November 2010 Archives

Welcome to the November 2010 edition of the Expressive Arts Carnival. This month's theme, see announcement, was to "draw a wall using any medium, and show what is on one or both sides."

It is my policy to not comment on art in the Carnival (maybe in the comments if discussions ensue). But I feel as though it is not my place to put words to others' art, especially healing art. Any words after the art is displayed are those of the artists.

Here are the entries in the order they were submitted.

Entry 1: Kylie

Kylie wrote: "This was drawn first in pencil, then with a felt tip pen and then later it was scanned into the computer and the colours were added digitally. The mask is the wall, on one side is us (my alts & I), on the other is the vines, rose & globe which are meant to represent life & the world. As we worked on this submission the same thought kept coming to me: Is it that the mask is keeping the world out (protecting us) or is it keeping us in (a cage), preventing us from living life?"

Entry 2: Ivory

Ivory wrote: "This was not easy. I tried to draw it, but couldn't. My mind had too much imagination that my hand could not articulate. For as long as I can remember, I feel as if everyone knows something I don't know, or they are intelligent in a way that I cannot be. This feeling is what makes me say that it is sometimes more painful to be aware of something than to be ignorant about its existence."

Entry 3: Castorgirl

Castorgirl wrote: "The green and purple are the colours in front of the wall.  These are the colours that protect the rest of the system, and the outside world, from the wall and what is behind it.  The purple acts as a warning, and the green as a grounding colour.  Then there is the black wall.  This wall must be strong and impervious.  The bright red, or anger, is the first thing bashing against the wall, then the shame of blue; before the black emptiness of the unknown.  Each of the colours is separated by mini black walls, to try and keep layers upon layers of protection occurring."

Entry 4: Splinteredones

Splinteredones wrote: "This piece was a self-portrait i did many years ago, when all I could see were the walls around me. They kept me from flying completely apart."

Entry 5: Paul

This was from a post here in May 2010, where I wrote: "the directive was to draw our relationship to treatment. As you can see from the image above, I felt quite split about that question. On one side, I felt as through there was this sense of blending of colors and views, held within a container of grounding brown. But on the other, there was pure black chaos. The two sides felt completely separated by a wall."

Entry 6: Kerro

Kerro wrote: "I can see that now, which is why I've shown my image as a window. The bricks in my wall have largely come down, but I'm still looking out on life, or some aspects of life, that are still out of reach, even if the 'decor' on my side of the window is nicer now."

Entry 7: Sanity is Knocking

Sanity is Knocking wrote: "I think this project has been liberating in that I've tried to address both sides of me, but challenging as I still don't know where that middle ground is. I still see things in colour or black and white, for the most part."

Entry 8: Katie

Despite her initial reservations about the prompt, Katie wrote: "I realized that I don't have to create an image of a wall that serves as a barrier. I can show a wall how it now feels to me. An old crumbling wall that no longer keeps things out. Because there is more to my life now than feeling that way."

Entry 9: OneSurvivor

OneSurvivor wrote: "At first glance, it appears that G-d is only on the other side of the wall and breaking through to me. However, He is actually on both sides of the wall... as evidenced by the signs on this side that He placed there. So, He is with me on this side. However, the wall of abuse blocks me from seeing Him fully... from experiencing Him fully. That is why He is bringing that wall down. That is why He is healing me.

Entry 10: Clinically Clueless

Clinically Clueless wrote: "This image represents the wall that I have of the defenses that hide the reality that I do not want to see or feel.  The wall has open spaces that allow things to flow back and forth which I am in the process of doing... exposing and accepting reality instead of hiding it behind my defenses.  I actually do know reality, but I won't, at times, allow myself to see it."

Entry 11: Jahda

Jahda wrote: "The title of this piece is 'Invisible Wall.' On one side of the invisible wall are the Many Mindstreams that continually obscure and distort my vision. On the other side is the Mind of Clear Light."

That's all folks! Thanks to all those who contributed. We had 11 entries (a tie for the most ever)! Thank you everyone! If you think this Carnival is worthwhile, then let others know about it and we can continue to increase the contributors for future months.

A heads up: Next month's theme will be "open", so any survivor art is fair game! If you have been on the fence about participating, next month would be a good time to jump in.

Also, I have a private mailing list for the Carnival. If you want to be on it, drop me an email to: paul@mindparts.org.

In Self Assessment, Part Deux, I talked about how disengaged I felt in the hospital. I had been trying to do what I knew always works. But something was holding me back. I was not making progress.

I found out I am physically sick.

I have known I had been running a low-grade temperature since the beginning of the month. And I have felt achy and run down. Up until this past week, I attributed it all to what was going on mentally. But my symptoms worsened and my temperature went up to over 102F a few days ago. What little energy I did have went away completely and I found myself practically unable to do anything except sleep. I have preliminary confirmation of Lyme Disease, a bacterial infection caused by ticks, which are common in my neck of the woods.

