Alchemy: the Science of Art & Trauma

It is a great untruth that real art is always, only, and ever about dark things. But there's a seed of something useful and real at the core of the lie.

I try to keep my expression neutral, but I am blessed/cursed with a face incapable of mystique. I raise one eyebrow and flatten my twisted mouth, widening my eyes into a shape I hope looks like quizzical curiosity instead of what-the-fuuuuuuuuuuck.

I say a silent prayer to a God I’m not sure I believe in. Please, please, don’t let me start laughing. You know how something’s ten times more hilarious if you’re forbidden to find it funny? Yeah, that thing. A wheeze escapes my lips and I quickly strangle it into a cough (which I’m sure fooled exactly nobody).

I’m 16, and coming to the end of the campus tour for the Fine Arts degree I was considering pursuing until about fifteen seconds ago. There’s a group of about 10 of us, all standing in front of a series of paintings from one of last year’s students. The excited professor leading the tour introduced it as “a creative exploration of sexual trauma” (this was before trigger warnings, you have to understand).

There is no way to put this politely. We were looking at a wall of dildos, dicks and ducks. Ducks dicks. Ducks being dicked with dildos. Ducks with dicks being dicked with dildos.

I wanted to paint because the world’s beauty and wildness made me ache, because I could think of no better way to spend the days of my life than to write an endless, wordless love letter across a thousand canvases. Knowing I could never really hope to capture any of it properly, and that was OK: I could die happy at the end of that life.

This, I was quickly learning, was not considered Real Art.

Alchemy: The Lie of “Real Art” and Trauma

Hidden in many great untruths, you’ll find something that is very true indeed. It’s this that makes makes the lie so thorny and pernicious, the barb that hooks in us.

It is a great untruth that real art is always, only, and ever about dark things — that trauma is the spring that feeds vast rivers of creativity, washing salt tears and blood ore downstream. Real art isn’t about beauty or truth or — dare I say it — having fun. It’s about torment, and only those who have been brutalised have anything to say worth taking seriously as artists.

It’s easy to see why it’s an enduring idea, right? As a species, we’re certainly attracted to the macabre and extreme. Plus, the belief that serious art is made of trauma is a comforting one. It means there’s meaning baked into suffering: something terrible has happened to you, and now you can spin it into something precious. You can sew your wounds together with the golden thread of art. You can salvage something worth a damn, even if it feels as though everything else has been stripped away from you.

Please forgive me, I mean no offence and no minimisation of anybody’s personal trauma and catastrophe. The idea that pain makes a person “interesting”, and that anyone who has suffered should ever see this as something to be grateful for, is offensive. What I wish to speak to, what I wish to weaken, is the pervasive idea that the goodness of art is proportionate to the seriousness of the subject matter, the personal trials and tribulations of the artist.

Alchemy, the ancient search for a transformative process that would turn base metals into gold, swallowed countless lives. Brilliant minds across generations bent their knowledge and will to the task, burned their resources and energy and time for the sake of something we now know was futile all along.

Trauma cannot be “transformed” into art.

It cannot be transformed into anything.

It can only be integrated and transcended.

I’ll discuss how pain and even trauma can be useful to the creative process in an upcoming piece (and — even better — how art can be useful, even transformative, in healing). This is the true part of the trauma-art myth. But for now, I want to focus on the danger of romanticising the relationship between trauma and creativity (not to mention how it leads to a lot of bad art being passed off as “profound” and “important” … though perhaps I am simply too much of a basic bitch to appreciate the creative complexity of a duck sporting a lime green strap-on).

“Good Damage”

There’s a poignant moment in the animated series Bojack Horseman (which is well worth a watch, don’t let the legions of terrible people who raved about it while entirely missing the point put you off) that captures something of this rather poignantly. Diane, a troubled creative who previously made a living ghostwriting for the rich and famous, is attempting to author her own book. Attempting, and failing. Over and over. She wants to write a collection of personal essays, a serious tome drawing on her experience of trauma, weaving incisive social commentary out of her personal pain. Eventually, after a long struggle with writer’s block amid a spiralling mental health crisis, Diane finds herself penning a lighthearted pre-teen mystery: Ivy Tran, Food Court Detective. Her friends and boyfriend urge her to publish it — it’s really good! Diane, horrified, refuses and insists she must complete her original manuscript:

If I don't, that means that all the damage I got isn't good damage, it's just damage. I have gotten nothing out of it, and all those years I was miserable it was for nothing.

Diane’s attempt to write her book of essays was a desperate struggle to make what had happened to her a source of something positive and hopeful. To prove she was smart and interesting, incisive and worthy, because she had suffered.

Sadly, her story illustrates what happens all too often when damage is the gravity well around which we orbit, the centre of the world. We struggle to transcend our suffering, and we also may come to believe that if even we did, we we’d risk having nothing left that’s valuable to say, no Real Art left in us.

