Healing Trauma Creatively

How pain becomes extreme creation in the traumatized brain

Recently I dreamt that I had a big blank canvas in a white room. I started applying watercolors to the paper, which spread out in a multitude of colors that ran beautifully onto the walls and floors. I was amazed at what I had created.

The next morning, I woke up without anxiety or an emotional flashback for the first time in months.

Since I’ve been a child, in the years after my trauma occurred, I have had vivid dreams with elaborate storylines and complex symbolic significance. It took me time to realize that they were meaningful, not unconscious gibberish. When I started paying attention and sharing my dreams with a therapist, I realized how cathartic my dreams were.

In dreams, our brains can literally process traumatic events, sometimes symbolically — like in a burning house falling apart piece by piece, or in an intense desire to flap your arms like a bird and fly away — and sometimes directly, with sudden visions of abusers or buried memories of extreme fear. Dreams can provide details of trauma and all the multitude layers of emotions stacked on top, in terrifying but manageable form. Like an allegory for actual pain.

Sometimes the characters switched out in my dreams helped me make sense of current events that reminded me of my trauma; Adult friends and acquaintances acted out scenes in my childhood home. Sometimes my abuser took the form of a literal monster, helping me understand what had happened before I could process the gravity of who had done it.

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