106. Foundations of your Life

Transcript

“Feminism is not about making women strong. Women are already strong. It's about changing the way the world perceives that strength.” This quote from Jameela Jamil starts us off. 

Welcome to the modern creative woman. I am so delighted you are here on this audio creativity journey. Have you ever considered your personal foundation? When you think of a foundation, it's about the house. And if you've ever watched a design show on TV, or you've ever looked at the repairs that someone might do when they're planning to move into a new home. It starts with the foundation zero. People skip the foundation problems and just decide they will paint and add wallpaper. The contractors will understand that with a broken foundation, the house will not last, the upgrades will not be well maintained and the whole thing is at risk of collapse. When you think about your own foundations, it's essential to reflect on what matters most to you. What are your core values and how will you integrate your core values and your foundation into your life on a day to day basis? The foundation is often something we have and we forget about. 

It's not very often that we think about the foundation of the streets we walk on, or the buildings we walk into. However, we think about them a lot. When they're unattended, they're collapsing. This episode is all about paying attention on purpose with self-compassion to your guiding principles, your philosophical foundations, your purpose in life. And sometimes, actually many times, we need foundation updates and upgrades as we grow older, as things change around us and as we discover our old ways of thinking and behaving aren't working anymore, we always need foundational upgrades around our values depending on what's most important to us at any given point in time in our life. If you're not a parent, parenting is not important. If you become a parent, it becomes the most important thing. If you're not in school, your education might look different, but education is always at the top of my list. I'm always wanting to learn, and I can make that happen in a whole variety of ways, as can you. That is going to school and educating yourself. From reliable sources, there's zero reason why you're stuck with the same values. I had a value when I was in school to, you know, take my classes, write my papers, show up, be present. But now my education looks different. It's much more about reading, writing, attending conferences and workshops. Education changes, but my value has stayed the same. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. Your foundations started probably generations and generations ago. Your family foundation is a long history of experiences from the people who came before you. Carl Jung writes about a collective human unconscious that would be kind of going all the way back, but the generations of our families that have a huge influence on us, who we become in our personality, the problems we face, the solutions that we have to our problems, and the strategies that we use to be resilient and survive. Those are passed down to us. And sometimes we like those strategies, and sometimes we don't like those strategies, and we have to shift to find new ones. Another type of foundation are your early childhood foundations. And in the first 5 or 6 years of life we learn how to attach to others. We learn so much about relationships. If people are safe when we're a child, we develop secure attachments. But if there are inconsistencies, we have different ways of attaching to protect ourselves and feel safe. And many people struggle with their ability to attach to others. They might have a reactive attachment, a disorganized attachment, an insecure attachment to others. These are, of course, foundational, and yet they are possible to overcome. And the more we work on our insights around relationships, the better we get at them. Art is so powerful here. Depicting our family relationships is one of those art therapy tools that gets straight to the heart of the matter. Images of family can reveal to the person, drawing them all kinds of ways that perhaps they did not perceive safety, or the ways that they aligned with certain members of their family. It reveals both the strengths and the struggles of our upbringing. Another layer that's very relevant are the philosophical foundations, and these are the beliefs and attitudes and cultural mores that we grow up with. And they come to us through our family, but they're delivered through society. So societal expectations about women would fall in here. Beliefs about race and culture and class and ability get filtered in through society, and we learn them initially from our parents, and later on we learn them out in the world. Expectations about what women's bodies are supposed to look like are filtered from society, through our parents, through magazines, television. Who gets shown what images are valued? What is the current standard of beauty? All of those play a huge impact on us. Many women struggle with looking at other women and. Finding someone else's beauty to be an excuse to beat themselves up. There is a sense of somehow there's a beauty Olympics and people compete or they don't compete. And we become narcissistic, injured sometimes by looking at other people who have an aesthetic that we admire, and then we use that to beat ourselves up for somehow seeing ourselves as lacking what someone else possesses. So the implications of these philosophical foundations being filtered to us are huge. What we learn about race and culture has a huge impact on if we feel comfortable where we are, and broadening our awareness is essential in this area. As a white woman, I want to learn so much about cultures so that I can appreciate the broader sense of people's philosophy and understand that race and culture are such an important aspect of everyone's lives, and they're so unique. The philosophical foundation of community and connection is present in some cultures and less present in others. Have you ever considered what your philosophical foundations are? And by that I mean what are the