Trauma & Art

Edited May 22nd. 2023

Today’s post includes a variety of things that I have engaged with or that have been of interest recently.

A  BOOK

“Time to choose,  time to choose. To open and learn or run and lose.”

A few days ago I read Edgar and Elouise, an illustrated  book by Sue Johnson, PhD. Sue Johnson developed Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT) for individuals, families and couples, which in a nutshell is a humanistic based approach developed in tandem with the theory and research findings of adult attachment. Attachment views humans as innately relational and wired for intimate bonding with others. This model prioritizes emotions and emotional regulation as the key organizing factors in our personal experience and in our key relationship interactions. It draws on the principles of attachment science, Carl Rogers and Salvador Minuchin’s concepts and techniques.  I first encountered her work in 2011, as part of a clinical psychology programme I was doing. At the time the focus of EFT on attachment and emotions had felt a welcoming change to the heavily cognitive and behavioral orientation of the programme.

In the videos below Dr Sue Johnson and Ed Tronick show us moments of connection, disconnection and repair both in childhood and adulthood, and also, provide an overview of EFT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyCHT9AbD_Y

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQCg-jC25fo

To come back to the book, it’s for those aged 9 to 90 plus, is written for the inner child in all of us, has the form of a fairy tale and has been inspired by the author’s ten year old granddaughter. The story is set in an enchanted forest, featuring three grand pine trees, several inhabitants, like Edgar the crow, Elouise the fox, Spike the porcupine, Harry the hummingbird, Ronald the rabbit,  country mice, flies and other creatures, and humans, which are called SOAs, the Scariest of All.

Take your place: a new story for Edgar                               

When we first meet Edgar he is a crow with very little confidence. Elouise the fox, on the other hand, seems to be ecstatic about her superiority and beauty. These two have a strong bond, but Elouise has gotten into the habit of putting poor Edgar down and making him feel really small. Spike the porcupine enters the scene. He is wise, well read, compassionate, with therapeutic skills. He knows how to guide others to find their fierceness, tap into the confidence of who they are, see the positive qualities in themselves and others. He also knows about threat responses, biases and obsessions, and old myths.

‘I am NOT the me you say you see! Love me. Help me to see the best of me!”

Spike asks Edgar: “But who gets to decide who you are?  Do we do it ourselves or do we let others decide crow?” He tells him he can’t let Elouise and the SOAs (humans) determine who he is. He talks to Edgar about his ancestors and his family’s migration to find the sea, and about Nordic and Indigenous myths related to crows. He patiently guides him to find a new ‘me’ and choose his story about who he is carefully, and then advises him to try this new way of being and perceiving himself with his best friend, Elouise. Meanwhile, we learn that despite her nasty personality, Elouise has a soft heart and is actually the one who rescued Edgar as a tiny chick and the one who stuck around to raise him, which as we know is against all fox norms, forcing her to leave her pack and live as an outsider.

Spike helps other more timid, shy creatures find their fierceness and courage to act when they are scared. In the book we are informed in simple words about our biological responses to threat. He explains that it is natural and makes good sense to be afraid in a place like the forest because there are real threats. Edgar, in turn, soothes Ronald the timid little rabbit, who is scared all the time, even of his own shadow. He explains to him that rabbits “freeze and hide and only sometimes run. We ALL freeze and hide sometimes” and that “it is actually clever to go still and numb sometimes, but not so if you get stuck there…” because we are bigger than our fears. He also tells him that “Everything has a shadow…. It won’t eat you. It just follows you around in the sunshine.”  A little girl also steps in and shows the little rabbit how to take a deep breath, in, in, in to stop the Trembles.

Then the pine trees and the animals face the biggest threat of all from the SOAs,  “the most scared and mistaken of all creatures, who murder each other all the time. They call it a ‘battle’…”.  They are coming to cut down the trees. Like humans each animal responds differently when scared and anxious, and thus, we learn about “obsessions”, which is when the same moves are repeated over and over to make the worries stop. For instance, Harry the hummingbird paces to-and-fro repeatedly when she’s afraid, but Edgar strokes her head and soothes her fear. He also tells her about his own obsessive behaviour when he was young.

Together we are stronger

Finally, we witness how these small animals are stronger together and how in togetherness they manage to find a way to stand against the big scary SOAs, in order to save the trees and their habitat, without freezing, giving up, doing frantic to-and-fros or running away.

ARTWORK

Speaking of cutting down trees last week we had to cut down a fig tree that had died in our garden. It was a sad affair for me, and I had being postponing the process for over a year, stubbornly watering the tree while knowing deep down that it was probably beyond redemption since last summer it produced no fruit and this year no leaves at all, its brittle branches breaking off and its bark cracked like the surface of dry land.

