“I’ve suffered enough. When does my artwork improve?”
Refrigerator magnet from stickergiant.com
“Suffering is justified as soon as it becomes the raw material of beauty.” Jean-Paul Sartre
The tortured artist mythology is an ancient and enduring notion: The idea that art depends on suffering, and that artists are likely to be full of dark emotions, and even need their pain to create.
But is that valid? Do we need to suffer to be “truly” creative?
The impact of trauma is different for all of us.
Idris Elba noted how his father’s death affected his acting:
“I got to a place where I wasn’t even living anymore. I was becoming a robot with my work.
“I have no fear of jumping out of burning cars or out of buildings on set, but in reality, I couldn’t run one hundred meters. I just felt out of touch with reality.”
“Idris Elba reflects on how his father’s death affected him,” ABC News Jul 6, 2017.
[Photo is from his Facebook page.]
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Creative expression, trauma and unhealed trauma
Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz helps creative people in TV/Film, performing and fine arts with “life struggles, depression, anxiety, creativity, relationships, PTSD, and addictions – to become their own best version.”
In one of the articles on her site addressing trauma and creative people she writes:
“Many artists live with unhealed emotional trauma.
“Some decide to seek help. Some speak publicly about their challenges.
“Some even use their own healing journey to encourage other creatives to take the leap and seek help.
“And, there are those who feel their creativity is their healing power.
“Through the art that they create, they can see their painful experiences from a safe place, so they can make sense of them and transform them into healing stories.”
Read more in her article
Emotional Trauma: A Treasure of Creative Inspiration or A Place of Darkness?
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Singer, songwriter, voice actress and director Sia (Sia Furler) has talked about having complex PTSD from a number of childhood, developmental and adult traumas.
The image above is from her video conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté for the Trauma Talks series of The Wisdom of Trauma event.
Sia: I’m a trauma baby, as is, I think, pretty much everyone in Hollywood.
Gabor Maté: We find out over and over again, [movies are] created by really traumatized people.
Sia: Yeah
See videos and more about this online event in my article: How to recover from trauma – The Wisdom of Trauma movie and Talks on Trauma series.
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See multiple resources below to help deal with trauma and improve emotional health.
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Will we “lose” our creativity if we deal with emotional health issues?
Cheryl Arutt, Psy.D., a psychologist specializing in creative artist issues, says “Many creative people…worry that they will lose their creativity if they work through their inner conflicts or let go of suffering…”
From one of her guest articles on this site: Affect Regulation and the Creative Artist.
Also hear much longer audio interview:
Psychologist Cheryl Arutt on Creative Artist Issues.
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In his paper The Abnormal Psychology of Creativity, Steven James Bartlett writes….
Norwegian painter Edvard Munch – famed for his painting “The Scream” – was hospitalized several times for psychiatric illness. He remarked:
“A German once said to me: ‘But if you could rid yourself of many of your troubles.’
“To which I replied: ‘They are part of me and my art.
“They are indistinguishable from me, and it would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings’ ”
[See more in my article Are Certain mental disorders linked to creative genius?]
But a number of artists and psychologists say this ‘suffering artist’ idea is wrong, even dangerously self-limiting.
How do difficult or traumatic experiences affect us, and how can we improve our resilience and emotional health?
What is considered trauma?
Actor and playwright (“Cleo, Theo & Wu”) Kirsten Vangsness responded in an interview to the question “How have the current political climate and social movements impacted you as an artist?” :
“I was already finished with [my play] CTW when the Kavanaugh hearings started and mostly done even by the time the presidential elections had occurred.
“The ideas of how women (or of any person that bends, feels, identifies or appears more femme) holds and creates power differently, and also what trauma does with memory (and also what is considered trauma since women especially often have all kinds of weird sexual moments sort of thrust upon them as a result of being seen as weaker), are big ideas that aren’t new things that have been rolled around in art and conversations throughout the history of humans.”
[Kirsten Vangsness: Past, Present & Future!, Theatre of NOTE Nov 8, 2018.]
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How do talented actors and other artists make use of their inner emotional lives, including the shadow and dark sides, to be more alive and creative?
“A dark side of being a creative and a performer, is to have access to certain emotional states that are the medium through which art is created.” Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz
Actor Anthony Hopkins has talked about engaging with this side of ourselves:
“I’m not a psychologist, but at the back of it I think there is a feeling that everything is uncertain, there is no guarantee of anything and that causes us great fascination and fear.