What I want to bring up here is the question: How do we attend to our mental wellbeing when we are physically sick?

My own current situation has increased my appreciation for how truly difficult it is. Paying attention internally when one is severely dissociative is a hard enough task even under the best of circumstances. For me, I have noticed that because of being sick, there is an expected hunkering down of sorts, which means my internal awareness is reduced. My internal parts do not operate in the same way as they do normally. I am not sure how exactly this is all happening. It is as if my system does not have enough total energy for parts to be as active and accessible as they are normally.

The best I can do is be as gentle as possible with myself. And to be "on call" when I feel better so that I can cultivate the internal awareness I know is necessary for "normal" living. For me, that time will come when I am out of the hospital. I see no point staying here any longer if all I am able to do is be physically sick.

I find myself also thinking about many in the survivor community who struggle with chronic physical problems. I have a better understanding of how difficult a road it is for them. I find myself asking how they navigate the rough waters of healing?

Then I started asking how I would be able to attend to my mental wellbeing if I still had current depression or anxiety or suicidality? The reality is I do not have any of those symptoms in any kind of ongoing way anymore. I realize this makes things so much easier. I realize this also means I would not be where I am in my healing. This site would not exist, at least in the manner that it does; its content, messages, and focus would be far different.

Because I know what it is like to struggle with these debilitating issues and deal with ongoing dissociation and trauma difficulties, I try to bring that perspective to my writings here. My being physically sick, helps me appreciate that for many, a lot of what I write here may seem out of reach (or that I am out of touch).

I want people who read Mind Parts to know that I write to show that while the healing journey can be painfully long, healing is very possible. Anyone can heal. Do not let anyone, including yourself, tell you you cannot. As I have said before, one of my main mantras is: Anything is possible. I believe those words.

N.B. The deadline for the Expressive Arts Carnival No. 5 is extended to November 29th due to the US Thanksgiving holiday.

To say that I have not been very engaged here in the hospital would be a major understatement. Yes, I did 10 pieces of art over the weekend and had shift in acceptance Monday evening. But that was ephemeral. There has been one distraction after another since coming here, all meant, I think, to deflect against dealing with specific memories.

First, there was the not eating and drinking, which I truly thought was going to take me over, and has not gone away completely by any means. Then there have been troubles with an increasing fever for a week; for me, all physical ailments are a distraction! And yesterday, I deliberately allowed the comments on my last post, a mistake on my part, to distract me for most of the afternoon and evening.

But, in the midst of all of this was the sole group I have been to, I think, since I have been here. Well, it was a combination deal of talk-based self-assessment followed by art therapy self assessment. So, two groups really.

Back in May, I posted Self Assessment, where we used art therapy in group to "represent body sensations, thoughts and emotions contained in a circle." Yesterday we repeated that directive.

I have said before that I believe art therapy is one of the mental health community's greatest inventions for healing. And while I have done many art pieces over the years, I never attempted anything with such vigor as in this piece. I started with the circle, the black circle. Then I put the typical angry colors of red and black to represent surging emotions (a whole host of them) and body sensations (physical pain).

I put gray in there to represent me, the adult host (or "coach" if you will) of my system. I have recently been asked to put myself in artwork. But I did not ever have a color. I chose gray a couple months ago, and it made its way into this image. All the while, I was going back and forth between laying down the interior colors and angrily making the black circle thicker and thicker.

I have heard artists talk about getting into their work and using the medium as a conduit for emotions, and have seen this in movies. That has never really been an experience I have much had, until yesterday. I can certainly say that I have the experience quite often when performing on the piano. I absolutely find it thrilling!

The second part of the assessment was to draw healing colors outside of the circle. The healing colors that are very specific to me are purple, pink and brown. I was feeling more of a presence of the part of me represented by purple, so he got the most area on the page.

During this whole process, which took only about 15 minutes, I was using the oil pastels so hard that I broke several. Then I immediately grabbed the bits and smashed them into the paper. And, as usual with oil pastels, I used my fingers to blend all the colors. My hands were completely covered in color when I was done.

I think this is the first art piece I have done where I have completely filled the page with color. It was very important for me to do that. I do not know why it was important and do not know what that means.

I rather like the result. And maybe I am more engaged than I think.

In Blending, I talked about how I navigated through Halloween and a short hospital stay which led to increasing my level of acceptance. I almost never leave the hospital so quickly. And probably for good reason. I ended up back inpatient in exactly a week.

What I believed was acceptance was more a mirage. I asked to leave based on what was really only a minute amount of internal communication. It was not enough to leave here confidently. But I did anyway.

