When We Lose a Loved One, pt. 2: Art and Journaling Exercises
In the past few months, my professional “stalker topic” was loss. A number of clients brought up past losses or were experiencing losses and we were working through them in therapy together. Current world events bring up the topic by their very sad nature. I was recently asked if and how art could help us with the process of mourning and healing after a loss – or a series of losses. Don’t think of this text as a manual for art therapy. This topic is too complex to be encompassed in one little blog, but I will do my best to outline a procedure that might be helpful and give you a few prompts to work get you started.
How can art help?
There are at least two ways in which art can help.
First, creating art helps you express your feelings. By allowing them to flow onto a piece of paper or by sculpting them in clay (or whatever your preferred method of expression is), you are externalizing them, creating a bit of breathing room between you and all the feelings of loss, while at the same time allowing yourself to feel them: they will emerge spontaneously through the process of creation.
We can make the case that art not only helps us experience difficult emotions, but that the process of creating art cultivates equanimity – to create you have to be with the feeling and being with a feeling while creating something is the very practical manifestation of equanimity: being with but not being overwhelmed by what’s happening.
The second thing that art can do is to help you figure out what is it that you feel in the first place. Our feelings are often unclear to us, and they may even cause us anxiety precisely because they are unclear: when there is no clarity, there is anxiety. Creating art helps you find ways of making sense of your feelings by discovering appropriate symbols for them. It can be a color, a shape, a brushstroke… It’s only our conscious minds that like words, other parts of us prefer different ways of symbolizing the world, and these ways are readily available in works of art. Have you ever looked at a painting and felt a sense of exhilaration by looking at a single brushstroke? Has a color ever conjured up a highly specific feeling that you couldn’t explain if your life depended on it? Are there shapes that make you uncomfortable? (Asking for a friend!) All these are your psyche reacting to elements that are beyond words.
Understanding how our psyche through art is not simple. It’s useful to have a therapist or a coach to guide you through it. However, you can also do it on your own and I will do my best to outline a procedure that can help you do it.
The procedure
I’ll first summarize the process in a few steps and then I will explain each of them, and provide prompts to get you started.
Here are the basic steps to repeat for each of the prompts:
Preparation and grounding
Creating art
Journaling
Review
Set aside at least an hour, preferably even more. Perhaps you won’t need more time, but it’s better to have more time than less. I know it sounds like a cliché but the creative process will unfold on its own and you don’t need unwanted interruptions. That refers to external interruptions but also to your own mind, which is why we will talk about grounding too. Before we get to that, there are a few more practical things to decide on and do. Choose your medium and prepare everything. If you want to paint, make sure all your brushes are put in a visible place, have enough paper, have the colors at hand. Create a safe environment, play pleasant background music. When I do this, I like nature sounds like storms, Chopin, or a particularly atmospheric album called Nocturne by Charlie Haden and the ever-brilliant Gonzalo Rubalcaba. But you do you and play something that will facilitate getting in touch with your emotions, with an emphasis on the darker side of the spectrum.
Oh yes – turn off your phone!
Then, the grounding part. As you get everything ready, do a grounding exercise or meditate for 5 – 10 minutes. This is to help you clear your mind and settle your body, to rest and relax you so that you have fewer hindrances while you explore your feelings.
Then, when you feel ready, do the work. I will offer more details on this when I list the prompts.
Once you feel that your creation is finished, stop, and pause for a few minutes looking at it and tuning into your body. What does it feel like to see what you’ve created? You don’t have to define anything, but focus on the experience of looking, on what your gut tells you, what you feel in your chest, behind your eyes, etc. Use your creation as an object of a brief meditation.
Then, take out your journal and write about the process. Don’t censor yourself, don’t try to make sense, just let the words flow onto the paper. Write down whatever comes naturally – impressions, ideas, thoughts, memories. Don’t process, just pour all that stuff into the journal. When you feel like everything came out that there is to come out, stop and close the journal and leave it aside somewhere. Put your work aside and out of sight.
Take a week before grabbing the journal and the art again. Don’t think about what you created, continue normally with your life. About a week later, take them both out. First, look at what you’ve created and use it as the object of meditation once more. See how it makes you feel, if any details attract your attention. Do that for 5 minutes, then take the journal and slowly read the entry you created. Read it slowly and preferably out loud, and as you read, pay attention to what strikes you as important, what you resist, what attracts you, how it all makes you feel. Then go back to the parts that stuck out and read them again, repeat them a few times, see how they resonate. Then journal about this experience. That’s what I call review.
