Grief: How Art Therapy Can Help
Grief and loss are profoundly personal experiences that can leave us feeling isolated, overwhelmed, and adrift. Grief “often includes physiological distress, separation anxiety, confusion, yearning, obsessive dwelling on the past, and apprehension about the future. Intense grief can become life-threatening through disruption of the immune system, self-neglect, and suicidal thoughts” (American Psychological Association, 2018).
Grief is one of those experiences that comes in many forms and can send us into a cycle of many different emotions. Humans can experience grief not only from the loss of a loved one, but also the loss of a pet, loss of a previous identity, a breakup, a betrayal, a move, and more. It can encompass the loss of anything important in your life, even if that person/place/thing isn’t permanently gone from this earth. Traditional methods of coping often focus on verbal expression and cognitive understanding, however art therapy can offer a unique and transformative way to process grief and find healing.
Cycle of Grief
One of the things I like to talk to people about as an art therapist and psychotherapist when coping with grief and loss is the cycle or stages of grief. The five stages of grief model was developed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. It was developed to describe people with terminal illness facing their own deaths but has been adapted as a way of thinking about grief overall. These stages encompass:
Denial: feeling numb and carrying on as if nothing has happened. Even if we know someone has died it can be hard to believe they are not coming back. It can also be common to feel their presence.
Anger: This is a very natural emotion to feel after someone dies. Anger can come in many forms and can be directed at the person who has died, ourselves for things we did or didn’t do before their death, or close friends or family members.
Bargaining: This is when we start to make deals with ourselves or a higher figure if we are religious. For example, if we act a certain way or do a certain thing we will feel better. It can also consist of asking a lot of “what if” questions and wishing we could go back and change things with the hope of a different result.
Depression: This emotion is often highly associated with grief and can be painful, intense, and can come in waves or many months or years.
Acceptance: Gradually, most people find that pain eases and they can find acceptance for what has happened. This doesn’t mean we are “getting over” the loss but we are learning to live again and keeping their memory alive and close.
Although these are labeled as stages/cycles I want to emphasize that there is no correct order in which these emotions happen. I like to think of it as a scribble and will sometimes even have my clients draw it out as such. We can move back and forth from one thing to another and there is no timeline, which can sometimes make things challenging. There is also no one right way to experience grief, some people demonstrate considerable resilience, others face temporary impairment, and others find themselves stuck in a state of intense emotion. I think that psychoeducation plays an important role when processing grief since many people experience shame for their feelings and understanding more can give depth and validity to their experiences.
Using Art to Cope with Grief
Using art therapy as theory can help aid in coping and understanding grief and its cycle. Cathy Malchiodi, an expressive arts therapist best known for her work on trauma-informed treatment in expressive art therapy, noted that therapeutic art making served four purposes. These four purposes also echo the dual-process model which is a theoretical model that describes how people cope with loss by alternating between two types of responses: loss-oriented and restoration-oriented. Cathy’s four purposes include confronting mortality, meaning making, crisis resolution, and authentic emotional expression, with meaning making being especially important and a leading mechanism of change which art therapy does extremely well. The spontaneous creation of art, poetry, and performance offers a way to memorialize the relationship with the deceased and make meaning out of life. Overall, visual arts such as drawing, painting, photography, clay, and more have been common in grief therapy, specifically with the creation of mandalas, scrapbooks, and thematic collages.
In my own work with clients, using the four purposes of therapeutic art making, there are some specific forms of art making I like to bring to the space that the client can then take the lead on including identity/grief quilts, memory book or box, kintsugi, altered books, letter to deceased embroidery pieces, paintings, and more.
Identity/Grief Quilt: using the clothes/other reminders of the deceased to make a quilt. This can allow for meaning making by creating something new out of important items that might be hard to give away. The quilt can then be used for comfort as the client is grieving or can be displayed or hung up. It can also be put away if the client is needing to compartmentalize.
Memory Book: making a scrapbook of photos, letters, and tokens to remember the deceased. This allows the client to confront mortality while also allowing them to create a remembrance piece they can access anytime but also put away on a shelf.
Memory Box: similar to the book but finding any container, decorating it, and adding tokens/memorabilia to the box that remind the client of the deceased. You can add candies, essential oils, photos, etc, anything that reminds the client of kind memories.
Kintsugi: The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. This can help the client process their own emotional expression as they make meaning out of repairing something that feels broken and making it new and beautiful.
Altered Books: can be similar or different to memory books. Using an old book to explore the theme and feelings associated with grief. Paste in photos, create blackout poetry, create journal entries, etc.
Letter to the Deceased: take some time to write a letter to the deceased and express everything you wish you could tell them. You can continue to do this over time as a way to update them on your life. You can put the letters in envelopes and stash them away. This can help process any emotions the client might be feeling towards the deceased or themselves.
Embroidery Piece: This can be good if the client is looking for something to display. Create an embroidery piece dedicated to the deceased: their favorite place, animal, things they enjoyed, etc.
As the client and therapist create art together the client will be able to process their grief in many different forms. Art making can lead to conversation about memories, but can also be meditative and allow the client to sit with their emotions and truly feel them. Overall art therapy can allow one to move through the cycle and towards healing while also providing new meanings and mementos.
