Children are born primal and free
You are meant to be innocent, organic, and blossoming as children.
Yet people are often taught, ‘You should, you have to. ‘They walk straight, cross their legs, be polite, don’t make waves, and keep secrets. They minimize their sensitive nature, believing their feelings are weak. They hide their deepest needs in fear of punishment.
As a child, I loved flowers, climbing trees, playing in the mud, writing poems, and painting pictures.
My parents cut me off from my body through physical abuse and verbal shaming. I slowly froze into a false image of myself.
They dressed me with bows and patent leather shoes and shoved me out to play, warning me, “Don’t get dirty!” If I did, my gorgeous blonde mother hit me with belts and hangers and punished me with harsh words. I was called a stupid, dirty child. I was told that I was a mess—and sent to my room to cry alone.
My mother would threaten, “Wait until your father gets home.”
When my father did come home, my mother attacked him with complaints about my “bad, dirty” behavior.
Tired from his day, he’d enter my room, hovering over me with a frown, “Listen to your mother, or else.” The “or else” kept me quiet and terrified.
Love starts as a spark of life expands organically and swirls into the passionate fire of life. If ruptured, it smolders and turns to ash, kicked away like dust.
When I was six, my father brought home a puppy named Rusty because of her light, brownish-gold fur. She was an innocent pup, and because she did not know how to pee on the papers, my father hit her until she howled, yelping in pain.
I screamed, “Daddy, stop, stop!” My father, dark, hairy, and burly, suddenly stopped.
“Puppies don’t know how to pee in the right place,” I cried.
This is a painting of myself, based on a photo taken of me. I wanted to capture my loneliness and my sadness.
I rushed and picked her up, carried her into my bed, hid her under the covers, held her tight, and whispered, “I love you, Rusty.”
Rusty grew into a growling dog and showed her teeth when she was afraid. Rusty never lost her fierce growl.
In a childhood home film, I climb on my father’s lap as he sits on a beach chair by the pool on a Florida vacation. I climbed, and he pulled me off. I threw my arms around him, and he pried me away over and over.
Childhood pain branded itself into my skin and blood. I didn’t know I was traumatized. I blamed my parents and hated myself.
At sixteen, I constantly thought about killing myself, but then I was introduced to therapy by watching the film Splendor in the Grass, and I went to a Jungian therapist, Dr. Schulman, three times a week and paid for it myself.
He guided me to write my feelings, paint my dreams, and use my words and art to lead me into my psyche. It was the awakening of my primal source of ancient healing.
Art and Catharsis
When you experience the kind of trauma that I did, your emotions feel like these madly scribbled lines: they form a knot, a mess, and they’re so chaotic that they defy words that could possibly describe them.
What is the way to access feelings?
“Application of art, music, dance/movement, dramatic enactment, creative writing, and imaginative play–They tap into implicit, embodied experiences of trauma that can defy expression through verbal therapy or logic,” writes Cathy A. Malchiodi, author of Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process.
Art provides access to the trauma, a language that can lead to transformation.
Joshua Leavitt said, “Catharsis provides a model of healing that deals with those things that disturb us the most and that we wish to face the least. This is a practical way to accomplish the ancient spiritual goal of creating light out of the very substance of darkness. As the apocalypse myth keeps reminding us, the darkness will not just disappear. Instead, it must be transformed.”
Women’s connection to the body excavates cathartic emotions from the soul through art, such as in my painting below. It embodies my experience of the power to create a path of feminine strength and the power of the heart.
Fire of Remembrance by Marta Luzim
The Power of Energy and Creative Expression in Healing
Everything in Life is energy. Energy never dies; it transforms. Engaging in creative and cathartic movement connects your emotional, cathartic energy to tell your soul story.
Your core wounds are formed from the initial, primal, emotional, and metaphysical impacts on your body, brain, and nervous system. These experiences freeze within your psyche and re-emerge as daily thoughts and beliefs that shape self-esteem. That is why experiences beyond the thinking mind are necessary to release them.
These beliefs are personal and universal, affecting you multi-dimensionally. Most of the time, you are unaware of these core feelings/ beliefs. They are hidden in the subconscious and emerge when trauma is triggered.
Emotional energy is a powerful force that fuels creativity and connects us to deeper aspects of existence. It bridges the tangible and the metaphysical, allowing us to channel our feelings into creative expression.
When you harness this emotional energy, it becomes a life force that can inspire art, music, writing, and other forms of creativity. This expression helps you process your experiences and connects you profoundly to others, fostering empathy and understanding.
