Art Bytes: Sherri Jacobs

The field of Art Therapy has grown exponentially around the world, partly due to the pandemic. Art Therapist Sherri Jacobs explains how making art can actually reduce sadness, anger, and depression.

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There are times in our lives when we feel broken. Remember what it was like during the pandemic. That was a really scary time. The fear of the unknown, the anxiety of possibly becoming sick. The worry about loved ones whose immune systems were compromised. It was lonely. Stress, full and unprecedented time that we all shared a feeling that we were powerless. There's a growing body of research that shows there's something that can help us through times like those. The power of Creativity. Making art can actually reduce sadness, anger and depression. The field of art therapy has been around for more than 50 years, but recently it's exploded in growth all around the world, thanks in part to the pandemic. Welcome to Art Bytes, a podcast from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where we take you beyond just the art on the walls and into the stories of the artists and the ideas behind them. I'm your host, Kathleen Layton. My guest today is Sherry Jacobs, a registered art therapist and founder of Heartland Art Therapy, who's been working in this field for 25 years. Sherry received the Distinguished Service Award from the American Art Therapy Association and has coauthored a comprehensive book for Advanced Trauma Therapists. Thanks for being here, Sherry. Thank you for having me. As I mentioned, this isn't a new therapy. I mean, it's actually its own mental health profession. So do you attribute its growth to the pandemic or are there other factors at play here? Well, mental health therapist we are calling what happened during the pandemic. The second pandemic was the mental health crisis that we witnessed across the world, especially in the United States. And all therapists really filled up or still full. Art therapy was part of that. But I would say that the field of art therapy really started growing in interest as the topic of art and healing has grown. And I also want to just clarify art therapy just for your listeners. When we talk about art therapy as a profession, what we're really talking about is a person who has a graduate degree from an an accredited, accredited graduate university who has several thousand hours of clinical experience before they even call themselves an art therapist. There's a lot of misunderstanding to what we we are our own profession, as you mentioned, right. And over the years of our 50, 55 years in existence, the first several decades were mostly on how art therapy works. That's what our research was about. That's what our journals were about. That's what our conferences were exchanging ideas. We've really transitioned over the past ten or 15 years into why art therapy or right art heals and the why is really being answered by many other disciplines such as neuroimaging and bigger quantitative data pools that can really, truly show why art heals. And that in a way has put us on the map in a new way of being legitimate. Right. And actually things like that really do legitimize you to the public because it's not just here. You can color this thing and you're going to feel better. There's a science behind this and you need a lot of experience and education in order to do what you do. Absolutely. Yes. So who is struggling the most right now, do you think? If we look statistically over the past four years, probably, sadly, the gen-z population and what age group, Gen Z is roughly 15 to maybe 24, that their word is the Z XL initials for the people that are millennials and Gen Z, mostly because of the isolation and the disruption in the developmental stages of their lives. And sadly, before the pandemic, they were this generation was already struggling with a lot of anxiety and depression. And that just increased with the pandemic. Absolutely, yes. So in your private practice, you work with clients who have experienced trauma, but also trauma can take a lot of different faces. Absolutely. What do you see? So post-traumatic stress disorder and PTSD, PTSD and the definition of trauma has really changed and expanded. The trauma field has changed quite a bit over the past several decades. We used to almost rank trauma as in like a war or a natural disaster or something horrific would be ranked pretty high. And something like getting bullied at school might be ranked low. Now, we don't rank those anymore. We really look at the symptoms that people are coming with. And so a person that getting bullied at school might have the same exact same symptoms as a person that just came from a war torn place, that can be deeply disturbing. Absolutely. Yes. And we're recognizing that now. Absolutely. Which is fantastic. And so what else did you see? And so I would say I am a trauma therapist, so a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder. And I think there's a lot of misinformation out there because back in the olden days, like 25 years ago, people thought that, dear, that's when they had PTSD. They were doomed to have that for life. Right. And even if we just name what like PTSD is, post-traumatic stress disorder is a memory that cannot be controlled or a maladaptive memory, if that makes sense. And so thankfully, it's the easiest of all the mental illnesses to treat, which is new news for a lot of people. Yeah. Is it because we've learned so much about it and learned how to treat that? We've learned so much about it. Again, we have with the trauma field a lot of neuroimaging tools. We've learned a lot actually since 911 has been the