While I did well for several days, everything collapsed in a matter of hours. The memories that surfaced on Halloween, the ones I thought were attended to, came rushing back with a force greater than I could have ever imagined.

As I wrote in the earlier posts, I had been trying to do the work I knew I needed to as an outpatient, but just today I realized why that is so hard. Being a Dad, husband, and working has to be protected on the "outside." This means simply that I am not that willing to allow myself to be vulnerable as an outpatient. While normally this is a good boundary, it can get in the way when a step forward in healing work needs to be done.

This is why I have always used the hospital to help me with these big pieces of work. My time in the hospital has been hard. This is more normal for me here. Physical pain ramps up. I get memory flooding. I lose time. I have difficulty maintaining control. I get little to no night sleep (or sleep all the time).

Stopping eating and drinking, an old coping strategy, seemed like the only way out. The only way to control things. After several days, today I made the decision to begin eating and drinking again, for I was getting rather ill. The price was just too high. And, deep inside, I knew I was just postponing facing things.

Over the weekend, I did a good deal of art. I made 10 important pieces (one of them is shown above). Today with "My Healing Guide," I tried to make sense of them and put them into context. As I did, everything kind of started to fall into place. I saw the 10 art pieces as telling a story. A story I could never tell with words alone. And a story I could never tell outpatient.

We went through the images quickly because we were short on time. And she clearly tried to help me move towards a place of acceptance. This was truly hard for me. It has not been at all easy to accept that some of the abuse was at the hands of multiple abusers (or "organized torture" to use my doctor's words that sent me over the edge on Friday). While, I have always known bits and pieces of these memories since the early 90s, it was always much easier for me to think they were false memories. That I make them up. To deny.

But one of the biggest lessons I have learned over the past couple years of healing is that to deny sets up a conflict with specific parts, and leads to self-abuse that recreates it all. So, really the only path to healing is to accept the truths we hold inside. Today I was telling myself that I would not be going through so much internal struggle and pain and self-abuse if there was not truth to the memories which have haunted me for years.

This afternoon, I did not go to any groups. Instead, I stayed in a sort of sleep-awake state, processing. I was getting titrated memories and there was some kind of communication going on internally. Most of it was about acceptance. It was interesting that I was not flooded with memories. I cannot even say for sure what the images were. But I am certain I was trying to put everything in its place.

Normally, when I make this kind of progress like today, I say I have done enough in the hospital and start to advocate to leave. But I do not have the sense I am over any hump. As soon as I moved towards acceptance, and started taking in liquids again, the physical pain came back. I will give myself more time here. And I am not certain where this stay will take me. So much has happened already in such a short time.

What I will work on now is to be gentle with myself. To continue to try to eat and drink enough. To accept as much as I can. To not push the memories away, but to contain them safely. I will continue to express myself through art and writing in my journals.

I also know I need to find a way to talk about the overwhelming material outside of the hospital. I know how to do a lot of things. But this is one skill I have not quite mastered. The question for me is: How do I handle the responsibilities of life while at the same time make progress on what is held in parts of me and needs to be addressed and healed?

Last week, the Oprah show attempted to tackle the problem of male sexual abuse. The premise of the show (see link below) was to bring together 200 male survivors and broadcast to millions in order to "lift the veil of shame."

I do not watch Oprah, nor any other talk show hosts. Of all of them, I probably respect Oprah the most for her willingness to address large societal issues.

But, with this show, I was left severely disappointed as well as seriously triggered.

Many of the statistics were affirmed, like 1 in 6 boys have unwanted sexual experiences or abuse, that more than 9 out of 10 abusers target children they know, that many boys (and indeed girls) are abused by more than one abuser, and that male on male abuse often leads to sexual orientation conflicts in victims.

Oprah had an opportunity to do something really admirable, and the opening image of all the men holding photographs of themselves as boys was extremely compelling and moving. But the show missed the opportunity. The show did not focus on lifting the stigma. I found the show to be unnecessarily sensationalistic. I did not like many of the messages. They were almost uniformly negative. The focus was mainly on dealing with graphic abuse details. The only rationale I could come up with it being done in this way was that it was felt that it was more important for viewership to sensationalize over having frank, perhaps more boring, discussions of the issues.

The guests came off only as victims. That was somewhat predictable. There was no hopeful message from any of the guests. Everyone talked only of the perspective of what was done to them and how hurt they are now. And their lives being taken away. Nothing about moving through and healing. There was no hope. For me, that was the huge disappointment and I found myself getting angry.

There was a segment where two brothers who were abused by priests told their story. That was hard for me to watch and I did not know what to think, probably because a lot of what was said was so similar to my abuse. Perhaps had that segment not been so needlessly graphic, I would have had a slightly different take on the whole show. But, knowing a bit about the clergy abuse scandal reports, I know she chose a rather extreme example. What was the point of choosing an extreme example?

