Creativity as Medicine
By Joel Samuels, MD
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 26 seconds
Stone carving transformed my life of chronic pain, depression, and drug dependency into a life of renewed vitality with the ability to work, dance, and feel whole again.
After 25 years of working as an emergency room physician, I underwent several back surgeries, which resulted in many hours of physical therapy and treatments with never-ending pain and limited mobility; my life was reduced to bed rest and hot baths. So, I pursued several treatment options, including tapping into my creativity as a way of healing chronic pain.
I began by carving small hand size pieces of alabaster and marble while lying in a zero-gravity chair, and I instantly fell in love with sculpting stone. Later, I was able to carve while standing, which provided the opportunity to work on larger pieces. To my amazement, time seemed to melt away while I was engrossed in this process; my physical and mental attention deepening and widening. It was as if I had entered a spacious room, leaving the back pain outside. Something magically healing occurred in me when I entered the world of the stone carving, while at the same time, I remained in the present, discovering the shapes and lines embedded in the rock. Focused attention on carving became a meditation, complete with mindfulness of the body in motion. Previously, I discovered that distracting myself was minimally effective in relieving pain. In contrast, stone carving was highly effective. The repetitive movements of chiseling, filing, and sanding the stone were a perfect setting for mantra recitation and training the mind. I was learning to stay in the present while remaining open in this vast new room of creativity. Stone carving transformed time. Hours felt like minutes, while my body pain was in the distance, as if on the back burner. When the stone would crack and pieces would fall away, it opened me to another opportunity to use creativity and literally go with the flow. As my dear friend and source of sculpting inspiration, Shiffi Menaker-Schreiberr used to say, “The stone is the guru [teacher].” I also found that the process of carving trumped the outcome. This idea became paramount in healing. Stone carving became my medicine.
I hope my story and art will be beneficial to others. A thank you to all my doctors, healers, teachers, and friends (too numerous to name) and to my partner Ellen Vogel whose support and love made this possible. Also, special thanks to Anam Thubten Rinpoche, Darlene Cohen, and Shiffi (mentioned earlier), who were invaluable inspirations and helped guide me along the path.
Commentary
By Eric Greenleaf, PhD
“When you have a difficult problem, make an interesting design out of it.” – Milton H. Erickson, MD
Dr. Erickson employed all manner of creative devices to respond to his own physical pain, and to a patient’s emotional pain in life. He tried countervailing his own pain with distraction, like when he would press his chin into the top of a chair, and when he hallucinated that the colorful hooked rug in his office was spiraling into the air. He would also have detailed discussions with Mrs. Erickson in the middle of the night about the pain sensation in his feet. He used the conversation and detailing of the pain as a distraction until his wife would gently remind him that she and the rest of the family needed their sleep.
To reduce the emotional pain of a woodcarver’s low self-esteem, Dr. Erickson borrowed one of the patient’s ironwood carvings overnight and returned it the next day with bruised fingers and a replica of the carving that he had made. He did this to experientially show the patient the value of his (the patient’s) work.
Dr. Samuels, an experienced physician, and healer discovered a way to respond to his own crippling pain in a way his patients would recognize. He did this by putting his thoughtful, calm demeanor to work through his eyes and his hands, as he slowly changed stone to art. As was once said, “Architecture is frozen music.”
Note: Those interested in viewing Dr. Samuel’s stunning sculptural work, please see: http://mrdrjoel.tumblr.com/
For imaginative approaches to healing, using visual arts, movement, and trance, see www.miltonherickson.com.
This excerpt has been extracted from Volume 39, Issue No. 3 of The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Newsletter.
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Skills for the Art of Bringing Forth Change
by Hillary Keeney and Bradford Keeney
Type: Softcover
Performance. This is where it starts. The Keeney’s heretical perspective holds that professionals can fill up on theory — indeed, on many theories — at the expense of developing the performance skills that are the foundation of effective therapy. They argue that creative performance technique, rather than theory, is primary. Thus this new book is appropriate for any practitioner no matter what school of therapy they belong to.
The authors begin by envisioning every session as a three-act structure with a beginning, middle and end. This helps therapists maintain a focus on movement and change, like a compass that allows practitioners to keep track of the plot line and direction of every session. Exercises help readers make these ideas their own.
In Chapter Two, “Short-Circuiting Vicious Circles,” the focus is on creative ways to interrupt the pathological discourse that maintains impoverished experience in clients’ lives, while “Feeding Virtuous Circles” considers the creation of more generative, resource-rich experiences. This section ends with “Designing Prescriptive Action for Change,” thus rounding out the discussion of the basic tools necessary to implement a well-formed therapeutic performance.
The midsection of the book presents opportunities to initiate and maintain consistent presence inside creative, transformative interactions in every session. “Always Utilize and Improvise” leads the way by describing, and inviting the reader to practice, ways to create openings for new movement. “Absurdity Lubricates the Wheels of Change” introduces exercises to help awaken difference and inspiration. “The Changing Therapist” encourages the therapist to include and expand his or her role as an instrument of change.
In the case studies in Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten, the authors demonstrate ways in which they have helped practitioners to uncover their own unique resources and to develop mastery of creative and effective expression. The final chapter, “Bringing Life to Clinical Training,” gathers together thoughts on the importance of performance-based skills and one’s own wisdom-based learning as the linchpins of an alive therapeutic environment.
Hillary Keeney and Brad Keeney bring to their work a rare combination of intellectual depth and jump-off-the-page enthusiasm. Creative Therapeutic Technique is a practical guide that knocks the familiar staid therapeutic stance on its ear, suggesting instead an approach that allows therapists to always be ready and able to meet clients where they are — and then uncover fresh and vital ways to get them where they long to be.
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“A book you can’t put down! I don’t know how to adequately convey that the Keeneys are true to the work of Milton H. Erickson. This is improvisation and utilization at its best, delivering solidly based effective therapeutic work. With exercises and all sorts of informative teaching, they show us how to do it. Best of all, the book fulfills a remarkable paradox: you will hate to finish this well-written, entertaining, and practice-changing book, but will hardly wait to finish so that you can use what’s been learned.”
—Betty Alice Erickson, M.S., LMFT
Private Practice, Dallas, TX
“If you are looking for new inspiration to enliven your clinical practice, this is the book to read. The Keeneys are masters of invention. Turning conventional thinking and practices on their head, they encourage therapists to leap over the bonds of the rational and enter the realm of the theatrical and metaphorical. They create a new therapeutic context with first, second and third acts. Guidelines are included that lay out specific ways for therapists to give free rein to their own imagination and develop their unique creativity. The book is filled with many clinical surprises. There are startling examples of transformative experiences in which silver linings are found within the darkest situations, seeds of hope are implanted in barren landscapes and nightmares are turned into dreams. It was a pleasure to read and I highly recommend it.”
—Peggy Papp, LCSW
internationally renowned therapist;
senior faculty member, founder and director of the
Project for Adolescents and Their Families,
Ackerman Institute for the Family, New York City
“If you try to get nothing from this book, happily, you will fail: It is a page-packed monument to unscripted change! You won’t put it down once you begin as it teaches how to amplify experiential resources rather than focus on either problems or solutions. The book’s creative voice alone will inspire therapists to pull the weeds out of any garden-variety approach and let flowers of change blossom and grow for both them and their clients. Enjoy.”
—Stephen Lankton, MSW, LCSW, DAHB
Editor-in-Chief, American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis;
Faculty Associate, Arizona State University, School of Social Work;
Member, Arizona Board of Behavioral Health Examiners;
Secretary, Arizona Social Work Credentialing Committee
by Roxanna Erickson Klein, RN, PhD, Ernest Rossi, PhD and Kathryn Rossi, PhD
This volume illustrates how classical psychosomatic medicine becomes psychosocial genomics just as surely as the 21st century becomes the 22nd. This is an example of how science is self-correcting and continually evolving. Erickson's Collected Works is updated with current concepts of neuroscience, psychosocial genomics, and bioinformatics for students, clinicians, and researchers who wish to extend his innovative therapeutic approaches into the future. Erickson mediated the transition between classical hypnosis as a curious alchemy of abnormal states of mental dissociation and suggestion to a new form of psychotherapy when he began publishing his early studies of psychosomatic phenomena in the 1930s.