“So we look into the dark side of ourselves and the world.
“I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, the dark side of one’s nature, and have fun with it.
“What happens if you don’t address the darkness in you?
“You become repressed, depressed and suicidal.”
From my article Make friends with the shadow side of ourselves to be more creative
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In his appearance as a guest on The Ellen Show, Colin Farrell said he was finding that he is more creative being sober and happy.
“I was terrified that whatever my capacity was as an actor would disappear when I got sober,” he admitted.
“I ascribed to the notion that to express yourself as an artist, you have to live in perpetual pain.
“And that’s nonsense.”
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In the compelling crime drama TV series “The Killing” (set in ‘always raining’ Seattle, hence the design of this promotional poster), detectives Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) work hard to solve the murder of a young girl.
[Photo from AMC tv site for the show.]
In her profile article, Lisa Rosen notes that Kinnaman continues to struggle with smoking, and used an electronic cigarette during their interview.
“I’ve always had an easy time quitting. I’m just really good at starting up again,” he admitted.
Rosen says, “Not shocking, then, that Kinnaman felt his way into Holder’s character through addiction. His research included visiting NA and AA meetings, and meeting people who struggled with meth.”
Kinnaman notes, “He’s got this restlessness within him that comes from this void that he has, that he’s tried to fill with drugs. I wanted to feel that restlessness in his body language, that he’s never standing still.”
Rosen noted this is something else the actor shares with his character, and that “He’s in constant motion, tapping his foot against the table leg for the entire interview.”
[By the way, in my article Gifted, Talented, Addicted, I speculate that many creative and talented people use drugs to try to deal with the emotional pain of their intensity or excitability and high sensitivity.]
Romanticizing the wounded artist
In an interview for the Los Angeles Times by writer Lisa Rosen, Joel Kinnaman says that in European theater circles, “there’s this romanticizing about the wounded artist; you have to be in pain to be able to portray pain.”
But he considers that nonsense.
Her interview article noted that preparing for his stage debut role of Raskolnikov, in an acclaimed production of “Crime and Punishment” in Stockholm, he “set out to be as positive and happy as possible in his real life.
“That translated to the role in ways he didn’t expect,” Rosen notes.
Kinnaman said, “Nobody wants to be depressed — everybody’s trying to feel better; when they strive and fail, it’s all the more poignant.”
The audience response was overwhelming.
“That made me feel very confident that I could be who I am.
“I think Mireille [Enos] comes from the exact same perspective.
“She’s a bubbly, happy person on-set, because she knows she has complete access to any depths of darkness.”
From Joel Kinnaman gets outside himself for ‘The Killing’ on AMC, by Lisa Rosen, the Los Angeles Times May 26, 2012.
[Photos from Joel Kinnaman’s Facebook page., and Mireille Enos’ Twitter.]
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Troubled relationships can be one source of pain.
In an article about the London debut of the opera “Prima Donna” by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, and his album “All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu,” writer Tim Adams comments “Songs for Lulu is, Wainwright says, something of a homage to his former party-loving and addicted self – Lulu – seen from the vantage of hard-won sobriety.”
“Wainwright feared once or twice that his settled relationship with theatre producer Jörn Weisbrodt might have a debilitating effect on his gift for tainted love songs, the yearning, nuanced ballads, one part Morrissey, one part Mahler, with which he made his name.”
He quotes Wainwright: “I wondered if not being in these fatalistic disasters with boys, I would lose this dark lake of pain to drink from. But I needn’t have worried too much,” he says, with his wild laugh.
“In many ways, Songs for Lulu is a reaffirmation of that persona. Highly romantic, highly unstable. I mean, what I have found is that once you give up on a life, it doesn’t go away.
“You are always appeasing, or bargaining with, or neglecting that former self, the spirit who used to be behind the wheel, and would like to be still. I don’t cross to that side of the street any more. But it is important for me as a healthy person to acknowledge that the demons are still around.”
[The Observer, 21 Feb 2010 www.guardian.co.uk]
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“She never seemed shattered; to me, she was a breathtaking mosaic of the battles she’s won.” – Matt Baker
[Quote image found at Facebook / Word Porn.]
Book: A Burning Bridge Is A Warm Goodbye: Poems, Quotes and Panic by Matt Baker.
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There are, of course, plenty of examples of artists using creative expression to transform pain.