Oprah went on to say she hoped that people watching "will release the guilt and shame they hold." Tyler Perry, one of the guests, talked in a brief comment about men taking back power and healing. And another guest, I think Dr. Fradkin, talked a bit about shame. But those sentiments were clearly not what Oprah wanted the show to focus on. She appeared to be more interested on the shock value of the stories.

While they talked about drug and alcohol addiction and failed relationships, they focused on only the stereotypical male maladies and nothing more. There was no talk about mental health disorders stemming from abuse. There was a passing mention of depression. Nobody mentioned suicide. Nobody mentioned dissociative disorders, other than in the descriptions of abuse which used phrases such as "leaving my body" when abuse occurred. And nobody talked about any kind of path to healing. Nobody.

In what I considered her worst offense, somehow Oprah chose to have a guest, of all the possible guests she could have had, be a man who regularly takes his own children to his mother who still lives with his father who was his abuser. It was as if she did this for a purpose, to call out the man in what I perceived to be a hurtful way. I wondered, as I was watching, how that particular guest was viewed by the 200 men in the audience. Probably he was vilified. I thought it was a poor choice. Surely one of the other 200 men would have made a better choice.

Sadly, nobody asked me!

Of course, I am curious to know what you all think.

Dr. Kathleen Young, a therapist blogger I greatly respect, adressed the show on her blog post: 200 Men: Standing Together to Lift the Veil of Shame.

The link to the full Oprah show can be found at: 200 Adult Men Who Were Molested Come Forward. But beware that the show can be triggering.

This is an art piece I made probably more than a month ago in "My Healing Guide's" office. I have had it sitting in my desk at home and was waiting for the right time to put it up here. I rather like the image, so I am not quite sure why I waited so long.

I have had a mixed relationship with art therapy the past many months. I went into a long drought, slipping back into the "I can't do any art!" self-judgment. For a long time I have known that the golden rule of art therapy is to leave your art critic at the door. Maybe I should have closed the door, because the critic has been walking right in and sitting on my shoulder all the time. There has been huge resistance. I had supplanted that resistance with working doubly hard to solve things intellectually. But I learned a while ago that not all problems can be solved intellectually.

Shortly before I went into the hospital before Halloween for what was an ultra-brief four day stay, I did go back to the skills that had helped me in the past. While my hospital stay was not among the best of experiences, it still did a couple of key things for me. For one, it helped increase my level of internal acceptance; always a good thing. For another, it helped me achieve some internal communication that had alluded me. Not bad for four days!

Since I have been home, there has been some mild internal chaos. I have been determined to stay safe, but this has meant that I have had to breathe through some intense bouts of pain and some uncomfortable changes of state (of the personality kind mostly, but also the emotional kind). As a result, time is a bit choppy for me.

I am here to remind myself how helpful it is to express feelings through art. It is like a common language we all share internally. I learn so much about myself that is vastly different from what I learn if I try to think everything through.

This piece of art came at a time when I was conflicted internally. "My Healing Guide" knew I was not feeling able to do art, so she suggested that I just lay down some colors on a page. I chose very specific colors, colors that represent aspects of my system. I cannot remember, but I think I just drew lines of color in a kind of quick and irritable manner, ending with a sort of "There! Are you happy now?"

But, I chose oil pastels and it is very hard to stay irritable when you use oil pastels! She has many types of art media, plus I keep several with me in my backpack. I chose the oil pastels because I find solace in the physical process of blending the colors with my fingers.

That was the case here. What started with the feeling that everyone inside was separate, ended up with the feeling that we were all together and "blended." Our therapy session shifted. I opened up. Art can do that for you.

N.B. A reminder that submissions to the Expressive Arts Carnival No. 5 are due in two weeks (on November 23).

Welcome to Activity No. 5 of the Expressive Arts Carnival. Thank you to all who participate and welcome if you are new!

Submissions are due by November 23, 2010. All submissions must be made by e-mail. Please do the image in landscape format and send me an image file with a width greater than or equal to 1280 pixels. Please also send some explanatory text.

You may also wish to send me a link to a page hosted on your own site (or blog), if you have one. It is important to repeat that nobody is required to have a blog in order to participate.

The Carnival will be published on the afternoon of November 24, 2010.

To submit, e-mail to: paul@mindparts.org.

Please use "EXPRESSIVE ARTS" in the subject heading to help me keep track of submissions. Every submission will receive an acknowledgement of receipt. If you don't receive one within a day or so, then please follow up with me.

If you have questions or need clarifications, direct them to me by e-mail or ask in the comments here.

11/21/2010 Update: The Carnival submission date has been extended to November 29, 2010.