Remembering the Self: Re-awakening the Spirit through Creative Expression
Chloe Elsass
CL 830 Developmental Psych Through the Lifespan – Fall 2022
Kristin L. Beasley, Ph.D.
Pacifica Graduate Institute
3/5/2023
Remembering the Self: Re-awakening the Spirit through Creative Expression
However soft, fragile, and impressionable children are, they are also highly resilient. The physical makeup of a child is one that is meant to grow, evolve, and expand. A child is no more the same from day to day as a bud on a plant is as it shifts in season. Each of us are born touched by the uniqueness of our spirit and this spirit is either allowed to explore and flourish throughout development, or the child learns swiftly the clumsiness and mess of non-received affect, pressure of fitting their amorphous self into societal squares, and the potential harms of existing alongside everything and everyone.
This unique and individualized relating begins the moment a child takes their first breath on their own. Ideally, the child comes together; out of utero with the mother to gaze into each other’s eyes and return the initial language of love with paired sounds of heartbeats. As Hill (2015) stated, “affect is at the core of our being, a measure of our heart” (p. 1). Affect is at the very center of knowingness, existence, understanding, and expression. Love is, hopefully, the very first affective way we show up in the world and are mirrored by. However, there are many circumstances, which may color this initial moment with other feelings, which carry a heavier connotation. For many mothers, a child arrives on the heels of a miscarriage, and in this situation, birth is inextricably linked with death and possible deep grief. As Massie and Bronstein (1996) reflected in their study on Inner Themes and Out Behaviors in Child Development, “earlier pain and damage was undeadened [sic] and not fully compensated by the successes many of the mothers had achieved” (p. 57). Post-partum plays a fundamental role in a mother’s capacity to provide the desirable affect of excitement, understanding, patience, and want for connection. This was the circumstance with my mother, after losing six children between my older sister and me. I was what she wanted more than anything else, yet the happy moment was unavoidably coated in loss.
Children are developmentally selfish and egocentric (Oaklander, 2006), as they learn to exist as themselves before having a greater understanding of the dualistic nature in coexistence with the world and others. Even after the developmental threshold of cognitive recognition in separate experience, Oaklander noticed the persistence of emotional egocentricity when faced with unmet affect, abandoning, or a rejection of the self-expression by others. The child learns to believe the affect of others to be their fault and anything perceived as negative, to be a direct correlation with their “badness” or unacceptable self. Oaklander explained:
Children blame themselves for everything bad that happens to them because of their egocentricity and difficulty to separate out individual experience. Young children blame themselves if there is an illness, if they are abandoned, if they are rejected in some way, if the parent has a headache, if the parent is angry and grumpy, if they are molested and if there is some kind of trauma (p. 8-9).
Reflected later, Oaklander discusses the child developing mechanisms to shut-down characteristics of the self as a means of protection and to mold themselves into a more “digestible” version. Where the point of resilience in children comes in, is in the deep excavation of my inner child and the sense of self that entered the world, pure and whole, prior to any learned beliefs of unworthiness. Despite the enormity of my traumatic experiences from infant to adolescent, the core of my being has always been one of love, joy, and full delightful expression of light.
The purpose of my creative expression, via collage, was to remember the silly, loving, smiley, happy, lovely, and gentle self. To remember that in spite of the horrors, I have continued to be able to enjoy bits of life and to remain laughing. I sometimes find it easier to look back in rebellion at all of the ways my parents failed me with completely unmet affect and rejection of my being in relation to themselves and their nervous systems full of their own struggles of trauma. Yet, it would be a disservice to the wholeness of their intentions and effort not to acknowledge the many ways they provided me the opportunity to maintain my sparkle throughout childhood. I was always encouraged to be creative and express myself through many different art forms, facilitated by my parents knowing to put me in afterschool art classes, dance classes, and theater groups and camps. They fostered play and provided me with a goal of pure expression of self as a safe and acceptable endeavor when cultivated through the arts and appropriate art spaces. Adler (1988), explained “for man’s feeling of smallness is acceptable to him only if it gives rise to a constant upward striving, it if awakens belief in the self and in the future, and insight into a common human destiny” (p. 418). The striving, for me, was insatiable curiosity within the infinite realms of artistry. The societal lack of expectations with art allowed me to feel safe in being, knowing I couldn’t get it wrong if what was being created came from me. Art fostered greater understanding from my family and became a language they could understand me through, despite many missed, fumbled, and misunderstood grasps for connection on my part.
Per Winnicott’s (2005, 1953) concept of the transitional phenomena, a person comes to discover and know themselves in the midst of creative non-purposive play. Here the person is able to explore the boundaries of their being in relation to others, objects, and energies of the world. This was particularly helpful to Winnicott in therapeutic moments of play and creative expression. When are child is provided the safety and freedom to be in playful exploration, they learn sense of self, particularly as it is mirrored back to them through objects and individuals. My artistic endeavors were the safe place I needed to discover myself, separate from the constraints of my familial trauma and the limitations of my families communication and affective styles of care. I felt like I could enjoy myself while being curious and when deeply immersed in the awe that life so often poured into me. No matter the darkness I’ve endured, the wonder of this life and the world, particularly that of nature, has yet to be lost on me. When playing outside, I often found myself in flowers and the wind blowing through the trees and over grassy hills. I see my resilience in the steadfastness of mountains and the constant ebb and flow of ocean tides. I see myself shining on sunny days and accept the necessary cleansing of my grief in the rain. I have learned the organic nature of my capacity for love and hate, creation and destruction, in witnessing nature’s seasons and ways. Without a certain level of abandonment and rejection from my family, I’m not sure I would have this intimate relationship with the natural world.
In my creative process, I have reflected the emersion of myself within nature and in relation to the playfulness and joy of family moments. This process reminds me of who I am at the core and the affect of love I bring to each day by simply existing in the seasons of blooming of my life. In a phenomenological kind of way, nature “watched, waited and wondered” (Muir, 2000) me into my ecopsychological becoming, cognitive understanding, and emotionally regulating habits. Though regularly unmet affectively by my mother, Mother Nature stepped in to truly see me, and continues to do so, throughout my continued development. In moments of turmoil, remembering the healing power and self-affirming nature of both artistic expression and the natural world are paramount feelings of wholeness and meaning making. I’ve strayed from the path of the pure desire to create and am reminded when I look into the eyes of my joyful child self that to deny this form of expression is to deny myself many opportunities for healing. For in the safety of play, I rediscover my worth—naturally.
References
Adler, A. (1988). The child’s inner life and a sense of community. Individual Psychologo: Journal of Adlerian Theory, Research & Practice, 44(4), 417-423.
Hill, D., & Schore, A. N. (2015). Affect regulation theory: A clinical model. W. W. Norton & Company.
Massie, H., Bronstein, A. A., & Afterman, J. (1996). Role of depressive affects in close maternal involvement with children: Inner themes and outer behaviors in Child development ii. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 13(1), 53–80. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079638
Muir, E., Lojkasek, M., & Cohen, N.J. (2000). Chapter 3: Infant led psychotherapy. Watch, Wait, & Wonder: A manual describing a dyadic infant-led approach to problems in infancy and early childhood, (pp. 17-21). The Hincks-Dellcrest Institute.
Oaklander, V. (2006). Chapter 2: What brings children into therapy: A developmental perspective. In Hidden treasure: A map to the child's inner self (pp. 5–19). essay, Taylor & Francis Group.
Winnicott, D. W. (2005). Chapter: 4 - Playing. In Playing and reality (pp. 71–86). essay, Routledge. — Quote Source