catalyst into research in that field. And as an art therapist, I would say creativity and artmaking is essential in that healing process. So when you have these clients, they come in to see you. How do you approach them? How do you how do you get at what it is they're feeling and how you can treat that? a lot of people come to therapy mostly because they're feeling awful and or stuck and or miserable and looking for resolution and hoping a therapist can help them reach that place of of healing or feeling unstuck or feeling like themselves again or healed from whatever it was that happened to them or that they experienced. And again, as an art therapist, creativity is such a beautiful partner in helping in that process. Why is that? Well, what we know about how our brains work and I'm also, by the way, I'm also a marriage and family therapist. And so I've spent many years also doing just traditional talk therapy. And what we know is that when we try to access our stories and our experiences verbally, just with verbal communication, it's so difficult to do. And for many reasons. And as we're learning more about how our brains work, really our verbal hemispheres tends to be in the left side of our brain. That's not completely 100% accurate, but for the most part, the communication we're doing right now is very left brained. A lot of our stories, a lot of our experiences, a lot of our trauma tends to be housed in the right brain. And so when we ask someone who's been through something horrific or something bad or does something not so good, we ask like, what happened? People have a very hard time articulating that verbally. And what we know is a tool like artmaking or creativity or imagination or music or movement can help access those stories much faster. How does that work? How does how does the practice of drawing a picture help you access those feelings? So because we have a hard time sometimes verbalizing them. And sometimes when we think of what I said, a maladaptive memory, sometimes our memories are stored as fragments or bits or pieces and a jumble. I almost feel like people are coming in and dumping out like a 500 piece puzzle on my floor and just saying, like, this is what I'm going through. I don't know how to make sense of it. The art making can be the tool to help people slowly create a coherent narrative that might have a beginning, a middle and an end. It might help and access things that actually don't quite have words to help them look at the paper of what they just painted or drew to name that thing. So how do you know someone is a good candidate for art therapy? As an art therapist, I would say everyone is a good candidate for art therapy. Occasionally have people who are extremely resistant and they like to honor their boundaries. But most people I can usually get over their discomfort of making art. And when they do, they often are surprised and shocked at how fast they could access the story that they weren't able to articulate in previous times. And oftentimes, I'll tell my clients, like what we just accomplished in one art therapy session, we would have never gotten there with words just back and forth with verbal communication. Or it would have been a six months of a verbal therapy sessions. So they're they're not able to verbalize how it is they're feeling, but they're going to draw on a piece of paper. What do they draw? How do you direct them to access those feelings that they can't verbalize on to a piece of paper? art therapists were really trained, again, as I said, with the how. So we have many, many, many thousands of ideas in our book that we keep in our back pocket of just ideas that we might offer. And I think one important piece of that is matching the right material or art activity with the right age. Sometimes you'll see people saying that they're doing art activities or they'll provide coloring books for elderly, which I find slightly disrespectful if it's like a child's coloring book. And Crayola is so first matching the right material with the right age and the right population. And then art therapists, we have a pretty comprehensive understanding of the properties of the art materials that they can really serve in an incredible way of helping to elicit emotions or helping to contain emotions. Can you give us an example of the properties? Sure, absolutely. And we almost think of it on a continuum of like we think fast to slow or more out of control to more in control. And the more less control or the less controlled side, we would say paint or clay or something that's a little bit faster can really help people elicit emotions, especially if that person comes in and that hyper analytical that I'm fine. I don't really need to be here. Way when we know that they have some emotions to access or even if they say, I don't feel great, but I don't know what I'm doing here. Right. Right. And so something on that faster side might be helpful to help access some of those emotions. On the slower side or something more controlled, we might think of a pencil or colored pencils as a way where if a person comes in or if a person gets triggered or has a psychotic episode or gets very disregulated, or therapists actually think in real time as we're working with people to enlist the materials to help access what it is that they are, we're hoping that they can feel. And it's a very intuitive way. I think over a years and years, we intuitively just know what are the right materials. And we have usually art rooms that we're working in to access those materials. Can you talk a little bit about a client that you might have seen in the past who had some success? No names or anything, of course. Absolutely identifying. But to give us an example of how this exactly works. Sure. gosh, I could talk. they can. We stay all day so I can tell you thousands of stories. We only have until Tuesday. So. So I have thousands of stories. I'm sure you do. And I'll share one that was sort of a public planned, but I worked in a retirement center for I had one group for 17 years straight, weekly. And so one of my clients in there didn't have use of her, but two clients that didn't have use of their body from their neck down. The staff kept bringing them to my group, and they weren't able to participate because I was a painting group and I taught both of them to paint with their mouths. One of them had had a spinal cord injury and lost the ability to use her body, and much of her experience was unresolved grief and the art and painting with her mouth became the conduit for where she could express the grief she had really shut down verbally. The painting allowed her to open up and share and kind of find some some contentment in the final years of her life. The other client that I worked with was born not being able to use her body. She was born with cerebral palsy and was in her sixties and had never contemplated doing something creative like making art. And so for her, she painted for the last 15 years of her life and my groups and the transition of her experience by being able to incorporate art making, was it unlocked an ability for her to use imagination in a way that she hadn't before? First, that she started to think about from week to week what she was going to draw. And then I would say midway through her art journey, she started drawing and painting herself as she wasn't the things she longed for Walking, dancing, standing at the beach, swimming. And then eventually, the later part of her art career, she started painting herself as is in her wheelchair. And that became the most meaningful art for her. And did that what did that signal? Acceptance. Acceptance, Self-love. And because it was more of a public art group that we were doing, she was able to give her work to people, to sell her work, to show her work. And it added layers and layers of meaning and worth and being able to give in a way she couldn't before, and a way of self-reflection of of how art can actually heal. Absolutely. And it was thankfully a beautiful experience to have such a long term person to work with. And we aren't always that lucky. But I would say even the short term one time sessions, I sometimes do a lot of public art therapy. Things can be transformative where sometimes people have been doing this for so long in Kansas City, sometimes people come like, Wow, I did a mask making workshop with you in-patient psych decades ago and like, I still have the mask and it's still like something that brings a lot of meaning to me because it helped me like, unlock something. What if you are not able to find the material to help that person unlock? Do you just keep trying different approaches? Absolutely. We keep trying. And I think sometimes people might have an experience of making some art and it might not have much meaning for them in the session, but when they take it home, it might bring on some more meaning. So I've heard about hyperfocus, and I know you're familiar with these terms. These are all new to me, but this is what you do. Hyperfocus is when our brains change from beta, which is very quick moving, which is normal waking life. We're both on beta waves right now to slower alpha or theta waves. That's how we feel when we're on the edge of sleep or when we're daydreaming, sort of floating there. So is that flow what you're trying to achieve with the clients that you see? a flow state, which is sort of a popular term that came around in the past 20 years or so, I would say absolutely. We're trying to achieve those flow states. And in the art therapy field, we spent many decades debating whether we were doing art, psychotherapy or art as therapy. And I would say, yes, we are achieving flow. States are helping people find those flow states in both realms. My definition, the best definition I had recently for a flow state is effortless. Attention. I like that. Yeah. And what we know I'm going to go back to the brain is that when we get to bypass, I'm holding my hand on my forehead. When we get to bypass this analytical executive functioning part of our brain that's really when we can achieve a flow state. And so for the art psychotherapy, when we're doing art to help conjure up information, to help a person gain insight, insight really is the goal in a some flow states the moments that happen. And we know that we can access it better through insight rather than analysis. And so when we quiet down that that upper part of our brain, that's very analysis based, we can achieve that. The art can help get to that state and the art can help access and problem solve for the art as therapy. That also would be a flow state, because if something like the dementia crowd that I that many of us work with, we're really only working in present tense for them. We've eliminated past and future and we're just helping stimulate that moment in time. Is it a flow state? Possibly because we're stimulating that with music or movement or art or something to enhance that? Would we call that effortless, intentional attention? Possibly because we are stimulating people that might have been rolled into a session almost catatonic, and they're being woken up with the creative intervention. So I would call both of those flow states. Well, how they entice. So the physical change that we undergo when we visit, say, an art museum is well documented. I mean, it has a calming effect. The heart rate goes down, perspiration rate goes down. And in