The Arts for Youth Trauma: An Answer to the Cry of Our Time

Interview with Bill Rossi, 2009

Digging in to look for the life within us can bring about a release and transformation of the pain. That’s where the therapy is.

When you use creativity, you can cut below the layers to get to the survival mechanism and creative spirit. If you hit that place right it’s like natural energy – healing will start to take place.

An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable emotional disorder in a given year while 9-13 percent of children ages 9-17 have a ‘serious emotional disturbance with substantial functional impairment’ (www.nimh.nih.gov).

No matter what you perceive to be the cause of the continuing decline of America’s emotional well-being, it’s clear that we need to begin to deal with it.

How? We don’t have to look too far for ways to turn the tide — in fact, there’s a readily available antidote that was specifically developed for survival in dark times, music that we now call Blues and Jazz.

In understanding Blues and Jazz we find a powerful tool for dealing with the many challenges life gives us. It has the power of hope and the power to transform circumstance so life with spirit will somehow prevail.

Following is an interview with Bill Rossi, author of Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed and creator of the educational and therapeutic approach that harnesses that power.

MHR: How do the Blues speak to the suffering of today, and how can it be therapeutic?

BR: The Blues grew out of the intolerable conditions of being enslaved. So what did slaves do with those intense feelings of pain and depression, how did they find a way to relieve them? They dug in to find a way to deal with their circumstance.

They started with field hollers, call and response to each other, singing notes they knew from common scales. Then, to better express their pain and condition they bent and lowered notes, producing a feeling of tension. These notes became known as the Blues notes.

Blues notes are the expression of a sadness or pain but at the same time make you feel better – the expression leads to release and creative use of this leads to a transformation.

The color blue represents the Blues as sadness, or feeling down. These notes eventually became a part of what is known as the Blues scale.

As the notes were developed they took the shape of longer phrases that started to tell stories. So the Blues went from words “I’m sad” to explaining why they were sad. Singing about their pain brought a feeling of release because along with the rhythm they were feeling the life inside themselves. So although there was an almost intolerable feeling on the outside, they sustained their existence by getting in touch with a deep sound and rhythm, the life pulse, inside themselves.

And then they generated that life and they kept themselves generated by looking for … for what? We are all conditioned to look outside ourselves for relief from the human condition but when there’s no life without, and it’s just an oppressive painful thing, you have no place else to go but in. And digging in to look for the life within us and getting in touch with it brings about a release and transformation of the pain.

MHR: How can this be therapeutic today?

BR: Creativity is life.

So it starts growing, right? You’re enlivening it, so it starts to have its own life, a power inside you. It starts to overtake the outside circumstance. So at the moment anyway, while you’re expressing and doing the music, the music becomes larger so it can become competitive with the outer circumstances. This causes relief and causes you be able to maintain and grow in life.

This can be such a powerful therapy because it grows from a very primal source of creativity that’s inherent within human beings. When you have no place to go to escape the pain, oppression, trauma, you need to go deep inside yourself. That is where there’s creativity, life. It’s a God-given place.

The musical expression of the slaves became a language. Blues and Jazz are a universal language because they come out of a primal human condition which is that every human being suffers somehow. So this music talks directly to that place.

There are many ways of expressing that condition, from the field holler to Rock and Roll to very sophisticated forms of Jazz like Duke Ellington’s. That’s why the Blues has affected so many different forms of music, because it expresses a basic human condition that underlies everything.

The purpose of art is to express a basic human condition, whatever that might be. Sadness, happiness, anger, injustice, celebration. But art has to be grounded in a real life experience. No matter how much sophistication or intelligence you implement you have to remain with a gut level, real experience; if you leave that and begin to intellectualize it the art no longer has that quality.

When you listen to the best musicians such as an Ellington or Coltrane, despite their high level of sophistication they never leave the real gut life experience. All of their music is built on that foundation, and that foundation is always being developed because as the tree grows the foundation has to also grow.

