Art Heals

As I pottered through facebook yesterday I found a talk at the Freud Museum on the subject of Art and Mourning: The role of creativity in healing trauma and loss. This title made my stomach turn a little and my heart ache, yet I also felt a lot of excitement - it was like a little light turning on. A question arose in my mind, was what I had been through over the last 5 years, the coming to a place of childlessness - did that equate to a trauma?

I never would have thought my experience of deciding to try for a family, all the hopes, dreams, conversations, emotions - up and down, the let downs every month. Then deciding to have IVF and all the decisions and explorations, risk taking, procedures and tests etc etc etc. Then going through the let down, the failure, the conversations and emotions of HOPE, anxiety, sadness, anger, fear and apprehension. Is that trauma! All the way through this process, I did very little talking about how I really felt. I knew it was definitely a loss. I had definitely lost something, but it felt very difficult to place it as a loss in this society because, I did not have the child, the family, even the pregnancy in the first place. Yet my body and emotions felt like they did.

Trauma seems such a big word today, but somehow it feels good to label what I have been through as a little truama. The definition of trauma is 'a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.' I wonder whether being English, and not making a fuss or a big thing out of upsets, puts the blocks on really taking and accepting this trauma.

This weekend with the sun shining, pottering around town at the WOW Festival, it was the first time in a long time I noticed so many children around - families, laughter and togetherness. My heart panged 'that will never be me'. I have, we - my partner and I, have missed the boat (as they say). Its a hard thing in today's society to come to terms with not being able to do something that we want. SItting with it and coming to terms with it.

Though things do change, after just under a year of deciding to let go of trying to be a mother, this Sunday I felt the urge to create something different from our coupleship. I didn't know what, but it felt different. The urge to create a family had gone and the pain/emotion was very different - it was a realisation of reality and a moving on. A crossing the bridge into something different. I believe I have been through a trauma, in psychotherapy terms - a small 't', but a truama just the same. Coming to terms and having compassion all the way I know that this part of me is healing. Through Art, through Expression, through honesty and lots and lots of compassion.

Art Heals - the talk details are below.

http://www.freud.org.uk/events/76398/art-and-mourning-the-role-of-creativity-in-healing-trauma-and-loss/

Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss. Art and Mourning will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain.