133. That Quiet Drift Away From Ourselves...and How to Return

In this episode, Dr. Amy Backos takes you inside a moment every creative woman knows too well—the quiet drift away from our creativity and, in many ways, from ourselves. What begins as a blank page or stalled idea can quickly snowball into self-doubt, overwhelm, or a nervous system stuck in self-protection. But this isn’t a personal failure—it’s biology, psychology, and lived experience converging.

For 20 grounding minutes, Amy unpacks why we stop creating and how to gently navigate our way back. You’ll learn:

• Why the brain interprets vulnerability, visibility, and uncertainty as “threats,” and how that shuts down creative impulses
• The four psychological patterns that disconnect us from our art: avoidance, emotional overwhelm, perfectionism, and the freeze response
• How childhood experiences—from classroom critiques to the pressure to perform—shape our adult creative identity
• Why creativity is not a luxury, but a biological form of expression that reconnects us to our sense of self
• How art-making supports self-regulation, identity repair, and the reclaiming of your own perspective
• A simple, soothing creative practice you can do today: the Rainbow Photo Series, designed to ground you in presence and rekindle your creative spark

Amy also shares personal stories about knitting failures, adolescent art shame, the psychology of “too muchness,” and the surprising perfectionism behind choosing the “right tomato.”

You’ll walk away with practical ways to re-enter your inner world, slow your nervous system, and create not for the product—but for the reconnection.

The Modern Creative Woman is a weekly podcast for women who want to live, create, and heal with intention. If this episode resonates, please share it with a friend and leave a 5-star review—your support helps bring this work to more women.

To learn about the upcoming Modern Creative Woman x Girlboss Paris Retreat—a transformative week of art therapy, self-expression, and deep reflection—connect with Amy through the link in the show notes or on Instagram @dramybackos.