Recognizing emotional energy as creative and metaphysical invites you to explore your inner worlds and transform your experiences into something beautiful and meaningful.
Unpacking Your Story: Truth-telling through art, writing, and non-linear experiences allows you to explore what happened, how it happened, and its impact on you. This journey of self-discovery leads to greater self-knowledge and self-love.
The Language of the Soul: Within each of us lies a profound language of the soul expressed through imagery. Visual art, symbolic imagery, dreams, and intuitive writing serve as vehicles for recording the nuances of life experiences.
Rather than relying solely on words, these creative forms use your inner eye to convey feelings that may initially seem abstract or incomprehensible. This ancient and profound approach to healing transcends thought and belief.
How do you like to channel your emotional energy into creativity?
Here are some examples of exercises you might try:
Expressing emotions: First, take deep breaths into the belly, then access a sound as you release the breath. Do it three times before: Yelling, hitting a pillow, or venting can be cathartic. Primal screaming out bodily sensations that are stuck, such as tightness, numbness, tingling, shut-closed throat, feelings of suffocation, heart palpitations, gripping belly, sensations of fleeing, fighting, or collapsing, can move the energy of trauma.
- Creating art: Painting, drawing, dreamwork, collaging, or other art forms release emotions.
- Inner child work: journaling, dialoguing with the inner child, painting, drawing emotions to free frozen feelings
- Talking with a friend can help you gain insight and feel better able to face it.
- Listening to music: Music helps you release emotions through spontaneous movement
- Writing: Writing in a journal, intuitive memoir, and art can effectively express emotions.
- Psychodrama: Acting out past pain can help you reassess and let go of the pain.
- Reliving traumatic events: a trained therapist guides you to talk about a traumatic event and reach catharsis.
Rusty in 1964
Dealing with the Trauma of Rusty
One day, after I was married, I returned to my parent’s home to visit Rusty. I yelled, “Rusty, Rusty, where are you?”
Behind me, I heard my mother. “Marta.” I turned. “We put Rusty to sleep.”
“How could you!? I didn’t say goodbye,” I cried.
As my mother walked away, she said, “It had to be done.” The back of her blonde hair ghosted me.
Love waits, calling to You. Life is a process of recovery, a remembrance of love.
I discovered that Rusty was buried in a pet cemetery. I visited her. Branchy trees shaded her gravestone. I apologized. I believed I had failed her. If I had gone to see her earlier, I could have cared for her, held her, and comforted her.
This piece is a love letter to Rusty. We were friends and confidantes. I created a safe space under my covers to heal throughout the trauma.
How do you and I/YOU tell this story—the paranormal, abnormal, and normal need to love—and allow the broken heart to have her voice without shame or judgment?
Start a journal, a paintbrush, a scream, a punch to a pillow, and a story that melts the heart. The creative is the language of the soul. The process of healing, truth, and self-love
Resources:
- The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
- Visual Journaling by Barbara Ganim and Susan E. Fox
- Life, Paint and Passion, by Michele Cassou and Steward Cubley
- Relearning how to paint spontaneously:Most of us had our spontaneous creativity trained at an early age when we felt pressured to please others by striving for a “talented” end product in school. This documentary film by intuitive painting teacher Michele Cassou is well worth watching if you are having trouble accessing your spontaneous creativity. Watch here: A Conversation with Michele Cassou and The Flowering of Children’s Creativity
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD
- Clips taken from Give Her A Voice’s The Telling, Women’s gutsy “real life” stories of abuse and recovery through film, dance, monologues and song
- Mindful Madwoman Meditation by Marta Luzim (free download)
Marta Luzim, MS has worked with women, families, and couples for over forty years. She is a Psychospiritual Therapist with an MS in Counseling Psychology and a BS in Education. She is an expert in womens’ story-telling and a Next Level Practitioner in trauma. Marta holds certifications as a Kaizen creative coach and metaphysician; she is an intuitive intimacy trainer, mindfulness breath worker, and Kabbalah of Character expert. She is a self-published author, has published articles in Citysmart Magazine on creativity, healing, and women’s issues, is the third-place winner poet of Smell of Brooklyn Bricks through the Story Circle Network, and is an artist and playwright. Her novel, The Calling, and her book, Heart of A Woman, can be found on Amazon. In addition, Marta is the president of Give Her A Voice, Inc., a 501c3 organization that produced The Telling, a multi-media theatrical performance of women’s stories of recovery. www.giveheravoice.org She is currently working on her memoir on her soulful journey recovering from trauma. She can be reached at [email protected] and her website is: www.womenswayin.com
