of all my former colleagues working at the hospital up in the Bronx. Even before COVID-19 pandemic, the everyday stressors of working in a hospital were monumental. Since leaving the hospital last summer, I have dedicated my time to learning about trauma, stress and burnout. My focus is on the impact of stress and how to reduce its impact and treat symptoms of trauma. I feel that my focus is exactly what is needed right now.

Always one to enjoy classes and book learning, I also believe that knowledge is not necessarily power until you put it to practical use. What good is knowing about the sympathetic nervous system, vagal nerve, cortisol and the amygdala if it doesn’t lead to making significant life improvements? For me, understanding stress from a neuroscientific and biological view, allows me to be helpful to people during times of crisis by making these concepts practical.

Well-being encompasses both physical and mental health, so practitioners must consider areas like cognition, emotion, spiritual beliefs, psychological, social and generational influences when considering what makes up the feeling of well-being. There is so much more to think about than the nature vs. nurture debate of my undergraduate classes!

When exposed to threats, our nervous systems kick into overdrive. We bypass the meaning making prefrontal cortex and react from the body. What this means is that we cannot just debate our stress away. We need to take action.

We need experiences to counterbalance our dysregulated nervous systems. This is where the creative arts therapies can help. When we have experiences that are beyond language, when we cannot find words to express what happened or is happening, we need other means of expression. Art therapy can help us because art is a symbolic language that can bypass our logical left brain. Movement, sound, play, imagination and music can all express and release those emotions that we cannot find words for.

Expressive arts therapies are for anyone who can use symbol and metaphor for self-expression. Everyone can be soothed from the repetitive and mindful use of art media, to bring our nervous system to a place of balance. Art therapy can help us identify how an experience has impacted us. We can return to a state of calm, slow down and focus so that we can get ourselves “back online” again. Through art therapy, we can find meaning in the chaos and randomness of life. It is an approach that can bring us back to joy, not only as an intellectual construct, but as a felt bodily sense.