Do you suffer from chronic pain? Art therapy may be helpful to manage chronic pain symptoms. Check out this article below to learn more:
Art Therapy: Creating Through the Pain
Art therapy, or even just appreciating art, can help your chronic pain symptoms. Here’s how.
It’s easy to understand why an artist would find relief, comfort, and satisfaction in being able to use art as a way to express feelings. Perhaps the best example of this is Frida Kahlo—she of the famous unibrow—whose life was marked by chronic pain believed to have been caused by several factors: congenital spina bifida, a bout with polio that left her with asymmetrical lower limbs, and a devastating bus accident at age 18 which led to a lifetime of surgeries, recoveries, and chronic pain.
Her paintings dealt with the brokenness of the human body and with the physicality of the pain she experienced. One of her most heartbreaking paintings, “The Broken Column,” shows Kahlo in a leather and metal back brace, her chest split open to reveal her backbone. There are nails embedded in her skin and tears flowing from her eyes.
Making art and, for some, observing it, has been found to be healing and valuable in helping to reduce chronic pain. This is true even for people who in the past have had little interest or talent in an art-related field.
According to the Foundation for Art and Healing, the arts are transformational, engaging our hearts, minds, and souls. Creative expression has the power to improve wellbeing by helping us to shift perspectives.
Physiologically, art can have powerful effects on our bodies:
Reducing blood pressure
Bolstering our immune system
Improving brain cognition
Fighting inflammation
Reducing pain
Making art can help the body to release endorphins, the body’s natural pain relievers, which can block the nerve cells that receive pain signals, essentially blunting the pain.
Art Therapy and Chronic Pain
According to The American Art Therapy Association, art therapy is an integrative type of psychotherapy which provides a way to express emotions and experiences not easily articulated in words. Through active art making and the creative process, facilitated by a specially trained art therapist, people may be able to reduce conflicts, anxiety, and distress and build emotional resilience.
Sandra Izhakoff, a painter, art teacher, and art therapist in Forest Hills, NY, encourages people to engage in the creation of and appreciation for the visual arts. People with chronic pain so often feel that they have lost control—control of their bodies, their choices, and the very fabric of their lives. Izhakoff says that “art materials of different varieties allow a person to gain control or to happily and purposefully lose control. Working with pen and pencil allows participants to control their movements, whereas other materials free them to 'play' with the material and create shapes or images that can be defined or free-form.”
Appreciating Art
Research suggests that observing art as well as making it can have a healing effect. Because health and wellness are increasingly being seen as social issues, rather than purely medical ones, museums are now playing an important role in enhancing the health of visitors, staff, and communities they serve.
A 2018 article in Pain Medicine reported on a program in which Ian Koebner, M.D., director of Integrative Pain Management at the University of California Davis Medical Center, and colleagues collaborated with the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, in a program that used docent tours to decrease pain and social disconnection for people living with chronic pain.
Results of the pilot program found that participants experienced pain relief during the actual tour, as expected. While changes in pain intensity pre- to post-tour were not significant, they were, interestingly, significant at three-week follow-up.
Several participants noted that the program raised awareness that social connection could mitigate the burden of their chronic pain in the longer term, and continued to get together with other participants after the program or joined other community-based arts programs.
One actually framed social engagement through the tour as analgesia, pointing that that the program was “a novel piece in the puzzle of successful pain management.”
Today, along with numerous other museums across the country, Crocker offers art-based programs such as ArtRx (museum tours), Artful Meditation, and others through its Art + Wellness suite.
More Research Around Art Therapy for Chronic Pain
A phenomenological study “Chronic Pain: Gaining Understanding Through the Use of Art” that appeared in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy, which supported the use of art as an expressive medium, explored the lived experience of a small group of people ranging from 27 to 63 years old who were attending a one-month pain management program in New Zealand.
The program participants were invited to create a visual image of their pain and to later write a narrative, which was then taped, about their pain story portrayed in the artwork. Each individual’s experience was reflected by the colors, images, and words inserted into the picture. Some themes that emerged were loss of self, redefining self, “gaining pain and losing self,” the experience of chronic pain as a journey, and the struggle to remain hopeful.
“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I had no words for,” wrote famed artist Georgia O’Keefe. For many people struggling with chronic pain, involvement in the visual arts can be a rewarding way of sharing the experience without having to explain it to those who might otherwise find it difficult to understand.
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