All three of the old fig trees we found here when we arrived have now died and have been cut down, signifying endings, but in their place three new trees have sprung up in other places. I don’t know whether they will produce any figs or figs as sweet as the ones this small tree gave us over many years in surprisingly great abundance. The experience has found its way  in one of my drawings.

I’ve also included a few photos from a recent walk in the rockier, arid and less inhabited parts of the island… There are certain Greek naturescapes like these that I love, as well as, olive groves, fig trees and rocky shores, which along with the language make me viscerally aware of my Greek roots. While I was hiking with the cut tree in mind I thought of a poem I recently came across by the Greek poet, Αντώνης Σκιαθάς,  The only loyal tenant.

“That’s how this summer ended / with embroidered heather / on a Sunday afternoon / in Astipalia**, / on whatever white / was in the sun’s metal sheet. / Unsuspecting, we left / but left a fig tree behind / rummaging through the doors  / looking for the latch to survive  the winter.  / We trusted   / that she wouldn’t empty the house. / That’s how the fig tree, winters and summers   / listening to Scops owls and muffled cries /  remained there all those nights / in the hall towards the cistern / the only faithful tenant”.

** Greek island

The Australian television pantomime style series Adventure Island screened from 1967 to 1972 created by Godfrey Philipp and John Michael Howson was for quite some time top children’s TV show. The story was moralistic with a strong “good over evil” motif. Usually the residents of a town on the island would be tricked in some way by one or more of the “baddies” and often dimwitted Clown, with sawdust for a brain and a very poor memory, would save the day. Each story was serialized over five days, Monday to Friday, and everything turned out alright by Friday. I think the earlier shows began with Nancy in an enchanted wood. She would sit down behind a tree-stump on which was poised a magic book. She began to read the story from the book and then we would see the story played out by the characters themselves. Some of these characters have also seeped into my artwork above.

Some of the more frequent characters were Liza, Mrs Flower Potts, Percy Panda and Dodo Panda, Clown, two Cockatoo and Matilda Mouse puppets, Samson the pussycat and several baddies, like Pirate Captain Crook and Miser Meanie, who counted his money consistently and set fines for things like chatting in the street,…, The characters possessed magic powers which they could call upon if the need arose.  I came across an episode on YouTube, in which some magic seeds in a pot grow into a magic plant that produces glass like flowers with diamonds….

SIGN LANGUAGE

Another topic I’ve decided to include in this post, after listening to a singer’s decision to learn sign language to allow her art to be accessible to deaf people, has to do with the benefits of sign language. I was already aware of the many benefits of learning sign language not only for people who are deaf, but even for people who can hear, in terms of cognition, communication, visual-perceptual skills and spatial awareness.

I delved further into the topic and it seems that sign language is a very versatile language that can be used to talk underwater and taught even to babies with many benefits. Also, sign language can be particularly useful for those working in public roles such as police officers, doctors and other health workers, teachers and social workers. Some other significant benefits, other than been able to communicate with the millions of people with hearing deficits across the world and making art and knowledge more accessible to them, are:

Sign language has been found to help babies communicate better and sooner. According to studies, babies as young as eight months can sign words and imitate signs from their parents, which increases opportunities for parents and children to bond in positive ways and eliminates stress for a child in terms of communicating its needs. Some research suggests that this earlier communication can lead to greater levels of confidence in childhood and beyond, and that it can be beneficial for children with special needs or on the autism spectrum.

Sign language also seems to lead to higher reading levels in children and brings long term cognitive benefits for those who have been signing since they were babies or very young. It has been linked to higher IQ scores. Over the course of their 20 year longitudinal study Dr Linda Acredolo and Dr Susan Goodwyn have discovered that it leads to heightened reasoning skills, raises child’s IQ, babies speak much sooner and use more complex sentences, which sets them up for faster cognitive development.

Sign language enhances our ability to interpret body language because it involves facial expressions, a range of nonverbal signals that people use to communicate their feelings, and bodily cues and hand gestures. Moreover, studies conducted in the UK and elsewhere, have found that another area that seems to be positively impacted by the ability to use sign language is our reaction time and peripheral vision. Reaction time refers to the amount of time that passes between the moment we perceive something and the moment we respond to it and peripheral vision is what we can see around us without having to turn our head. These capacities play a key role in activities, such as, sports, driving or cycling, etc.

And finally, similarly to what is already suggested about how learning a second language can have a range of cognitive benefits, such as, enhancing creativity and even protecting against memory deterioration related diseases [and while there are differences between spoken and sign languages] research shows that the underlying  neural processes are similar.