Canada, visiting an art museum is actually prescribed for patients who are stressed. So are we heading in that direction in this country with all of these new things that you're talking about in the new research that shows how helpful art therapy is? The answer's yes. I'm an optimist, so I am all about this. And this is radical new way of thinking. And it's also very practical, the way that it is sort of unfolding in the United States. There's a group of people at Johns Hopkins that created a whole field called neuro esthetics, a way beautiful places matter, why our environments matter. And they're working at the policy level, at the research level. They have a new book out called Your Brain on Art. Really recommended. I have read it. It's an excellent book. Consolidating all of the current research. And their optimistic view is that, yes, in the United States, we will be dosing art activities or prescription art. It sounds radical, but washing your hands sounded radical like 500 years ago. People are against it. So it feels like as that starting to happen around the world, it even changes the roles of what places like museums are to communities or community centers or music halls or places where we can have creative experiences in lists them, and really natural organic ways of becoming helpers in a mental health crisis that we're in. So not everybody is experiencing the severe trauma that you've been talking about that your clients, a lot of them have experienced. A lot of us, though, feel stressed at certain points, of course. So how can we intentionally incorporate art into our self-care regimen or create? Well, I often find many people I come across have a fallacy that they don't feel they're creative because they can't draw or paint and they've cast off the idea that they are can engage in any kind of creative thing. And they say, I'm not creative, so I can't do art therapy or I'm not creative, so I don't have any concept of doing that. Is self-care. I like to tell my people who are self-proclaimed left brain people that like even creating an Excel spreadsheet is an incredibly creative act. It requires putting together pieces to visually map out something profound. And so just that's the first hurdle is opening up that idea that being a Homo sapiens means we are inherently creative, all of us. And the second pieces in this time of uncertainty, this time period, I would say starting with the pandemic, where uncertainty crept in in a gigantic way for many people. I found that when we can manipulate time and space for them to do a smaller creative activity that has a tidy ending, it can be extremely helpful and feel good. So first I would say get off the screens for a few minutes to engage in something. And I would say something as simple as baking cookies or planting a plant or a very small activity. And like the proliferation of coloring books for adults, people are amazed by that phenomenon. But I would say that's one of those simple acts that people are like, I couldn't control anything in the world when the pandemic was going to end. But I could look at this coloring page, draw a color in the flower. It had an ending, and for some reason I feel better. And so those tidy endings can manipulate our surroundings in a way to offer a creative act, a feeling of accomplishment, feeling of accomplishment, of feeling, of doing, of making, or something like baking cookies, where we're taking several different elements, combining them together to create something new. That is the basis of what creativity is. And there's a beginning and end, a beginning as this process that seems insurmountable and like actually an Excel spreadsheet is to me insurmountable. But that's a whole other story. And so many of us in our professional lives are just stuck in this in-between place that we're in projects that have long, long endings far out. Well, you know, art therapy is certainly becoming much more mainstream, which is why we're talking about it now. I heard that Mattel has assigned 250 professions to the Barbie doll. Barbie's huge this year, as you know. And now there is an art therapist, Barbie, that isn't that the newest Barbie to come out? Yeah. What did you tell me this when you received that news? Huge, monumental moment for our therapist, because we've mostly been, like, hiding under the radar, off the radar, working in institutions for the past 50 years. Mattel had 200 and has 250 professions. They had never offered a mental health profession amongst those 250 professions and the company decided, like, what would a little girl want to be or what would a child maybe what might be an appealing health mental health profession for them? And they settled on an art therapist. They came to our national organization to make sure they had the language degree, to make sure that they had the the doll and the accessories. Right. Many of us who are in private practice, this particular Barbie looks a little bit like a mix of about ten of us across North America, myself included. And so we were very happy and very surprised and delighted by this pop culture thing. So I like the continuum that's that's happening here and the momentum that you're getting. So art can heal us. Is that what you would say? Absolutely. I would say art does heals. Art can heals, does heals. I, I do this all day, every day. My colleagues would agree with this. And now we have the evidence to prove it. So the Y is really proliferating right now? Yes. Art does heal. I love it. I love it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. I really appreciate it. You've been listening to Art Bytes, a podcast from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I'm Kathleen Layton. See you next time.