Transcript

 Last week, I was sitting at my art table in my studio, staring at a blank page for longer than I would care to admit. It wasn't that I didn't know what to create. It was that I suddenly felt kind of far away from myself and my own creativity. You might know this feeling as well. I think of it as a kind of quiet drift or a slow disconnect. The sense that the thing you once loved now feels intimidating or heavy, or kind of a burden to engage with. Can you relate? For the next 20 minutes? We're going to talk about how to make that reconnection to ourselves and really get into some of the psychology and neurobiology related to staying engaged with our lives. So welcome to the modern creative woman. This is a space where psychology, creativity and inner transformation meet. I'm Doctor Amy Bakos. I'm a licensed psychologist and an art therapist, and I've been doing this for 30 years. Thank you so much for joining me on this audio creativity journey. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. Sylvia Plath said the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt, and I find that to be completely true. If we are doubting that, we can express ourselves, that we have a right to express ourselves, or we doubt that we even know what's going on inside our mind or our environment. Being creative can be a real challenge. It takes a lot of effort to direct our mind into creating some artwork or speaking our mind. It just takes so much more effort when there are thoughts competing. Related to I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I don't know enough. My art is not going to look good. All of those thoughts take up so much space and psychic energy, and it can really crowd out our creativity. I also know self-doubt from wondering, can I manage everything on my to do list? Can I manage to get everything done before the holidays, before I have to turn my book into my publisher? That kind of self-doubt is related to time, and I've talked about that before with time anxiety. Here's the truth both psychologically and psychologically, we don't stop creating because we lack discipline or motivation. We stop because our nervous system shifts into self-protection. Our brain starts interpreting vulnerability, visibility, or uncertainty as a threat. And these are things that are absolutely necessary to move through a creative process. We have to be vulnerable about our emotions and be visible. We're creating something that is seen. And that experience of uncertainty is absolutely required in the creative process. We can't know what's going to come out from our sculpture or our painting. It simply emerges. It takes on a life of its own. There's nothing about it that is predictable. And the brain sometimes dislikes that. So our brain will shut the door. Kids stop developing in their creative process around the age of 12 or 13, and that is because they stop making art. That's why most people draw at about a 12 year old level, unless they've continued to practice. There is this embarrassment or shame, that adolescent feeling of being on stage where people are looking at you and judging you and teenagers will confuse their art product with themselves that if their art product isn't good, somehow they're not good. And those thoughts linger on into adulthood without pushing ourselves to take an art class to work with an art therapist. We end up in a space where we've lost touch with one of the most primitive and nourishing ways of self-expression, and that's making art. We move through four different areas in this kind of shutting down of our creativity. First is avoidance cycles. We want to avoid being judged. And if you're in art class in junior high, they hang your picture up on the wall and do a critique. You start learning how to assess the art so that you can make it better. But so many of us want to avoid the possibility of criticism. If you have been good at something and you're praised for being good at something, then it can really push us backwards. When we're not good at something, it can feel like not worth the effort. When I learned to knit as a kid, it was fine. There was so many things I was learning and bad at that I just had to keep practicing. And then I hadn't knit for a very long time. And after college, my mom sat down with me and we got a knitting project together and it was hard. I had forgotten a lot of it, and it wasn't that my fingers didn't remember. That was okay, but I made the same mistake over and over again. So instead of knitting a rectangular shaped scarf, I was knitting an extra stitch at the beginning of every row, and it just kept expanding into this really wobbly shape. And I kept persisting because I thought I would like to be good at this, and I remember being better at it before. And I think that really stuck with me. I was able to focus on the process and enjoy the pleasure of getting better, instead of focusing on the product where I was looking at this really wonky scarf. However, if you put it around your neck and then put your coat over it, it doesn't show how crooked it is. So I wore my products anyway. The second aspect is our emotional experience of like to muchness too many emotions. We feel stressed. We feel anxious. We're worried about the future and that everything all at once experience with our emotions is really stressful and it's completely possible to make a change. However, we can slow down, we can go for a walk, we can stretch, we can draw, we can really change our mood. It just requires a few minutes every day. Many people simply don't take the time to check in with themselves. The third aspect is perfectionism. As a protection tool, many people want things to be perfect so that they don't get yelled at as a child. If their room is clean, they'll avoid being yelled at. They clean their plate. They won't get, you know, snarky comments from their parents if they are able to have excellent grades, no one will complain. So this level of over performance in childhood can carry over into adulthood in really terrible ways. Unless we begin to unpack it, perfectionistic thinking should be used sparingly. We can make something better and better, like a perfect computer code means it will run smoothly and quickly. However, perfection does not apply to a person. We can find the perfect temperature or the perfect shade of blue. Maybe. However, it doesn't work for us. People become paralyzed. Like what will I wear? This doesn't fit perfectly. They will become paralyzed with finding the right apple at the store. Have you ever stood next to someone who is feeling every single apple or tomato? It's intense. Their level of focus could be considered, you know, seriousness. Maybe they're a chef, maybe they're cooking for someone really important and they're a little worried. But probably not. They're just at my local grocery store. That kind of perfection really slows us down. Where I have to find the perfect tomato turns into an anxious shopping experience instead of enjoying the shopping and finding a good tomato. That kind of perfectionism is paralyzing. It's what causes people to circle in indecision as well. We all want to make the quote unquote right choice. However, most things aren't so clear or cut and dried is right and wrong for choices. The final one I want to speak about is the freeze response. And you know, when animals, including people, get into a stressful situation, we will fight, we will run away, or we will freeze up. There is one more that's emotionally fawning, where we try and over take care of other people. We do too much to take care of other people, but the