                                                                                                     Edited  May 1st, 2023

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” THICH NHAT HANH

“The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love.” Sarah Ruhl

“I’ve never understood organizing world religions around the concept of guilt rather than around the concept of kindness.” Sarah Ruhl

“Be stone no more … She stirs …   I thought: someday I will melt. Someday I will wake up.” Sarah Ruhl

Today’s post is about a book I’ve been reading, which I heard about on a podcast with Sharon Salzberg and Sarah Ruhl, and also, includes two new drawings.

The book I’ll be presenting today with the title smile: a memoir, is by Sarah Ruhl, playwright and writer of other things, as she herself notes, and is dedicated to the many doctors and health practitioners that helped her during a decade of health related upheaval. She writes: “This is a story of how I learned to make my way when my body stopped obeying my heart.” Although the book follows the thread of her journey from childbirth to Bell’s palsy, and finally, to the discovery of undiagnosed autoimmune conditions, it inevitably brings together multiple threads of her life.

She begins chapter three with the sentence “This is a chapter of boredom and entropy”. She writes about her Bed Rest period, the books she read, the bags of books her friends brought her, including many books that featured dead twins and dead mothers. Twins also represent symmetry and the idea of the lost self. She threw them out and wondered about the literary obsession with this topic. She writes about her knitting attempts, the letters she wrote to her young daughter and the yet unborn babies, the feeling of confinement and boredom, and how the idea of bed rest was influenced by John Hilton’s publication of Rest and Pain in 1863. The rest cure became very popular during Victorian times for a myriad conditions, but was finally put to rest when physicians realized that it didn’t help traumatized veterans regain their strength instead it wreaked havoc on them physically and mentally.

In chapter five, a day after giving birth, she introduces the theme of Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve, which the Greeks called “dog spasm”. Ruhl writes that in contemporary Western medicine there is not a lot you can do to treat Bell’s palsy; doctors generally give some steroids, and then one waits for the nerve to grow back, and often it does. However, there are often underlying causes that if taken into account can increase the chances of recovery. Ruhl writes: “I have since learned that a very attentive doctor at the onset of the illness will automatically prescribe you antivirals (many Bell’s cases are caused by a herpes virus), will also test you for Lyme disease (a large percentage of Bell’s cases…..are caused by Lyme), or treat you for Lyme disease as a precaution. This attentive doctor will also give you a script for physical therapy and tell you to eat plenty of antioxidants. My doctor did none of these things.”

The memoir also speaks of the writer’s religious faith and spiritual journey alongside her health related experiences. Ruhl was raised Catholic and in the book she narrates her doubts as she deals with her own health struggles and the uncertainty concerning her newborns, who begin their life in the NICU. She takes us to her childhood and her current refuge in certain Buddhist teachings, as she navigates this period.

A few short extracts that provide a glimpse into her experience, and also shows how things that happen to us early on, which might not be perceived as highly traumatic influence our lives nonetheless:

“In junior high school, Sister Linda was out sick and we had a substitute teacher for Sunday school named Mr. Ivancovitch. He was very tall, and looked a little how I’d imagine Ichabod Crane, with greasy black hair falling over his face and very thick spectacles. The day he took over Sunday school he decided to focus on the bodily suffering of Jesus. He talked at great length and in great detail about how the lungs would have been affected by being on the cross, how the nails would have ripped through the wrists. It made me afraid……

….. I told Sister Linda that I wasn’t ready to get confirmed. I had expected a rain of judgment from Sister Linda, but what I got was mercy, understanding, and gratitude that I had taken the vow so seriously. She smiled gently, told me I could come back to the church anytime, and let me go home……… The day after I dropped out of confirmation class, a small band of Catholic kids circled me on the playground. “What, do you think, you’re better than us?” ….  “What are you now, Jewish?”………….

It took me two decades before I would read Thomas Merton and feel an affinity with Catholicism again, a faith that could be rescued from childhood tormentors, a faith that could be combined with other belief systems….. But that moment on the porch with the Hanukkah cookies probably shaped whole swaths of my life— the search for an ecumenical faith, the mistrust of institutions, the mistrust of certain kinds of girls…”

Ruhl writes about family, origins, belonging, about her husband, her parents and sister, and about her father who passed away in his fifties from cancer, untreated for celiac disease. We get glimpses of how they loved her and how they influenced her. For instance, she writes: “My father used to allude to what he called my mother’s “quick and darting mind.” My father’s mantra was that we girls must marry our intellectual equals, a mantra I wish more fathers would tell their daughters, and onstage my mother valued her intelligence over her image.” In relation to her mother she writes something that sounds true for daughters across the globe: “It’s hard to know where my mother ends and I begin. Isn’t that the story with so many mothers and daughters? I remember when I was little she taught me what a Venn diagram was. We were on a train, from Chicago to Texas, to see my cousins. In the dining car, on a napkin, my mother carefully drew two circles, showing me the overlapping section. “What do these two circles have in common? Here …” she said, pointing. I was fascinated by the logic of that diagram. Mothers and daughters: two circles, and the all-important bounded sections where they are complete unto themselves. Daughters perhaps have a tendency to point at the differences, mothers to point at the commonalities.”

