How Does Art Help with Grief and Loss?

Before I begin, may I say how sorry I am to know of your loss. I, too, have experienced the wrenching pain of the death of a child. My son Adam died in 1997 in an airplane accident when he experienced engine failure that resulted in the death of both him and his student.

My presentation today is about how I learned to cope with the many challenges I faced during my own personal grief journey over the past 26 years since his death. My deepest hope is that by sharing with you what I’ve learned along the way will be helpful, meaningful, and healing.

Ah, there’s that word: HEALING

Sometimes it just feels wrong to say that word when our hearts are so torn! We may find it difficult to think that anything could actually heal it. But when I say the word HEALING, I don’t mean that we should just forget our pain, and loss.

But healing in the context of my presentation today is meant to help us discover, with greater understanding and bolstered strength, how to cope with all that is in our grief journey. For me, it became Art Therapy.

My personal Art Therapy practices are creative writing, public speaking and singing, Gardening, and especially Photography. I’m not a therapist or specialist in grief. I speak only from what I’ve learned along the way in my personal grief journey over the past 26 years.

So, I ask you to take some examples of what I’m offering you today only as my personal experience, and not from a clinical mindset. Let me begin with a topic many may not have heard of before – Art Therapy.

According to Dr. Alejandra Vasquez, “…grief is the human response to loss that almost everyone will one day experience in their lifetimes… Some individuals may grieve without direction on how to release their feelings and emotions to help them cope with their profound pain and sorrow.” Dr. Vasquez is a specialist on the subject of Art Therapy and grief processing.

(There is a lot of information on this topic on the internet.)

So, How Can Art Therapy Help with the Grieving Process?
Expressive art therapy helps you express feelings and emotions that you sometimes can’t find the words for. Artistic expression to ease the pain of sorrow is expressed through what’s known as grief art. Allowing creativity to take over your grief enables you to process your pain and suffering in ways that you may not have examined before. Creating or practicing art in any form helps ground you and keeps you focused on the present.

The creative process gets you out of your head and into your body. The fluid motions associated with art help you slow down, lower your blood pressure, and regulate your heart rate. Art Therapy may help you connect to your deceased loved one by offering a way to memorialize them through your grief experience.

This artistic process is a way to create or engage in tangible artwork and activities that reminds you of your loved one. By creating a unique piece of art, you’ll always have a physical representation of that relationship to look at or hold on to when you need to feel closer to your loved one, even in the practice of performance art.

What Are Some of the Different Ways You Can Use Art to Process Grief?

There are many different ways to use art therapy to process grief, ranging from the written word to artistic expressions on canvas, or through song and interpretive dance, even sports.

Some standard examples of creative art are:

Interpretive dance

Music composition / performance

Painting

Pottery

Sports (like fishing, archery, tennis, golf…)

Gardening

Writing

Public performance like speaking or singing

For me personally, I landed on a few areas of artistic expression: Gardening, Cooking, Creative Writing, Photography, Teaching, and Vocal Performance whether in public speaking or singing.

Did you know that Art Therapy can actually help to regulate a person’s heartbeat, reduce stress, and ease depression.

Art acts as an anchor

Grief and the resulting feelings and emotions can make a person feel as if they’ve lost control of their feelings and their life in general. The ebbs and flows caused by the grieving process may seem overwhelming and challenging to keep under control.

Grief expressed through art keeps your emotions grounded when we’re feeling overwhelmed with loss. It can help us process our grief when we struggle to cope. Art helps to stabilize our emotions and acts as an anchor to our grief.

How Does Art Therapy Work for Us?

Art therapy allows us to open up to the opportunity to express our grief-related feelings and emotions. The creation of art helps with processing sensory and emotional experiences in hearts and minds.

According to Dr. Vasquez, these experiences align with the right side of the brain responsible for sensory and emotional reactions, which are expressed creatively much more readily than through cognitive means.

Through the art-making process used in art therapy, the process itself, not the art created, is more important. The creative process allows for pent-up emotions to release themselves onto a blank canvas, as sculpture, or in a song, a book, photography… this list is long.

The result is that both sides of the brain will better work together to help in the healing process. The griever can process their feelings and emotions and make meaning of their loss through the artful expression of their grief. That’s just good science, in my book.

Art therapy uses both the mind and body as an expression in promoting healing. Every time we engage in creating a painting, a song, or a written poem, we’re engaging mental processes that are physically engaging and that stimulate healing.

Healing Grief Through Artistic Expression

Well, so far we’ve learned that grief is a highly personal experience for everyone who’s touched by tragedy in their lives. There’s no one way to get through it, and each individual’s experience will be a bit different from the next.

And, over time, painful feelings and emotions will evolve, and adaptation to changed circumstances will follow. But, along with the proper support, counseling, and other tools, art therapy helps along the grieving process and may aid in offsetting some of the complications caused by grief itself.

I know that for me personally, if I had not expressed myself in my Gardening, Creative Writing, Vocal Performing and certainly in my Photography, I would not have “healed” in the same way.