Using markers to draw out emotional turmoil

By Erin Randolph

Jean Hume's 37-year-old daughter has a 26 percent chance of living to age 60. That's not an easy reality for anyone to deal with.

Her daughter, a single mother of a 9-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl, had a malignant brain tumor. And the night before having surgery to remove it, Hume did some artwork with her grandchildren to relieve the tension of an already tough situation.

In March, the night the tumor was discovered, Hume stayed up all night painting an abstract picture of a young woman with a tunnel going into her head. She also keeps a journal in which she doesn't write entries, but rather uses for pictures to illustrate the emotions she's feeling at the time - things like nightmares that haunted her as a child, faces that are one half happy and one half sad or a chicken on a skateboard.

What she's participating in is art therapy, which facilitates healing through the expression of emotions, thoughts and problems, while creating art projects. Still relatively unknown, the process is being utilized as a non-threatening method of therapy in prisons, hospitals, halfway houses, shelters, schools and elsewhere. The pieces of art become a launching point for conversation, because people unconsciously point to emotions and people and situations and more through their creations.

Hume discovered art therapy through a health-and-wellness class offered at Cottage Grove Presbyterian Church. With a master's degree and an EDS in special education and a history of anorexia, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, Hume quickly became interested in this form of healing arts, and after finishing Grand View's two-year certificate program, Hume now uses art therapy in her work with families at the New Directions shelter.

"I've learned that in working with children and adults, and also with myself, art therapy is non-threatening because you don't have to make a perfect picture," she says. "It's an easy way to start conversation with someone. I know what's going on with them and yet they do not have to tell me directly."

"I ran around with boys too much. I got involved with drugs. I shouldn't be here. I should be going to my high school prom. I will never have children. I used to go to church with my grandma. How did this happen to me?"

The image on the cover of this edition of Cityview, a heart encased in bars, was painted by a 16-year-old girl (name withheld) serving a 47-year prison sentence for a crime she committed while under the influence of drugs. She and some friends were joyriding, forced someone into their car (considered kidnapping) and crossed state lines (making it a federal offense). She created the piece while participating in a voluntary art therapy program with Roberta Victor at the helm.

Victor has been visiting the women's prison in Mitchellville for a dozen years now, dealing with special-needs inmates who have clinical diagnoses of mental illnesses. The art therapy provides a means for emotional growth and healing that will lead to a more fulfilling life, even if the inmate is serving a life sentence, Victor says.

As a part of her schooling (which she is still undergoing; she's about a year away from her doctorate in art therapy), she needed an internship and figured working at the prison would fill that hole.

"At the end of my internship, I realized I was hooked because the need is so great," Victor says. "There are so many mentally ill inmates that I realized this was a population that I could not turn my back on."

In addition to her work at the prison, Victor teaches and directs the art therapy certificate program at Grand View - the only such program in the state - and works with Sudanese refugees, including the Lost Boys, through the Cottage Grove Presbyterian Church. It was her health-and-wellness program that got Hume interested in art therapy.

Victor has been working at the church for 14 years. When the Sudanese refugees began arriving in Des Moines and started attending the church, Victor again saw a need and decided to fill it. The refugees had survivors' guilt. They had endured a great trauma while dealing with the civil unrest in their country, and now they weren't eating because they felt guilty for having such luxuries as food while those still in Sudan had so very little. So she worked with them through art to deal with issues left from the war and the assimilation of a new culture.

"Refugees have a hard time expressing themselves because of the language barrier," Victor says. In their culture, people are either healthy or mentally ill. Healthy people don't receive any therapy, so they would likely be turned off by that notion. However, creating artwork is a non-threatening way for the men and women to communicate what they are feeling.

Now, through a grant with the Bureau of Sudanese Services, all new Sudanese refugees are brought to her when they arrive in Des Moines for an art therapy session, and are told they can return whenever they like.

Her space in Cottage Grove Presbyterian Church is brimming with artwork - paintings and drawings cover areas on the walls, and hordes of clay figures are on display. The Sudanese men tend to form animals in clay, mostly cattle, while the women tend to mold people and pottery. However, among all of the clay figures that clutter table tops and shelves and glass cases, there sits a clay plate holding a hamburger and french fries. One man had recently gotten a job at a fast food restaurant, a testament to his new life.

Therapists at Children and Families of Iowa see a lot of kids coming from unsafe home environments where domestic violence and substance abuse are prevalent. They've been conditioned not to talk about emotions (and are often out of touch with them altogether) or problems and are very untrusting.

Marcia Bradley, a family therapist, tries to break that barrier through the use of art therapy. Because family histories are recorded at the child's intake, Bradley knows the child's background before she meets with him or her. However, it's not necessarily easy to gain the trust of a child who doesn't trust adults.

"With kids, you have to be more creative to keep their attention," she says. "Or to even get them to show up every week. It's sort of like coming to the dentist."