freeze response often stops us from creating. We look at the blank paper, think, how can I possibly make a nice piece of art and freeze up and abandon the project? And this has happened to so many people I know at age 12, they just simply quit making art. So those four areas where we can get into a lot of trouble avoidance, too many emotions all at once. Perfectionism, strategies and freezing those for problems aren't. They weren't designed as problems. They were designed as coping skills, strategies that our brain came up with in order to feel better in the moment. However, those avoidance strategies are now the problem. So instead of just having whatever our problem is, we have a problem and we've piled on all kinds of stuff on top of it, then made it probably worse than if we could just deal with the initial problem. Let's shift gears into a more creative kind of reframe for what's happening. I promise you, your creativity is not gone, and it's a biological process to express ourselves verbally and in art. It's one of the most primitive ways of expression. And we're talking about 75,000 years ago, people were drawing on rocks and cave walls. This is biological. It's a form of expression that if you're neglecting, you're missing out on this incredible part of the human experience. If you've been withholding your creative expression, it might be that it's simply waiting for creativity because it needs to be in a safe environment. You might need to have a little more safety in your mind to allow yourself to express more creatively. So when you're picking up a pencil or your paints or your camera, you're not just making art. You really are reentering yourself. You're centering yourself, and you are expressing your unique point of view. I've worked with so many women who felt invalidated in childhood and adulthood, and the more that was happening, the more they were shrinking and pulling inside of themselves and minimizing their own opinion in their own perspective. Creativity offers you something in a completely different way. Creativity is a reconnection to yourself. It's a return to your human beingness that allows you the ability to tap in and tune in to yourself and your own perspective. Creativity is also for self-regulation. Being able to slow yourself down through the creative process. Relax your body. It uses both sides of your body, especially focusing on a large piece of paper or focusing on taking photos where you take one photo, not ten, and then try and find the best one where you really are shifting your camera and going closer or farther away and trying to capture that unique, special perspective. That regulation strategy is so soothing. If you go out today and take a rainbow of pictures, one picture of something red and the next of something orange and then yellow, and you work all the way through the rainbow and you go in order one photo for each color, following the exact colors, you will find that you have slowed down enough that you're starting to self-regulate. You're directing your mind to look for specific colors, and because you can only take one photo, you'll slow down and take your time. Creativity also serves this really important function of repairing your identity. How you perceive yourself is sometimes ignored the way you think about yourself. Many women just rush through life, not taking the time to think about themselves. That self-reflective process is repairing our identity. It's integrating the parts that we like with the parts that maybe we dislike. And it allows us to become so much more accepting of who we are. This is absolutely the work of art therapy, where it's soothing, it's calming, and it's pulling aspects of the self together. The unconscious parts can become more available to us, and the idea of using your own perspective to see the world is so liberating and empowering, and especially for women who are often silenced. That kind of self-expression and ownership of our perspective is healing, and it's really thrilling to see that as a possibility for yourself. Before we wrap things up, I want to give you a little inspiration for an creative art practice that you could engage in. Please go out and do the Rainbow Photo series, and I would love to see them. If you send them to me, I would be delighted. I promise I'll respond. But you can do quick little moments. 10s is better than none, but a minute is even better if you just take a moment to notice one color around you and let your eyes linger on it. Keep your eye focused on that one color, and then take some deep breath and start to notice more and more about that color. If you're looking out the window at some trees and you see a particular shade of green, you'll notice that there is nuance in it. There's texture to it. If you're looking at a piece of art hanging on your wall, you will also see nuance and texture. If you spend just one minute having a close look at something. Another way to do this is go look at your plants. Next time you're watering them, really look to see not just water. Check the soil. Make sure it's moist enough. I'm talking about looking closely at the leaves or the flowers. That looking is a creative process, being able to see. And if you have ten minutes, then take that thing and draw it. Just take a pencil to paper while you're looking at the plant to sketch what you see. It's not about making a picture, it's about reflecting something that you're perceiving. So looking at the spikes on the plant, you could do some gentle drawing and you'll find that you are way more present. That five minute, ten minute experience can change your entire day. My plan for the day is to take my dog for a walk, and we live next to a beautiful nature preserve, and I'm going to do the photo series of Photographing the rainbow. And I really want to encourage you to do the same. It's so easy to pick up our phones for 10 minutes, but that doesn't nourish us at all and doesn't promote our creativity. So now that you know about how you can engage in a creative process, what will you create? The Modern Creative Woman is a weekly podcast for women who want to live and create and heal with real intention and creativity. If you would share this with a friend, I would be so grateful. It is exactly how we grow the podcast and start to share this information. I don't have advertisers. I do have some women who sponsor the podcast and you can find that link in the show notes. Leaving a five star review is also incredibly helpful, especially for Apple moving it up the list in terms of promoting it to other women. The modern creative woman has been partnering with Girlboss Paris every year for incredible retreats, and this coming year will be, I think, the best ever. This July, we will be spending a week in Paris with a small group of women, and it's all about art therapy. Self-expression will be looking at architecture and food and style and all the ways that you can engage in personal self-reflection. This is a transformative week, and women have reported feeling like a completely different woman. We're also teaching you how to bring this home with you. It's not just a week of holiday. This is the kind of retreat where you are learning things to take with you, to have a more enriching present life when you return home. If this appeals to you, you can drop me a message in the show notes. You can find me on Instagram at Amy Bacchus and I would love to set up a conversation with you. You can hear what the trip is about and if it might be an excellent fit for you. Enjoy your week and I am looking forward to talking with you again in the next episode.