pillars that support your beliefs? It's essential that we upgrade these kinds of beliefs on a regular basis, that we don't simply swallow whole the ideas of society or our family. We have to have an examination of the beliefs we were taught, and check them out and see if they're right for us. It requires a little metabolizing of the information. It's a psychological defense, and Freud wrote about this to simply accept the beliefs that we are taught. It's a defense against anxiety. And this defense. Is normal. It's natural that we all want to ward off anxiety, but the cost of swallowing whole the idea of others is dangerous. It limits our own personal capacity to know ourselves and understand ourselves. It's also dangerous to others. We can become an unsafe person when we carry around beliefs that we just heard from others. We can become unsafe to people if we're harboring unchecked, unexamined, racist or sexist ideas. In the field of art therapy. We're constantly having to look at the foundational pillars. And there's a wonderful art therapist, Stephanie Taylor, and she writes about how the profession has to continually and critically examine the socially constructed definition of art therapy. And it requires this continual self-reflection of our work. And it's in the context and with respect to the people that we serve. The philosophical foundations of art therapy really have to intermingle and create the basis of our assumptions and practices and research, and being able to critically examine the profession and root out strategies and beliefs that are principally based on outdated ways of therapy that are rooted in racism and colonialism. That's what makes the profession alive and vibrant, evolving and constantly shifting to meet the needs of the people that we're serving as a profession. I think about our role as our therapists in and how we connect communities and institutions and agencies, as well as our individual couple family group clients. I want to give you a few examples of foundational pillars that I've related to. And then you can start to unpack your philosophical foundations and what you really want to stand for, and let your life be an example of. And I really strongly believe, and I hope to influence you a little bit on this, that we don't need to run around and tell people how we want to live our lives. We can act in ways that reveal our values, and we can live what is most important to us in our therapy. I relate to three different avenues or philosophies. And as a professional, I think about my role as a healer. And healers have played an important role in all cultures and religions, and it's an archetype. There are healers in every situation, and you can see people helping where there are problems, and you don't need to be a mental health professional to be a helper. A helper is a role that we can tap into. That allows us to offer something that a person needs, not that I deem that they need it, but that they decided that they want something, they want support. They want to grow. They want to expand their sense of self, know more about themselves. And I think if you're a healer, you have your own personal story about why you went into that role as a healer. And ideally, it gives you a lot of personal satisfaction in your work to be giving to others. And the archetype of the healer is not about seeking dependence or cultivating dependence from our clients, the same way that teachers aren't trying to cultivate dependence of the children they're teaching, they're teaching independence, and therapists are helping people learn to not rely on old ways of thinking and embrace new ways of thinking. Another foundation that fits really well for me in the field of art therapy is that of the artist. And, you know, formal training and apprentice positions are what allow someone to become an art therapist. We learn the pragmatic tools of our profession. After 12 years of high school. Four years of undergraduate school and then three years of a master's school, and then two or more years of supervision and training, then we can call ourselves our therapists. It's a lot of sort of proper formal learning, as well as these apprentice positions where we learn from other art therapists who are leaders and understand how to teach it. Art has certainly served, as you know, in this critical role throughout all of humankind. And aesthetics is a crucial part of us developing as a civilization. And arts play a huge role in discourse advancement in cultural norms. Beliefs. Art Speaks to Us invites new ways of exploring a topic or learning something. Art is a tool of critique, and I'm using that word very specifically. Criticism is part of what an artist does. It examines what is and presents possibilities for what could be, and critical thinking and critical engagement. And critical theories are how every single profession grows. Ellen Dissanayake is a cultural anthropologist, and she has asserted that the role of art is biological, and using art has these evolutionary advantages not just for individuals but for communities as we grow and expand. And really extrapolating from Dyson Aoki, we can understand that art and aesthetics, as well as people who are makers, people who are exhibiting art, people who are teaching art. These are all critical functions to the evolutionary survival Of humanity. Art is not something to regulate to the first thing we cut from a budget. It's essential in our critical thinking and our personal growth. For me and the work that I do inside the modern creative woman, we have to think about the role that art making plays in communicating our inner experiences. It really reflects the outer world as well as our inner experiences. We can use art to communicate political history, political action. Art fits here. We can think about the role of art in religion as a way to promote spiritual attunement. The branding of a company or an idea aesthetics is essential in several ways. It's about the philosophy of art and the philosophy of the aesthetic experience, the looking at art. If you look at your clothes, there's probably a logo in somewhere inside your shoe or in your