It's easier to get them to return if they have something to look forward to, Bradley says. But getting them to open up allows Bradley to better understand the needs of her clients.

One client was a little girl who spent most of her life with a mom who used drugs and was surrounded by a lot of family conflict.

"She was completely inaccessible," Bradley says. "I was getting bored to tears just working with her. Ten minutes would pass and she wouldn't say anything."

Bradley hoped to be able to wake the girl from her emotional slumber. The little girl had missed her childhood, so Bradley pulled out some objects that would be given to a 2-year-old, Playdough, fingerpaints. Slowly she worked her way up to more complicated mediums, like markers, until she reached a 3-D object made of papier-m‰chŽ, a puppy she named "Baby."

"I actually did wake her up through that process," Bradley says. "She started getting more animated and alive. She started acting like a 10-year-old."

The little girl wanted to go to the store to get "Baby" all of the items she needed - despite that fact that "Baby" was made out of papier-m‰chŽ. Understanding that the only thing this little girl wanted was for someone to take care of her allowed Bradley a better launching point to make suggestions to the court.

Many are very out of touch with their own emotions, so Bradley spends a lot of time talking about them, especially anger, because that's the hardest one for children to accept as being OK. She gets a lot of drawings of happy faces and rainbows, which she attributes to the children being relieved that unsettling problems are finally being addressed. She also sees a lot of drawings with human figures floating in the air, which she sees as meaning either that the child is not feeling grounded or that a burden has been lifted - or perhaps both.

When she asks children to draw what a safe and an unsafe environment looks like to them, she often sees outdoor settings involving weather - one a bright, sunny day, the other with lightning and rain and dark clouds.

"The way I interpret that is that the safe and unsafe place is something they have no control over, like the weather," Bradley says. "I believe that talking therapy with children - if that's all you have - puts you at a great disadvantage. The advantage to the art is the process has a finished product. The child walks out of here with something they can feel good about. I think it's a good metaphor for the entire process."

Molly Kinser Douglas agrees that having a finished product helps boost a youth's self-esteem and self-worth.

As an art therapy guide, Douglas recently finished a program with adolescent girls from the PACE program, 99.9 percent of whom are court-ordered to be there, meaning she was already facing an uphill battle. Aged 12-17, the most common emotions the girls were dealing with were loss and shame, but they also were dealing with abandonment, divorce, death, depression and anger.

"When the girls did art therapy, there was a lot going on," Douglas says. "They were learning to express themselves through art in a healthy and safe way. They were actually able to connect their art piece or imagery with what was going on inside of them or in the world around them. With that, they were able to claim them and connect them. That can be a very powerful thing."

About a week into the class, Douglas had the girls create self-portraits using guided questions.

The eyes are the windows to the soul. What color are the windows? And so on.

The portraits were small and very mask-like: Don't touch me. Leave me alone.

Near the end of the class, she had the girls recreate the self-portraits using the same questions. This time, the portraits actually resembled young girls.

"With the adolescent girls, as well as any child or adult who has been through a severe trauma, there are no words to describe what's going on," Douglas says. "It's easier to draw a picture than to talk about it. There are no limitations to art therapy. Instead, it just opens the doors wider."

Of course, dealing with children and adults who have experienced severe trauma everyday at work can be hard on the therapists. It's not a profession for the emotionally unstable.

"You can't take it home with you," Douglas says. "You'll get compassion fatigue. You've got to be in the moment and then you have to do something else in your life to balance that."

For Bradley, being around these kids and teaching them that it's OK to talk about the events going on at home and the emotions bubbling inside them is a reward in itself. Having grown up in an unstable home herself, she is able to create an environment where the children don't have to be in denial or pretend anymore - one which she didn't necessarily have.

"Working with these kids is so rewarding," she says. "When I was growing up, coming from a similar environment as these kids, I was always getting in trouble for saying things. Now I get to come to work and talk about it. It's rewarding and life-giving for me to be able to come to work and bring the subject up."

And naturally, since Jean Hume participates in art therapy for herself in addition to the work she does for the New Directions shelter, she finds her scribblings and paintings really helpful to her personally. "I can look at those and know what they mean to me and it's not necessarily something that somebody would know," she says. "It's a real personal way of expressing yourself."

In her art exercises with the families at New Directions, she incorporates a lot of the exercises that Hume did herself as a participant in Roberta Victor's health-and-wellness class at Cottage Grove Presbyterian Church.

"The women and children there are very stressed out and traumatized and they seem to enjoy expressing how they feel through art because, again, it's very personal," Hume says. "There's a little boy at the shelter right now that has a lot of emotional stuff going on, and he carries a notebook around that he draws pictures in. Sometimes it's just easier - especially with children, but also with adults - to express themselves in these ways."

A few weeks ago, Hume asked a little boy at the shelter to illustrate the word "joy." He told her that it's just a word - not something that can be drawn.

Those people using art therapy would beg to differ. CV

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