Catalysts: The Science of Art & Trauma

While it might not be possible or wise to try and transform trauma into art, it’s entirely within your power to USE it in your art. But only if you want to.

I always did love chemistry class. Granted, I spent more time melting pens in the bunsen burner and making rainbows in the sink with acid than actually learning. But when the time came to cram like a motherfucker at exam time, I always regretted my inability to focus. I really enjoyed learning this stuff. Yes, even organic chemistry with all the letters and lines and math. There’s such poetry in understanding the world, in being curious, in learning the building blocks that make up everything — bananas and dish soap and nail polish and coffee, the curve of a smile and the smell of rain and the colour of the sea when it’s very cold.

In Part 1 I wrote about alchemy, the ancient pursuit of a process that would transform cheap base metals into gold — a ticket to riches that we now know was always a futile endeavour. I think of this as similar to the idea that we can turn trauma into art, and link it to the flawed presumption that “good art” always has its origins in pain.

Alchemy: the Science of Art & Trauma

Here, I want to explore what one can do with pain that cannot be written away, or painted away, or played away, or danced away (or drunk away, eaten away, loved away, punched or kicked or screamed away, or run away from).

Trauma-as-catalyst

It’s a weird quirk of ADHD brain that I can go to a vet appointment and forget the cat, yet remember things I learned in high school 15 “unprecedented world events” ago. If you have an ADHD mind and you’re fascinated by something, everything you learn about it sticks like melted road tar (and you have to really try hard to shut the fuck up about it at parties). Which brings me to the central metaphor of this piece: catalysts.

A catalyst, in chemistry terms, is a substance that increases the power of a chemical reaction simply by existing in proximity to the process. The catalyst isn’t involved in the reaction per se, it isn’t used up or transformed, but its presence creates incredible potency.

Unlike alchemy, which was only every a theory, catalysts are a proven, observable scientific phenomenon. Catalysts are used at scale in industrial production processes, and they’re working away right now inside your body transforming food into more usable compounds.

While it might not be possible or wise to try and transform the kind of pain that’s stored in the mind as trauma into art, for all the reasons discussed in Part One, it’s entirely within your power to use what’s happened to you creatively as a catalyst. If you want to.

Do you want to?

Because that’s a very important question to sit with, and reflect on, and give an authentic answer time to emerge clearly.

What is Art Good For?

You can make art for any reason, out of any motivation you wish, for any purpose, simply because you would like to make something. And if you have suffered life-changing trauma, you do not have a moral obligation to do something with what happened to you, either. If you want permission to focus on your own healing, and let the pain of the world take care of itself (as indeed it ultimately must), you have it.

Some art which clearly used trauma as a catalyst is indeed profound. On the bookshelf behind me, as I type this, is a copy of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. One day I will finish reading it. But it draws so intensely and unflinchingly on something so dark and evocative, I cannot bear exposure for long. It is an important piece of writing, both as a record of atrocity and as something that pulls at the insides of the reader like a swallowed hook.

But pain is simply one of many artistic wellsprings, and “never waste a good trauma” should be taken as broad encouragement for healing, not an indication that you’re doing something wrong if you don’t live in your pain and use it as an artistic catalyst. You can create for the sake of beauty, you can do it for worship, you can do it to work out your own thoughts on the page, hell, you can do it for fun. Especially for fun. The world needs more playfulness.

I happen to think that there’s a better case that all serious art is born from serious play, not from trauma and pain (if we’re going to try and make big sweeping statements).

A Serious Business

I’m fascinated by some of the arguments circulating at the moment around the politics of architecture. The roughly right-wing argument that modern design sacrifices all beauty on the altar of functionality, and the generally left-wing takedown that what we enjoy design-wise has merely changed (and anyone who says otherwise is surely a closet Nazi, who simply misses the good old days of child abuse and lead poisoning).

Maybe I licked my lead-paint Thomas the Tank Engine a bit too much as a toddler, but I absolutely think there’s something missing in modern art, design, architecture, and even writing, and I think we lost it with the insistence that Real Art is about pain and torment. If you’ve ever walked into a truly old, truly beautiful church (I’m talking at least 500 years), you’ll know what I mean. Make all the arguments you like about the profligacy or evils of religion (which all boil down to the foibles of power-seeking humans, who you’ll find anywhere if you lift up the right rock). These structures are a monument to beauty, to worship of something beyond the grit and grind of the everyday world. They exist to be breathtaking, to speak to something in the spirit. Once upon a time I was the most reactive, venomous atheist you could find anywhere, full of the kind of spite that only forms under a crushing ocean of hurt, and I still cried sitting in Notre Dame. I said some curse words afterwords, to prove to the God I didn’t believe in that it didn’t mean anything, because I was an idiot. And not even an honest idiot, because it did mean something. This was transcendent art, mighty and glorious.