label. If you drive down the street, there is the aesthetics of the street signs. Art is everywhere. And it really more importantly than just advertising, marketing or getting us to stop at an intersection. It stems from this idea of the spirit and the the content of art is spiritual. And this is from the work of James and David Hegel, the 18th century philosopher. George Hegel observes that how we contextualize things in terms of art's relationship to religion or spiritual tenets, that there are cultural and universal symbols that are necessary for us to communicate and understand the spirit in art and creative imagination stems directly from our ability to make contact with ourselves in the moment, with compassion, and go ahead and create art. And George Hegel also postulates that art has to be really considered according to historical and cultural circumstances. And that's an idea that really fits well with our postmodern beliefs. You hear me talk a lot about acceptance and commitment therapy as a contextual science. That one thought might serve us in one circumstance, but be completely detrimental in another. That context is relevant for our thoughts, for our art, and for seeking inspiration in the creative process. The third foundation that I relate to as an art therapist, in addition to healer and artist, is that of a psychotherapist, and the profession of art therapy emerged at a time when psychoanalysis was dominant in the field of psychology, and Freud's theories were considered standard mental health treatment. However, our identity is psychotherapists has thankfully evolved far beyond what the Western ideas of Freudian thinking initially offered prior to the emergence of psychology, specifically psychoanalysis. Families were responsible for supporting one another. Religious leaders participated in that role as well in supporting people through mental illness or grief or abuse, and these more family oriented, cultural oriented and community aspects of healing are still extremely relevant. It matters that we can connect with one another in our communities. By the time women come to see me as a patient of psychology, they have tried many, many things. There are many resources available for feeling better. I initially wanted to offer the modern creative woman as a way to offer support before people might want to have therapy. The modern creative woman is really about education. It's presenting for you the evidence based resources and the best practices for living a positive, happy life. Psychology is often rested on the idea of pathology and what's wrong with someone. The real significant drawback of that relates to if someone is suffering from a disease or a disease. There is also a community context, and oftentimes that community context has created the disease or disease in the first place. So someone with depression or anxiety may be going through extremely stressful life situations. And that's not the fault of the individual. But we treat the individual to help them feel better. And oftentimes they have to return to the very stressful environment that caused the anxiety in the first place. This is why community healing, family healing is so essential. It brings me back to the idea of the role of a healer, which is broad, the role of the artist also very broad. And then the role of the psychotherapist is much more narrowly focused on the individual, the family, the couple, each profession and each role that we play in life has different philosophical foundations upon which we rest. So now you know about the philosophical foundations of art therapy the healer, the artist, the psychotherapist. Have you considered the foundations upon which your professional or your educational role has rested? And I'm thinking more about how you can identify those most important areas for yourself. You heard me. Make note of the fact that psychology began with a focus on pathology, and what's wrong, where people suffering with the goal of relieving that suffering. And in the 80s there is a big shift. When Marty Seligman was the president of the American Psychological Association, and he oriented the entire profession towards positive psychology, which is not simply helping someone get rid of what ails or what hurts them. But the psychology, the science, and the research to support helping people live optimal happy lives. And this was a huge pivot that could only come about through a critical analysis of the field of psychology. The people beginning the research around positive psychology, strength based psychology, contextual sciences began to see the fundamental limitation of focusing on what's wrong. You see how that shift has made a huge difference in elevating what is available to us we know so much more about neuropsychology and what works for people. Because of this shift that we're interested in what's working, what is considered normal development, what's considered optimal development. So what are the foundational pillars of the things that you do, and focusing on what's most important to you in your professional or your educational life? How would you describe that? I want to talk more about these philosophical foundations. And so next week we will have a conversation that's focused on your personal foundations. And I'm excited to share with you my personal foundations. They are directly the pillars that I teach in the modern creative woman. So I can give you some of the evidence behind those, and also the personal reasons that I focus on what I do. Let me know how you answer the question. What are your philosophical foundations? Have a wonderful rest of your week. Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out once a month. And I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level, I want you to know you have options inside the membership. And if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the Modern Creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest @DrAmyBackos. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month. All those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at. Com. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.