As I mentioned, the major thread of the story, as the title itself denotes, is Bell’s palsy and all that is connected to that, which is every aspect of her life, the various underlying and undiagnosed health issues and reality. Ruhl begins by explaining that the Duchenne smile is considered the gold standard for a smile and it indicates a smile echoed by the eyes crinkling in response, Duchenne called the muscle that creates movement in the eyes during this smile the “muscle of kindness.” She tells us of her discomfort at being photographed, especially, once her smile became crooked. She writes: “At any rate, my general impatience and discomfort with being photographed pre-Bell’s turned, post-Bell’s, to fear and loathing.” She refers to the societal expectations for women to smile in public. She explores Bell’s palsy through the lens of vanity and asymmetry and wonders about what we do with life,which is asymmetrical and where we put all asymmetrical people with one leg, lazy eyes and crooked smiles….

I pondered how we take for granted many of our automatic responses like smiling. I smile frequently. It is something I don’t often think about. So, it was interesting to follow the unfolding of the smile narrative.  She further wonders about Mona Lisa. Many people have wondered about her smile, too. Was Mona Lisa genuinely happy or sad? What did her smile reflect? Ruhl says that neurologists have observed that her smile is asymmetrical, expressing happiness on one side only and her eyes are not engaged in the smile. Who was she anyway? Was she a self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci or his lover? While I was drawing his portrait [see previous post] while i was looking at portraits of him it was apparent that there were similarities between his facial features and expression and that of Mona Lisa. Did she have a secret? She also writes about her pain at not being able to smile back at her three children and her concerns about the “still face” effect on them during these formative years. She wonders if babies can read the warmth of intention from a thwarted smile and of how to experience joy when you cannot physically express it. She worries that she might traumatize them or stifle their empathy development by not being able to sufficiently mirror them.

Ruhl explores the smile through multiple lenses. Scientists for instance, have found that we show more emotion on the left side, which is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain, which regulates emotion. She makes reference to the findings of neuroscientists around brain neuroplasticity.  She considers whether we can experience joy when we cannot express joy on our face. She asks: Does the smile itself create the happiness? Or does happiness create the smile? She writes: “This was not only a neurological question, and a Buddhist question, it was also a question for actors…” She explains how in the 1970s Ken Campbell developed an approach to acting using the two sides of the faces separately, which he called the enantiodromic approach. … The theory of enantiodromia is that the left and right sides of your face represent different personalities…  Enantiodromia, according to the ancient Greeks, is a study of how opposites become each other ……  I once bought a two -faced wooden puppet from a gift shop here on the island, which had a smiling expression on one side and a mean expression on the other, a kind of Dr Jekyll and Hyde persona. She explains how portrait painters create life and interest in the face through some kind of asymmetry and through dark and light. The sketches by Rembrandt that I have framed on my wall, souvenirs from a trip of long ago to Holland, with my sister and husband, remind me of this. A student of mine liked to draw faces dramatically split in two, very light on one side and very dark on the other.

She writes about the many health care practitioners she sought help from, the more and less inspiring ones. She tells us of one good doctor, who asked for details, was concerned about her health and her losing weight for no apparent reason, screened her for celiac disease, which is an autoimmune condition and can often go undiagnosed your whole life with dire long term consequences. She writes: “It strikes me that the difference between a good doctor and a less-than-good doctor is one part expertise and three parts quality of listening.” The last diagnosis of Lyme disease, which might have additionally triggered Bell’s palsy, comes from an unexpected source, a retired doctor, who offers his insight after reading about her experience online.

Finally, Ruhl ponders on the overuse of illness as a metaphor because we want to give our illness meaning, like we often want to give our suffering meaning, and says that  if we give our illness too much meaning, we become the agent of our own decline. She quotes Susan Sontag, who has written that “Illness is not a metaphor, and … the most truthful way of regarding illness— and the healthiest way of being ill— is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” Towards the end of the book Ruhl evaluates her experience of Bell’s palsy and writes: “…that paralysis ended up revealing a potentially life saving diagnosis that affected my whole family…. Maybe Bell’s palsy was a tremendous gift.”

Ultimately, as she engages with living, bringing up children, writing, visiting doctors and trying different healing modalities, she seems to also awaken more to her life and reality. After she watches The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare she writes:

“I wondered, as I watched The Winter’s Tale: Is Hermione meant to be a real woman or just a metaphor for art? …. ..It is not the husband who wakes the wife, but the woman’s friend…… Be stone no more … She stirs … I thought: someday I will melt. Someday I will wake up.”