All this meandering is simply to say: profound art can exist in ways that are beautiful and meaningful, which have nothing to do with the randomness of tragedy and the awful things humans can do to one another.

If you feel the most (or worse, the only) interesting thing you can write about is your trauma, you’re wrong. That’s one of the many horrific things about the malware trauma can implant in the human mind: the idea that this defines you, that it is all you are, that it is all you have to say.

Is close-enough good enough?

One way to use trauma as a creative catalyst is to make art that is close enough to your pain that you can draw on your experience and learnings, but not so close that you’re in danger of losing yourself. Can you write about what you experienced, but from the perspective of someone who is very unlike you? Can you write a script or story about something that feels like it’s a similar loss, or betrayal, but with enough difference in the details that you can keep some emotional distance?

To offer a personal example of how I did this myself: I see my work as a therapist as a kind of creative synthesis, albeit one that’s always in motion and co-created between myself and the person I’m sitting with. When I began my training, I planned to specialise in suicide prevention, but quickly learned that I was going to be fighting the most damaged, terrified and poorly integrated parts of my brain all the way if I wanted to do this. It would be really, really difficult for me not to abandon my clients mentally in their scariest and most shameful moments of need because I would be off in another place, in another time, reliving my own traumatic suicide loss. It would be dangerous for everyone involved, and I would not be very good at it.

I tried writing about what happened to me for a while, too. I don’t think that was very good either, just pain and repetition and garbled thoughts. Eventually with time, distance, maturity and trauma therapy, I was able to do something a bit more useful. I’m still continuing in that process today, nearly two decades later. Which leads me to my next point:

Remember, you have time

Trauma can have a way of longing to be witnessed, and it can feel like you simply must do something with it immediately. You don’t have to. In fact, any feeling of urgency around trauma should be treated with slow, gentle compassion and curiosity. You can’t paint a storm while you’re in the middle of it, it’s just so much sound and fury, completely inchoate.

Healing and time will allow you to have enough distance to not only communicate something meaningful, whether that’s for yourself or for an audience, but to do it safely and in a way that doesn’t risk further traumatisation or damage.

The first thing I tell my therapy clients, the very first thing, is that it is far more important for them to tell me what happened to them safely than it is to tell me quickly. There is much one can intuit from what is impossible to say, from where it is unwise to go. Trauma therapy happens fastest, ironically, when there is a sense that there is all the time in the world.

Has there been time enough for you?

More importantly, will undertaking a creative exercise be helpful to you, as you continue to process your experiencing and integrate what happened?

If you think so, and if you want to use your pain as a catalyst to add potency to your creative vision, what follows are some thoughts on how to do it while protecting your mind.

Note: I seriously recommend that if you have experienced trauma, the kind that has the ability to seriously impact your day-to-day functioning, you engage the services of a skilled therapist. Especially do not attempt any sort of contact with traumatic material if you have a history of self-harming behaviours and/or suicidality.

Watch your window

Essentially, knowing when you’re using pain (introducing a catalyst) and when you’re inside your pain (attempting alchemy, risking damage, and in a poor headspace to translate anything creatively) is a matter of self-awareness.

I can’t map your particular journey, but I may be able to describe some of the terrain. The places you’ll want to arrive prepared and move quickly, and the importance of always knowing where you are in your mind.

If you’ve never heard the term ‘window of tolerance’ before, it’s a phrase therapists commonly use in trauma therapy that describes how close you can get to the thing without being triggered into re-experiencing. There are subtle clues that appear when you are in danger, and if you are attempting any sort of creative endeavour that touches on your pain, you must be very attuned to yourself and very mindful of how you are feeling.

Notice the sensations in your body. The kinds of thoughts and feelings you are having. Keep checking in with yourself regularly, and notice any shifts. If you’re writing/painting/drawing, the way your hand moves may change. Your handwriting may become more jagged, you may notice you are pressing your pencil or pen down more violently, perhaps moving faster. If you begin to find it hard to think your thoughts, if you feel yourself becoming close to overwhelm or conversely beginning to shut down and feel empty/numb, stop what you are doing immediately. I’ve included some grounding exercises at the end of this post that are helpful for safely returning to the present, please have a look (even if you never have to use them, you never know when they might come in handy). The signs of overwhelm, when we are thinking/writing/talking about something that is the source of deep pain, are often very subtle and overshooting the window tends to have disastrous consequences.