All good art also express a basic life force. Man is born with a sense of survival so no matter what the circumstance is, the instinct to survive is there. Man’s creativity is at that core. When you’re looking for your survival and there’s no other outward means, you go to the absolute core of the survival mechanism. That’s where the Blues resides – it evolved from the field hollers and never left its core. That’s why it’s so powerful.

That’s why it’s such an effective therapeutic intervention. Whereas many therapies treat the symptoms, when you use creativity you can cut below the layers to get to the survival mechanism and creative spirit. If you hit that place right it’s like natural energy – healing starts to take place.

You need to take it creatively deep enough so that a person who has experienced trauma, for example, will also experience something that is deeply upbeat. If a person re-experiences past challenges or trauma without experiencing something upbeat at the same time, they will go out of balance.

MHR: You have to have a positive place to go?

BR: Yes. You have to release the trauma or challenge or it will explode, but it has to be a therapeutic release. You’ve got to go to a creative place. You have to have goodness to go to, to direct yourself towards, so you release it in a good way. Otherwise you’re just out of control with your emotions and you will probably hurt yourself or other people.

Creativity needs to always be a component of anything therapeutic. In our music lessons we begin to get empathetic to what the student’s feeling, where their rhythm is in them, what their state is. Then we can start to play things that relate to where they are rhythmically or melodically, all the while trying different things to see what they respond to and what’s resonating with them. Then we exploit those ideas.

MHR: What do you mean?

BR: We get them in a groove, a cycle or repetition to feel the rhythm, and we get them to feel the notes in the rhythm, so the two are going together. That begins to get into their body, and then their ear, and then it gets them into that creative place inside them. Then you start to do call and response, and develop a phrase, a sentence out of that, and build from there. You and the student venture together from there and just keep growing it.

MHR: So they’re communicating their pain from a deep, honest place and going somewhere.

BR: They’re releasing, and it feels good to them because they’re releasing it in a creative way, in a way that makes sense to something very deep and primal in them, and that’s home – that’s like home base in a way, it’s mother earth, the life force in them. That’s a beautiful place to anybody. So then as you grow it, step by step, you stay empathetic so you grow it from where they are, just like the music grew.

Then you start to add more rhythms, more harmony, and out comes a phrase, then a sentence, then 4 bars, then 8, and then a whole complete thought in the 12 bar Blues or 8 bar form. From there you can find all kinds of ways to vary it – rhythmically, melodically, ways you can color it which give you articulation. You’re articulating more and more of what you’re feeling, you’re continuing to release, and that grows into creativity.

Then that becomes a language, just like we’re talking. And because it’s deep it hits those universal conditions and experiences, and this sharing of those conditions and experiences makes people feel good. Because it’s improvisational music it also gives choices about ways of building on the story, so it leads to a feeling of personal freedom.

MHR: That’s why you see the Blues and Jazz as an answer to the cry of today.

BR: Yes. All music with these qualities is a dynamic expression of the meaning of being human. It was one of the only means available under the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and racism, and this creative orientation is one that could be very helpful today.

Being human inherently means expressing and striving for fulfillment and growth; being human means being creative. We need to pay attention to that.

Music and the other arts can alleviate suffering through truthful yet graceful expression, can open up a person to feel alive and relevant as a human being, can stimulate insight and understandings of one’s individual potential towards life’s higher purpose, and can bring people together for a higher degree of communal support, all of which can help people rise above their circumstances.

The Blues are a particularly potent way to state a fact or a feeling, positively release an emotion, and create a good feeling that can bring about hope and a way to something higher. Many Americans are suffering right now; the Blues can help.

Vulnerable Youth: Creativity Transforms Trauma

Creativity transforms trauma. Since trauma creates tension that often feels unbearable, people have no choice but to find a release. A hallmark feature of trauma and other emotional disorders is the fight-or-flight syndrome, brought about by the intense feeling of being trapped. Another is helplessness leading to hopelessness.