There are at least six things that make a true trauma-art alchemic process impossible.

Problem 1: Trauma is, by definition, wordless

There’s some complicated science about this, but I’m not going to go into it because (1) we’ll be here all day and we both have short attention spans, and (2) it’s not important to understand the mechanics of it. The point is that part of what defines trauma is that it is an experience that cannot be symbolised through language. As Bessel van der Kolk puts it, “trauma comes back as a reaction, not a memory.”

The bit of your brain that forms words generally isn’t online during a traumatising experience (particularly during Big-T Trauma, like sexual assault or serious violence, which is not to minimise small-t trauma like early attachment wounding). What this often leaves you with is the ability to “tell a story” about what happened to you, but one which doesn’t involve any real connection to emotional experiencing.

This type of “storytelling” doesn’t make for compelling art simply because it isn’t real. It’s a representation of something that bears very little meaningful relationship to the thing itself. It’s the equivalent of a physics equation about mass and velocity meeting a stationary force standing in for the reality of a violent car accident. This is why we sometimes have the disturbing experience of listening to someone recount something horrific, and realise we are unable to feel anything as we witness this retelling. They are not in touch with the emotional content and bodily re-experiencing of what actually happened, so neither are we.

This distance, this psychic walling-off of what the unspeakable thing actually felt like, is an absolute necessity because:

Problem 2: Trauma that has not been processed exists always “in the now”

When a trauma survivor is in contact with the emotional reality of what happened to them, as far as the brain is concerned it is happening again. Right now.

You are no longer in the present in a safe place, you are wherever the traumatic event occurred and you are feeling the same things you felt when it happened. As much as “triggered” has become a joke of a term (thanks, Internet, for your progressive garbling of the psychotherapy lexicon), it’s useful for understanding what happens in traumatic re-experiencing. For example:

I am still (sometimes) triggered by the scent of white lilies. When I smell white lilies, I am no longer in a fancy office foyer near a scented bouquet: I am standing in front of a dead body, about to vomit. I lose the ability to hear, my mind starts to leave my body (which will continue to operate basic backup protocols in a sort of amoebic trance state). I have not only time travelled, I am trapped in the body of my past self and I am reliving the worst moment of my life.

Fortunately, because I’ve done some good trauma therapy and have my own training to guide me, I know how to get back to the present moment. Which is extra lucky, because lots of fancy offices favour big lily bouquets (and usually I’m there for something that will go much better if I don’t look like I am tripping balls in the waiting room). Each time I bring myself back after being triggered, I strengthen the neural pathways that keep me in the present, which mean that it happens less and less. But it goes without saying that I can’t write in a state of traumatic re-experiencing any more than I could have sat down next to the aforementioned body, whipped out a notebook, and started jotting down ideas (Dear Diary, pretty sure this is going to make a dope Substack post in 15 years…).

Problem 3: A traumatised brain often tries to resolve lack of symbolisation through repetition.

There’s a false assumption by many people (and again, not one without some truth to it) that healing from trauma is a matter of finding the right words, or the right combination of words, or the right type of understanding. When you can make sense of what happened, then you’ll be OK.

Some ability to put a traumatic event in its proper time and place is absolutely essential for healing, that’s true. But such a thing usually only happens with a really good base of wellbeing, stability, and time. As the old saying goes: the key to healing from addiction isn’t understanding why you drink. It’s stopping drinking. You don’t need to comb through the past over and over before you can heal, you need to focus on looking after yourself in the present. Talking or writing about the thing, attempting to touch it at all, is not where you begin. It’s also not the key that unlocks some sort of magic door to your past self, the you who did not truly know such terrible things could happen at any time. You can never un-know that. You can never go back.

Unprocessed trauma says the same thing over and over again (see Problem 1). Nothing is new, or meaningful, and this doesn’t make for very good writing. Believe me, I ran a lot of experiments, and I mean this very literally (a research project aimed at identifying changes in writing styles, handwriting, and tone which indicate the brain moving in and out of traumatised states). You can’t say anything new when you’re too close to your trauma.

It’s a record scratch, over and over again on loop.

Problem 4: Unprocessed trauma often leads to profound internalised shame

In the aforementioned Bojack Horseman storyline, there’s a part where Diane is supposedly working on her novel … but it turns out to just be “I am terrible” written over and over again, a la Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Probably the most heartbreaking part of my therapeutic work with trauma survivors is the way in which many of them internalise the terrible thing that happened to them (or worse, was done to them) as something they somehow caused. A stain on their soul that will never come off.

