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.

Group Mentoring for Positive Youth Development

Often thought of as a one-on-one experience, mentoring is really a way of being with students. A mentoring orientation is also very effective within a group experience, because the group offers opportunities not otherwise available.

Group Mentoring exposes prejudices in a safe environment

Success in group communications gives students confidence in assuming responsibility for their actions, and when they’re given opportunities to understand their actions they can learn that their actions can bring negative as well as positive responses. These are avenues of learning in which students and mentors/teachers can explore many choices before a real problem develops.

When we help students understand how their actions (and inactions) affect others, we provide a pathway that leads them to become less prejudiced, and to the realization that we all have very similar feelings and that everyone wants their feelings respected, not hurt.

Viewing divisive attitudes and behaviors as misunderstandings provides us with a positive way to address them. Misunderstandings and mistakes are part of the process of growing and learning. When we understand prejudice or aggression as a mistake stemming from ignorance, we can emphasize the ability to change. Students will learn through new perspectives and better choices.

Teaching that prejudice is simply ignorance

Having this kind of freedom draws people out and allows them to discover their own abilities, their own power. The key to so much of this growth is that students experience it within a well-guided group and obtain a deep understanding so these things become willingly internalized.

Mentors can see (and explain) what’s going on

Another area worth careful consideration is the misperceiving or misinterpreting of others’ words and actions. We can show students, for example, how we often take others’ anxieties personally where that might not be appropriate.

• People often feel anger for one person but take it out on another
• A person who is experiencing loss often becomes upset with other people
• People blame other people for their own insecurity.

Additional awareness and skills that can be taught and gained in a group include:

• Listening without interrupting
• Not putting oneself above another person
• Acting with fairness and empathy instead of dominating or imposing ourselves.

Learning the art of give-and-take after school

The workings of healthy group dynamics become clear when viewed through the lens of playing music in an ensemble. In order to make good music in a group you have to have confidence in your abilities and listen to what’s going on around you so your response will be one of give and take. When you are able to most freely express yourself and listen to and appreciate the others in the ensemble, you can respond to them appropriately, as in a good conversation.

This interaction of give and take, or hearing and responding, will produce a third dynamic which in its best sense produces the music. This dynamic of solidarity or harmony is a universal feeling which results in communal expression.

Mentorship opens students’ awareness

The ability to make connections, a capacity that is learned through making sense of and broadening an experience, is another ability that we can facilitate within the group. This is one of the most important skills a person can learn. A 16-year old guitarist in our program years ago eloquently summarized the personal benefits this can bring:

Being in a group of people [in this case an ensemble class] has shown me that lots of people have different ideas and that my idea isn’t always the best and isn’t always right. When a group plays together, you have to work with each other to make it happen. It helps me understand how to listen to people, even outside of the program in the other parts of my life.

Where this student had previously been quick to shut out others simply by not listening, he’d learned how to listen because he had to in order to do something he badly wanted to do – play music. He somewhat jokingly told us later that this could present some problems – he actually wasn’t able to shut people out anymore. It’s important to note that his teacher had often made him aware that he was developing this skill — when he was actively learning it.

His example demonstrates how the workings of an evolving group can be so valuable and readily understood in relation to many other areas of one’s life. This youth was originally not very skilled in either communication or music, but because the music was so important to him and he wanted to make the group sound good, he was willing to take the necessary steps and put in the required effort to learn acceptance and communication skills.

There were many “trials and tribulations” in the process, so he also learned that by sticking with something to achieve goals you develop the lifelong skill of perseverance.

Read Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more

Strengths-based Mentoring Transformed my Teaching Experience

Strengths-based mentoring changed the way I teach. Now I look only for the good, knowing that the weaknesses will diminish as the strengths grow.

Over recent years I have been struck by the feeling that our young people are falling through the cracks. Without even realizing why until now, I felt disturbed and protective when listening to adults complain about kids being unfocused and withdrawn.

At the same time, I have noticed a growing social awareness around the environment, politics, agriculture, and so on, and observed so many kind-hearted, open-minded people putting together and running organizations to benefit the greater good. I have often wondered why, then, with all of these new developments and community awakenings, are our youth slipping through the cracks?

Too many of our children are being left behind. While holding these questions in my heart, I have come across public and private school teachers, social aid workers, and mentors, who have added another component to my confusion because the one trait that seems common in these fields of work is that everyone seems very tired. Even extraordinarily compassionate mentors who mention recent breakthroughs and accomplishments and seem to be bordering sainthood, suggest that the work is so taxing that they don’t know how long they will be able to sustain it.

As I began my teaching career I quickly saw that I was at risk of becoming just as burned out as so many others, and began to wonder if this wasn’t at least one of the reasons there was so little progress being made in education.

It wasn’t until I started learning Bill Rossi’s Strengths-Based Mentoring Approach that I began to find a way out of my disillusionment, and a solid way into connecting with, reaching, and truly teaching my students.