Frida Kahlo (1907-54) painted a series of self-portraits, including this powerful image (at the right) “The Broken Column” (1944), a depiction of the years of treatment (including orthopedic appliances) she had to endure for a devastating spinal cord injury at age nineteen.
Salma Hayek commented about portraying the artist in the movie “Frida” (2002, directed by Julie Taymor), “For me, the most important thing is that she decided not to be a victim.
“A lot of people see the paintings and the cliches – Frida sufrida, the victim, the martyr. She was a woman who had a lot of pain in her life, but that didn’t stop her from having this wonderful love affair with life.”
Kahlo commented, “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”
Related post: Nurturing creativity in solitude.
In her article Creativity, the Arts, and Madness, Maureen Neihart, Psy.D. says, “A basic premise of the expressive therapies (e.g. art, music, and dance therapy, etc.) is that writing, composing, or drawing, etc., is a means to self-understanding, emotional stability and resolution of conflict.
“Creativity provides a way to structure or reframe pain.”
So do we need to suffer to be creative?
Musician Sting was asked about this in the documentary All We Are Saying: “Do I have to be in pain to write?
“I thought so, as most of my contemporaries did; you had to be the struggling artist, the tortured, painful, poetic wreck.
“I tried that for a while, and to a certain extent that was successful.
“I was ‘The King of Pain’ after all. I only know that people who are getting into this archetype of the tortured poet end up really torturing themselves to death.
“And I’m thinking, well, I would just like to be happy,” he continues.
“I’d like to do my work, and be a happy man.
“I’ve got enough memories of pain, of dysfunctional living, a reservoir to last me the rest of my life, so I don’t really need to manufacture that kind of life to be creative.
“Songwriting is every moment of your life, so if you’ve committed yourself to your art, you don’t need to go back.”
[Also see his memoir Broken Music]
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Actor Maggie Gyllenhaal has also addressed the stereotype.
In an NPR radio interview about her film “Sherrybaby” she admits she wasn’t very open to having creative discussions with the director, on account of the closed-down personality of her character, and she added, “I’m not someone who believes ‘The more tempestuous the better; if we have a really horrible time, that will somehow lead to great work.’
“I don’t think that. I would much rather have a collaborative, trusting, good relationship with the people I’m working with.”
But the suffering of anxiety and depression has historically – especially before better treatment – afflicted writers and other artists.
Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison notes in her book “Touched with Fire” that the majority of people suffering from a mood disorder “do not possess extraordinary imagination, and most accomplished artists do not suffer from recurring mood swings.”
She writes, “To assume, then, that such diseases usually promote artistic talent wrongly reinforces simplistic notions of the ‘mad genius.’
“But, it seems that these diseases can sometimes enhance or otherwise contribute to creativity in some people.
“Biographical studies of earlier generations of artists and writers also show consistently high rates of suicide, depression and manic-depression.”
[Quotes are from my article Creativity and Depression.]
Actor, producer, and writer Cynthia Brian says in her book Be the Star You Are!, “What I have learned is that pain, suffering, emptiness, and loneliness are an important part of the human experience. Sorrow and pain make us want to contract and withdraw, not expand and excel.”
Video: “Happy Talk: Sharon Salzberg + Josh Melnick (excerpt)”
“Can you be happy and still create great art? Or can meaningful art only come from angst?
Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg addresses this question from artist Josh Melnick…” One of her books: “Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace”.
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Creating depends on how open we can allow ourselves to be to both our inner and outer lives, and on our capacity to stay emotionally balanced, not tortured.
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More resources
Learn how to understand and heal from trauma.
This page includes a summit, books, courses and other material based on neuroscience research, body-based therapies, mindfulness and meditation, and other therapy approaches.
Agitation or Not – Eric Maisel on Calm and Creativity > His related book: Mastering Creative Anxiety
Creative People, Trauma and Mental Health
Article: Madness and creativity: do we need to be crazy? – The mythology of the mad artist continues in various forms, supported to some extent by research.
– One of many quotes: Cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman comments: “I do believe that If the mental processes associated with psychosis were evaporated entirely from this world, art would suck.
“But so would a lot of other things that require imagination. Too much psychosis and one is at high risk of going mad. But everyone engages in psychosis-related thought any time they use their imagination.”
Emotional Health Resources
Meditation programs, biofeedback devices, stress relief products
Vimeo – Emotional Health video collection
YouTube / Mental Health – Emotional Health videos
Facebook / Emotional Health and Creativity videos
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to enhance creativity and personal development.”
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