Art and Journaling Prompts
I will list four topics here and I suggest that you do them in this order, and then cover anything else that emerges as you work on these. Since this is meant for self-help, you’re free to modify them however you like. I am offering them in an order that works for me and for the clients I’ve done this with.
1. What is my grief like?
Begin by reflecting on the person you lost, but make the grief itself the focus. Once you start feeling it, stay with the feeling long enough to capture a quality of it. What color would it be? Is it a slow feeling or a fast feeling? Is it warm or cold? Can you visualize it in your body?
Any of these would be a good starting point to give you an idea of how to start creating, how to select a proper medium and what kind of an approach to take, what color palette to use, what style.
When you do the review process, try to finish it by answering the prompt question in a succinct and direct manner, but don’t concern yourself with it as you go through the other steps. Being vague and incomprehensible is not only fine in those stages, to a degree it’s required. Unless you’re lost and confused, you’re not exploring uncharted territory!
2. What do I need to forgive?
Perfect relationships only exist in our memories. Other than Martha Argerich’s piano technique and Rothko’s Rockefeller Murals, nothing is perfect, especially humans. We don’t mourn insignificant relationships, and every significant relationship involves hurt and pain, because that’s a part of the game.f you can’t think of anything hurtful or difficult about a relationship, take that as an alarm that says: you’re idealizing! When we lose someone, the game has ended prematurely and there are always loose ends to tie up. Before we turn to what’s lost, it’s important to consider what’s left to forgive and what was left unanswered. Start working on this by simply remembering what comes up as you free associate to the words forgiveness and unfinished.
The review process can focus on answering the question in the following format:
List every relevant situation (relevant is what comes up, not what you intellectually decide)
What is unfinished?
What hurt me?
How did I hurt them?
What would I like them to know but I never said?
3. What stays with me?
Relationships change us forever. Through our interactions with other people, we learn lessons and grow as persons. Relationships serve as mirrors that reflect the good, the bad, and the ugly – all of which is something to be grateful for, as each of these reflections is an opportunity for growth. When we say that someone is gone but not forgotten, we mean that a part of them always stays with us, through all the ways they’ve changed us, ways they’ve helped us grow. Gregory Bateson once said (I’m paraphrasing from memory) that our personality is what’s left of our relationships when we are not around other people.
Think about different ways in which the person you lost changed you. How they challenged you and how their feedback, opinions, gestures, etc. affected who you are as a person today. What will forever stay with you?
During review, try to condense what stays with you in one short sentence if possible. The shorter the better. If you ever needed a “mantra” or an “affirmation” – here’s one that rings true from experience. To share a quick personal example. Both of my grandmother have died and both were important in that special way that only grandmothers can be special. When I summarized the process, here are the two messages I was left with:
Grandmother 1: What people say doesn’t matter. Your values are above everything.
Grandmother 2: Take care of yourself and don’t take yourself too seriously.
On the surface, these may not sound too profound, but they come from a wealth of their respective life experiences and lessons they imparted, sometimes with calmness, sometimes with yelling, but always with love.
4. A memory that makes me laugh
This one is self-explanatory. Think about the person you are working on and find a memory that makes you laugh. But not just any memory. A memory where something fundamental and unique about that person makes you laugh.
As you do the review, there is no need to draw any conclusions, reflect on the feelings that this memory brings.
Continuing the Work
It’s almost impossible to process a loss with these four prompts, although they cover a lot of ground and if you follow the procedure, I’m sure it will be helpful. Please don’t hesitate to share your experience with me, I’m always curious to read the feedback. This web site has a contact form and I’m happy to hear from you.
As you go through the prompts I suggested, pay attention to other topics that come up and put them on a list. You can dig in deeper and explore anger, guilt, shame you may feel towards the departed person. You can address specific situations or words that you keep stumbling on. Gratitude, self-compassion, and even reflections on your own mortality are all fair game. The review process is quite important because it can reveal quite a number of subtle topics that are worth exploring and that otherwise may stay under the radar.
This is the second entry, a follow up on a series I started last year. Read the first part too. In the next two weeks, I will post the remaining two parts in the series so you may want to keep an eye on that too. If you’re not into creating art but still want to use art, keep an eye on the blog, as I am in the process of working on a course for Four Steps Coaching, Inc that will deal with using art to work with difficult emotions. According to a tentative schedule, it will come out by June.
A Few More Tips
I’ll end on a practical note. Here are a few more tips to make the creative process more effective:
Follow the feelings, never push them away
The less control you have over the creative process, the better it is
What your hands are creating doesn’t have to make sense to you, let your hands and your gut guide you
Art doesn’t have to be pretty and what you produce here doesn’t have to be art – so don’t think in terms of beauty or truth
Good luck!