When I started working with Rossi’s approach, I realized I have sometimes felt like I didn’t even have the child’s attention. I teach dance during and after school, and if a student wasn’t dancing right away, I would perceive a lack of interest and react by shifting into autopilot and losing momentum. It was disheartening, for sure.

Bill Rossi helped me recognize that a young person has many levels of engagement. I learned, through working with his approach, that many more students were with me in their attention than I realized. I learned in simple ways how to recognize that a student was interested … eye contact was a big one! So, maybe a student wasn’t ready to dance right away, but that student was not missing a beat – with their eyes – of what was going on. They were taking it all in until they got their footing, so to speak. As I loosened up, I realized that they were ready to join in small ways – clapping of hands, shaking a shaker, playing a drum – and then they would join the dance, already having the feeling of being part of a group.

Bill’s strengths-based approach has really helped me to see the different ways in which students learn. You may already know this to be true for the way you learn; you may need to understand a process mentally before diving in … you may need to walk through the experience physically before understanding it mentally … you may need to see the bigger picture first, and so on. As I continue to work through this approach, I am inspired by how students will show me (or in some cases, even tell me) how they learn most effectively.

As I observe, listen, and creatively honor their different learning styles, I am finding the learning process to be student motivated (not something forced) and I am slipping into the role of facilitator. Without some of the power struggles that come from trying to fit students into a mold they may never fit into, their personalities (and mine) are coming alive, and we are covering more material than I thought possible!

Read Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more.

Dawn Smelser, Director, MotherHeartStudio

Arts-Based Mentoring Trumps Standards-Based Education

Imposed knowledge never becomes real knowledge; that can only come from within.

Arts-based mentoring empowers students to learn creatively, from the inside out. In this post I compare arts mentoring with standards-based education, and why I think the change that’s needed will be a long time in coming.

With its focus on a narrow, one-dimensional performance, standards-based education not only misses the point, but it also compounds the mistakes of traditional education by discouraging and repelling those students who can’t relate.

Perhaps it’s the perceived need to be efficient that drives standards-based education to approach students as if they all learn in the same way. Unfortunately, this happens both in school and with after-school programs.

Treating all students the same can put students at risk because it doesn’t allow them to learn in the way that’s natural for them. As a result, we deny them the positive experiences they need to develop their unique talents and build their self-esteem.

When we deny them the authentic experience of what is positive within them, we diminish and even disable them: they have nowhere to go but to the negative.

Information Silos?

Human beings are dynamic organisms designed to be creative and to learn on their own.

Standards-based education also teaches students what to learn instead of how to learn. It treats them as if they were silos for information instead of dynamic organisms designed to be creative and to learn on their own.

Suffocating this healthy dynamic and substituting information for knowledge not only deflates the creative process, but it also disallows the opportunity for students to put the world together in a way that is meaningful and sensible to them.

It’s no wonder that students become anesthetized from being “talked at”.

A focus on imposed knowledge greatly minimizes students’ chances to develop into whole human beings. Knowledge that’s imposed from the outside never becomes real knowledge; this can only come from within a person. By primarily teaching information, education can break the spirits of students who learn differently or have learning disabilities.

An experience I had early in my teaching career is an excellent example of how very differently students can learn.

Comparing Strengths-Based (Arts Mentoring) to Standards-Based

One of my after-school music students was what we traditionally identify as a quick learner. As I gave him the parts to a song, he systematically put them together in good order and quickly accomplished the learning of the piece.

The “Spacy” Student

The second student was not as quick to put the pieces together and would pause and sometimes seem to be out in space. He couldn’t make the connections as quickly and seemed to approach the tune with trial and error, initially content to explore it and not particularly concerned about playing it back perfectly.

This continued for a few lessons until I began to wonder if he was ever going to get it, but he then completely surprised me and taught me a most important lesson which has become an underpinning of my approach.

Not only did he come to his lesson and play the entire piece of music with a depth that surprised me, but he also played it more fully and creatively than the other student had. There was richness in the way his hands produced the sound, he was all there and hearing everything he was playing, and he could play variations that included louds, softs, and inflections that were not in what one might call the “better” student’s playing.

Spaciness … or Deep Listening?

I came to realize that the second student’s spaciness was not spaciness at all. He was listening at a deep level, allowing himself to give in to what he was hearing and then processing this information in his own way.

He taught me how important it is to give students the ground to do this on their own and not impose upon them a uniform way of learning or expect that they should learn in any one particular style.

I also began to develop into a far more effective teacher as I learned to approach my students from the perspective of understanding the often subtle nuances of the ways they learned.

I call my teaching approach arts mentoring, but it’s effective with all subjects. This arts mentoring approach could greatly enhance learning in traditional academic settings, but I don’t foresee that in my lifetime.

After-school programs have more latitude in how they approach their students — they’re a great place to implement strengths-based arts mentoring. The benefits will carry over, too: as students develop their unique talents they’ll start to relate to their schooling and learn better during the day.

Empowering students to develop their talents opens the door for them to become self-learners. Perhaps more creative thinkers today will rise to the challenge.

Read Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more.