Think of trauma like a black hole in the mind. You must not enter that place under any circumstances, which is very difficult because you cannot easily see where it is until you’re in it and then it’s too late.

If you are very careful and slow and mindful, however, you may be able to glimpse — and describe — what you see at the boundary around the black hole of trauma, the event horizon.

But beyond the event horizon, nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the black hole of trauma, not light or sound or thought. The spider’s thread of fate between insight and obliteration is hazardous — stay too long, venture too far, and it will break.

Survival is a creative act

I want to leave you with a final thought: that you are here, that you are reading this, that you are thinking about what you wish to do with your self and life and art following an experience of unimaginable pain, is itself an act of unfolding creativity.

Trauma changes you. It doesn’t mean it invariably changes you for the better, anybody who dares utter the words “post-traumatic growth” to me will get my best bitch face in response (and I have a very, very good bitch face).

The world, and myself, and you, are less bright because of the darkness we have survived. But I do know some things I didn’t know before, and so do you. I am a person I was not, before — so are you. I have some things to say about that, and perhaps you do too.

I do not know you, but I can say with certainty that I am so very glad you are alive, and that you are here. Please keep writing, please keep going. Existence is brighter for the creative act that is your life.

You are the catalyst of the world.

Unsplash/Yap

Appendix: Suggested Grounding Exercises for Safety

There are many different techniques and exercises therapists favour when they need to help someone back into their window of tolerance, safely away from the event horizon of traumatic re-experiencing.

Here’s a few that could work for you.

1. Co-regulation (otherwise known as phone-a-friend). If you’re doing window-of-tolerance work with a therapist, you’ll be able to do this immediately. Otherwise, you may wish to enlist a trusted friend or mentor who can help you in this work. Let them know what you’re attempting, and that you’ll be giving them a call afterwards. Give an approximate time, and ask them to make contact if they don’t hear from you. Then, once you’re both on the phone, the goal is simply to have a conversation that draws you back into the present. If this friend or mentor is a good conversationalist, effusive and enthusiastic, this is probably as simple as chatting together about anything and everything until you feel the last dregs of the black hole’s pull drain away. Alternatively, you may wish to give them a topic to ask you about, a special interest you can rabbit on about forever (everyone has these, regardless of neurotype). Be aware that you run a small risk of this topic becoming linked to the trauma, so don’t do this with anything it would break your heart to taint.

2. Perception check (otherwise known as sensory grounding). The aim of this is to strengthen your experience of the present by tuning in to your senses in the present moment, which will pull you out of the past. A simple way to do this is using only hearing: notice and name every sound you can hear, beginning with the things closest to you, and expanding your awareness further and further out. Another popular exercise involves tuning in to each of the senses, and naming:

   1. 5 things you can see (e.g. plant, pencil, cat, dust dancing in the air)

   2. 4 things you can hear (e.g. air conditioning, traffic, birds, my own breathing)

   3. 3 things you can feel (e.g. my hair on my neck, my toes in my shoes)

   4. 2 things you can smell (e.g. perfume, coffee, the smell of this particular room)

   5. 1 thing you can taste (often this is only the taste of your own mouth, but it’s interesting to realise that your mouth has a taste but your brain ignores it unless you choose to focus on it).

   You can add additional strength to this exercise by adding sensory input - play some music, and notice each individual instrument. Eat or drink something, and focus on the taste and smell (this has the added bonus of tricking your lizard-brain “I am eating and drinking, which I would not do if I were under threat of death, and therefore I must be safe).

3. Teleportation (otherwise known as the “safe place” exercise, but this is another term the therapy lexicon has lost to Internet culture wars). Essentially, this is about taking yourself out of negative past re-experiencing by transporting yourself to another place entirely, one with a really positive pull. Close your eyes, and imagine the place you feel most secure in all the world. Let’s say it’s lying under a blanket at your grandmother’s watching cartoons.

   Now. Imagine every single detail. Is it day or night? Warm day or cold? What does the wallpaper look like? What cartoons are you watching? What are the sounds like? Can you hear voices? What else can you see in the room? What does the blanket feel like on your skin? Can you smell something cooking? Can you taste anything? Maybe you’ve just had hot chocolate. Keep going going going as long as you can, then stay there as long as you feel you need.

4. Exercise. If you feel able, and exercise is a positive thing for you (i.e. not something linked to self-destructiveness at any point), try to move your body. The more intense, the better, but if you can only manage a short, brisk walk that’s absolutely fine, you’ve just been near a black hole, cut yourself some slack.

You may need to do any or all of these exercises more than once, and you may simply need some time to recover. That’s normal, don’t panic that it’s not working, that’s thrashing in quicksand.

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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.

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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.

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