Creativity Counseling

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath

“Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.”
Yo-Yo Ma

 Fostering Creativity & Working Though “Creative Blocks”

As a psychologist, I have had the privilege of closely listening to and learning about the myriad of approaches and processes involved in the act of creating as well as its counterpart, the proverbial “creative block.” Indeed, the therapeutic relationship can be looked at as a collaborative and creative endeavor of exploration, insight, and trial-and-error attempts towards growth, change, understanding, and compassion.

Therapy is an artistic creation of learning how to sit with or to find the medium in which to express difficult emotions such as sadness, mourning, hurt, “truth,” ecstasy, and beauty. In the end, psychology, like art, is ultimately about the making of meaning, about honesty, about letting go or transmutation, about being in the present moment or recapturing a past one. It is about confronting some essential truth, even if it is a subjective one. Therapy, like art, uses the imagination to write or re-write your narrative–past, present and future.

What I Bring to the Creative Table

In addition to being steeped in other peoples’ creative practice and helping them through the stumbling blocks that impede this process, I have a life long involvement in my own creative, and sometimes not so creative, endeavors including poetry, painting, drawing, and playing an instrument.

Dealing with Emotional Obstacles

Creative blocks are normal and a part of the creative process. There are ways to transition through these times. Sometimes, however, unknown or hidden experiences and emotions connect to a particular artistic piece, to what is presently happening in your life, or to past experiences, and may be the underlying culprit preventing you from creating a vision/goal and moving towards that foresight. It is important to know the difference between “percolating” creative ideas and being blocked. They can feel remarkably similar, and at times, can only be known in hindsight.

Using Creativity to Heal: Using Therapy to Create

Most artists or people who dabble in the arts begin creating as a way of expressing what went unspoken within or between. As you already know, children rely on this mode of expression very early on since they do not have access to the precepts or the vocabulary to articulate affect and concepts. At some point, unless one pursues artistic modalities, creative pursuits fall by the wayside. Therapy can help open up shutdown aspects of oneself and lead to alternative perspectives and connections. Too often, therapy privileges the spoken word over the “felt truth” or bodily truth. An integrated approach to therapy with a focus on fostering creativity helps to bring holistic healing to all parts of ourselves-mind, body and spirit.

Please Contact Me for a complementary 10-minute phone consultation or to schedule an appointment.

“Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.”
Pablo Picasso