People suffering from serious emotional disorders need intense, positive outlets for releasing and channeling overwhelming feelings such as these. Unfortunately, positive outlets are typically limited, especially on a consistent basis, so these emotions are usually expressed and energy released in negative and destructive ways.

Creative self-expression brings release

A potent answer lies in the artistic mediums whose very essence is communication. Being able to express the truth, however difficult, is an important part of healing and finding a new direction. The arts allow for many different, positive ways of releasing and expressing without the stigma or concern of what is the right or wrong way to feel.

In fact, the more difficult it is to say the words about what hurt them, the more important it is to have other ways for children to express themselves and get their story told. – Joseph Benamati [Joseph Benamati, CSW, Parsons Child Trauma Study Center, Albany, NY.]

It is important to be in touch with all feelings and somehow express and communicate them, whether it is to oneself or to others. The arts can be very effective and in many cases may be necessary to help people tap into the real persons they are behind their defensiveness. Once they have done this and confronted difficult feelings they can reach through to their positive ones.

‘Nice’ Pictures?

Of course, that expression can be uncomfortable for everyone involved. I remember a meeting of child care workers and artists in which we were discussing an upcoming photography unit. As we began to discuss the range of emotional responses the students might experience during the classes and how to guide them, some of the child care workers became visibly nervous.

One of them expressed this discomfort by asking if they couldn’t just encourage the students to take nice pictures. We encounter this reaction fairly frequently, but it’s self-sabotaging. Any attempt to avoid, divert, or deny feelings – to specifically disallow people to express from an area that is meaningful and come to terms with what is really going on within themselves—will only lead to more difficulty . . . for everyone.

It’s good for people in trouble to be around artists. You unravel a bit when you make art—it’s like creating order out of chaos to make something unique. We artists have something in common with troubled kids. We also understand rage . . . artists aren’t afraid of rage. – Katheryn Charbonneau, teacher

Creativity transforms trauma by rising above

Expression that enables people to find meaningful resources within themselves provides a way to transcend difficulty. This can open the way towards normalcy and good emotional health. A person who is engrossed in playing music, painting a picture, or dancing, for example, can travel to another world where stress is alleviated, imagination is stimulated, good feeling is produced and new areas are discovered within –all-important ground where a person’s innate intelligence will thrive and where painful feelings can be processed and channeled. Strength and hope also have residence there.

Sam wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing without this arts program. It helps students step outside of the box, by which I mean go outside of routine ways of approaching situations so they can experience new horizons. This process and experience has helped Sam recognize that he has an appealing future, a future with possibilities that are meaningful and productive. Social Worker

Trauma as the spur for action

Emotional turmoil can be a great creative spur. George Bernard Shaw wrote, If you can’t get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance. Many artists, both professional and amateur, will attest that their involvement with the arts is necessary for their very survival because it gives them control and meaning in their lives, a reason for being, and an expression that keeps them going. The love of doing and creating is no small part of this, for where there is love there is healing. The following personal life experience of one of our former teachers provides a case in point.

Music is what I turned to: it was a lifeline to me. As a child it was a place I could go – I could play music and make sense of the world to a certain extent. I could find comfort there, I could find progression there. It helped me understand about going beyond certain feelings that I had about myself, or at least cope with certain traps that I might have felt in my environment. So it was important just to be involved in music whether it meant I was to be a professional musician or not. I could feel it in both my emotional state, my feelings, and I could feel it in my intellectual state. It made a lot of difficult feelings at least tolerable for me at that time.

And then as I grew I met other musicians. I found that this was a theme, and the creative process, whether it was music or art, had the same effects on other people. We’d share that with each other. As I got more involved in the teaching aspect I could clearly see how important involvement in the creative process was, not just for youth, but for anybody. I could see my students’ need for expression and how that could carry over. It could make them feel stronger and happier in other things, especially with kids who had more obvious difficulties. It’s something that I’ve grown with all my life.