This is literally in the symptom list for PTSD¹: self-blame for causing the trauma, but knowing this seldom registers as significant or true for a trauma survivor. It doesn’t feel real — at least, not like the pervasive sense of being less-than-human and undeserving of healing feels. Like survivor’s guilt it clearly makes no sense, but the brain doesn’t follow logic when it’s dripping with shame.

All art, all writing, everything crafted by a human carries something of the essence of its creator. It’s what makes writing profoundly vulnerable. And to do it, you have to have at least some belief that what you have to say is worth something. That something good can come from you, and therefore that there is goodness in you.

It also means you have to not feel terrified of exposure.

Problem 5: Trauma can make exposure (even artistic exposure) feel terrifying

There’s little that kills creative imagination quite like fear², and trauma can silence us as often as it can spur us into communication. I haven’t painted seriously since my own experience with traumatic bereavement, and I’m not sure I’ll ever really pick it back up again. Some things change us beyond all recognition, parts of us can wither and fall away in the cracks of the aftermath.

When you dip in and out of whichever parts of fight-flight-freeze your particular brain tends to favour post-trauma (usually a confusing, unpredictable combination of at least those three Fs plus a couple of bonus extras), it’s hard to feel safe being seen. For many people it’s hard enough to leave the house, or catch a bus, or get through a supermarket shop without dissociating.

Some of the most meaningful moments in my practice room have been when people trusted me enough to share their writing (once they were feeling stable and safe enough to have done some trauma processing work). In a few cases I can recall, the words in question were a lightning punch. Unbelievable. Yet they had never been shared, because exposure was more frightening than death for those who authored them.

There are people out there — right now — whose words you have never heard or read, who possess enough creative potency to melt a hole through the core of the world. If only the world had not burned through them first.

Problem 6: Trauma separates us from others

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk³ writes about the dilemma of traumatised war veterans: they feel (probably correctly) that their trauma can only really be understood by others who have seen and done similarly terrible things. The very pain that bonds them so powerfully to their fellow soldiers is the thing that keeps them seperate from the rest of society, so they find both respite from their aloneness and reinforcement of their sense that they are fundamentally estranged from humanity in these relationships.

This is an extreme example, but indicative of how hard it can be to feel connected to others when you’ve had an experience that you cannot even really understand or bear yourself, let alone explain to somebody else. It makes communicating through art a hell of a risk: what if, despite the very real barriers to making anything worthwhile outlined in points 1-5, you do find a way to use your trauma as fuel. You write a book about what happened to you, say. What then happens if the finished result is judged wanting? What if silence greets you, or eye rolls, or accusations of banality and weakness? What if people find it unimportant, or boring, or derivative? What if you cough out the guts of yourself, arrange the carcinogenic evidence of your desecration as best you can, and it makes you feel even more alone?

Blood and Gold

Alchemy is a fool’s mission, an eater of lives whether you’re trying to transform metals or experiences. Lead is lead, and gold is gold, right down to the atomic level. Trauma is trauma, you can’t write it away into something else. What you have is what you have, your only choice is what you do with it. How you carry it.

One choice, which involves a subtle but vital shift in perspective, is to use what’s happened to you. In science terms, trauma can be a creative catalyst, something that enhances the intensity of your art while also supporting your healing.

Some processes are only possible in the presence of a catalyst, and profound pain can be part of profound understanding about what it is to be human. Perhaps, if you are lucky and brave, you can find a way to communicate it.

This is the truth at the heart of the lie about trauma and good art.

NEXT WEEK: Creative Catalysts: The Uses of Pain

Annie Spratt/Unsplash

A note on ADHD and Trauma: If you’re a regular reader, you might be wondering what the duck I am on about since I generally write with an ADHD focus. While I accept I’m going off on a tangent here: (1) I have ADHD, tangents kind of go with the territory sorry, and (2) people with an ADHD diagnosis are far more likely to have experiences that fit the definition of trauma. That’s true of both “big-T Trauma” events like child abuse or sexual violence, or “small-t trauma” events like parental misattunement or emotional neglect. Smarter people than me can argue about whether this is causation, correlation, or a combination of both, for the purposes of this particular discussion it doesn’t matter. If you have an ADHD diagnosis, you have probably experienced trauma — and therefore, it’s worth thinking about what relationship might exist (if any) between trauma and creative expression.

---

Writing for a Cause

All subscription funds raised by Painting with Lightning go towards funding independent research in psychotherapeutic treatment development. My areas of experience and interest include suicide bereavement, sexual trauma, ADHD, addiction, and the use of AI in psychotherapy.

If you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford one, please email me at skyesclera@gmail.com and I’ll grant you access.

1. American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

2. Cameron, J. (1994). The artist’s way: A spiritual path to higher creativity. Souvenir Press.

Crabtree, J., & Crabtree, J. (2011). Living with a creative mind. Zebra Collective.

3. Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score (Apple iBooks version). London, England: Penguin Books Ltd.