Read Bill Rossi’s Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more.

Escalating Violence in our Village

April 2013

I wanted to begin this piece by saying, “In the wake of the Newtown shooting,” but it doesn’t seem appropriate. This morning I read about a shooting near Seattle killing five people. A week ago, a bombing at the Boston Marathon stunned the nation and was quickly followed by a shoot-out killing officer and offender alike. Before these events, there was the shooting in Aurora, Colorado. There was the shooting in Tucson, Arizona. There was Virginia Tech. There was Columbine. In our society, we are always in the wake. More aptly, we attend an ongoing wake, mourning those we’ve lost and fearing what may come next.

Of course we are afraid. We’ve watched innocent lives ended in seconds from violence we can’t understand. The immediacy of a gunshot is jarring, and gun control becomes the obvious subject of debate in our homes, our communities, and our government. It’s certainly a worthwhile discussion. The availability of guns in our country is an issue that absolutely needs to be addressed, but in the context of these tragedies, a deeper issue is denied the attention it deserves. Guns are the means by which so much violence is exacted, but that fact can do nothing on its own. The better question is: Why is this violence occurring, and how can we help prevent our children from growing into those who would incite it?

How Can We Help Our Children?

Violence is merely a symptom of a much deeper disease, one that affects not only shooters and victims but countless others.

How much does a person endure before deciding to commit atrocity? It’s a matter of mental health, and, equally importantly, it’s a matter of community health. The phrase, “It takes a village,” is one that we hear with nauseating frequency for a nation so far removed from this ideal. We fall very far short of that mark. By relying exclusively on the relatively impersonal public education system to identify and correct mental health problems in at-risk youth, we create massive cracks for our children to fall through. There are too many children and too few teachers to expect these things to simply sort themselves out. It does indeed take a village, and that means we need to be one.

I do not know the specific events and ideas that led to any individual’s choice to take another life. I do know that this kind of violence is the final scream of frustration from a person who doesn’t feel their voice has been heard. It seems far too easy to say that the solution may simply be to listen, but if we listen well, and listen from the beginning, I think the incidence of these tragedies could decrease significantly. Violence is merely a symptom of a much deeper disease, one that affects not only shooters and victims but countless other people in our country, many of whom go without any attention, not because they don’t need it but because they don’t know how to express their need.

Remedies Do Exist. Are We Looking?

Curing mental illness is as improbable as eradicating guns from our society, but addressing it with compassion and understanding from the outset allows a person to feel supported and engaged in their life and community. Finding positive ways for young people to express their whole selves, even the dark parts, is essential in creating an encouraging, inclusive, more peaceful environment. If a person feels heard and connected, they are far less likely to see themselves as “other” or their peers as “enemy.” They are less likely to take drastic action. In fact, supportive programs like Youth Advancement through Music & Arts (YATMA) don’t just help to pacify things, but they create the space for an at-risk child to grow, achieve, and contribute in ways we tend not to imagine for those who struggle with mental health issues.

The Power of the Arts

YATMA is moving to Danbury, CT in early May. Its presence in the community will provide a creative outlet for young people to deal with the trauma they’ve experienced in their lives. YATMA’s one-on-one mentoring approach builds skill and confidence in the arts, and it inevitably extends to collaborative efforts between students, their peers, and neighbors. It’s very difficult to describe the weighty effect that well-implemented arts programs can have. I’ve not only seen young people improve their mental health, communication skills, and academic performance through work with the Rossi method, but I’ve seen adults transform from hesitant event attendees to powerful community leaders and facilitators of the arts.

It’s never too late to reduce risk for individuals, but it does take a village. If we want change, we need to be that village, welcoming, supporting, and following the example of organizations like YATMA, which offer simple yet profound solutions to unheard voices.

This post was published in 2013. YATMA, which was the ground in which Bill Rossi and like-minded artists and musicians served over 2,500 vulnerable youth and adults, has now closed. Its success lives on in the strength and creativity of its former students.