Therapy Skills for Creatives: Anxiety, Your Creative Life Purpose, 3 Steps for Creative People During a Crisis, A Creative Hierarchy of Needs, Gaslighting in the Arts Community

A key part of Creativity Counseling is helping you roll with your powerful feelings, not struggle against them.  Along with these strong feelings is a powerful energy stream, and often for Creative People, this can be experienced as anxiety, anticipation, or otherwise angst. You may regularly find yourself having difficulty relaxing, making choices, settling into your creative work, starting projects and staying focused because of this high vibration energy.  Mother Nature has given it to you to support your creativity, and, in fact it will while you are working, but it can also take up so much of your executive functioning so as to cause difficulty.

In a similar vein to mindfulness, the first thing you need as a Creative Person, is to understand that you have a unique creative personality, and what that means for you. Creative People experience emotions on an expanded scale, so it is important to understand that, and reasonable to apply that to yourself in this situation.  What is your individual experience of emotions? How do you experience anxiety, anticipation, or high energy emotions like this?

Once you have thought about and tried to understand your experience of anxiety, spend some time trying to recognize when it happens throughout the day. When are some of your common anxiety pitfalls or higher energy periods that become obstacles?  Do you regularly wake up in the morning with an overflow of adrenaline?  Do you wake throughout the night this way?  How about when making choices? Make some observations when it happens, and how it feels, so that as it occurs, you recognize it is happening.

Emotions are chemical signals from the body to the brain.  For Creative People, they are powerful signals.  We don’t want to ignore them.  Once you are aware of them happening, your next step is to understand the message, knowing that only sometimes the message will be useful.  Waking up in the middle of the night, with anxiety about everything you need to do tomorrow, is not useful. The anxiety is “trying” to help you prevent catastrophe, but isn’t helping, really. It is just sleep depriving you. Anticipatory anxiety before you sit down to work is showing up to help you have energy to work.  Sometimes it overwhelms you and “freezes” you to the point you feel you can’t begin, but if you recognize the purpose is to “fuel” you, you may be able to use the energy to push through and get started. This process of discovery can be complicated, difficult, and is time well spent in Creativity Counseling.

If you have done steps one through three, and have evaluated when anxious or high-level energy is not serving you, or also not dissipating, this is when you move on to step four.  This step assumes you are doing background care for yourself and your creativity for overall wellness and stability.  Need help and clarification on background care?  I am here for that, too.  Step four is the implementation of on-the-spot techniques to soothe yourself, recognizing your feelings, and allowing them to release without fighting them.  This sounds a lot like mindfulness, and I am a big believer in those methods.  However, what I have come to realize, is there is some tweaking needed for your Creative Brain.

Over the years I have taught and used Mindfulness Techniques, I have found some difficulties both for myself and my creative clients. The techniques  seem to work sometimes, but not all the time.  They are a good beginning, but depending on the intensity of the situation, can fall short.  What has become clear to me is, once again, that this is due to the unique expanded emotional capacity of your Creative Mind.  As Creative People, you experience emotions very powerfully, so much so, that techniques, like mindfulness, functional for a typical emotional presentation, may fall short for you.  I have found that using the same ideas and incorporating your creativity is the key to success in managing your emotional load.

Basic principles of Mindfulness tell us to recognize our feelings to examine our needs, and meet them if necessary.  Mindfulness also requires us to stay present with our feelings as they ebb and flow like a wave, and release us from their grip. I believe the success to this for Creative People lies in also incorporating a Creative Intervention that allows you to stay present mindfully, while engaging your creative muscles. I have designed one such intervention that is simple, yet impactful, for you to try.

When you have completed steps 1-3 above, and notice yourself in step 4, try this intervention, a combination of Mindfulness Techniques, and an engagement of your creativity: 

1. Allow yourself to feel the feeling of anxiety or stress in your body, nonjudgementally finding those physical sensations with curiosity and kindness, in your body
2. Take some deep breaths, and allow your breaths to drop into your belly.  Try to allow your belly to rise and fall with your breathing.  Especially with anxiety, this will be very helpful to you.
3. Add this simple brain game: choose any animal, and alliterate it with an animal (“happy horse” or “persnickety porcupine”) 
4. As you breathe, repeat to yourself your alliteration- you may use as many breaths as you need to get through the alliteration- this is not important- for example (inhale) “persnickety” (exhale) “porcupine” 
5. Begin to count the animals “one persnickety” (inhale) “porcupine” (exhale)
6. When you get to 10, change to a new alliteration.  You can certainly change before or after that if you like

With your breath and creativity lightly engaged, your anxiety will dissolve.  You can use this during the day, when you wake at night, or any time you feel an overwhelming emotion.  Don’t fight the emotion.  Recognize it.  Allow it.  Take some deep breaths, and try the exercise.

By engaging your Creativity and using tried and true methods like Mindfulness, you will begin to experience the relief and ease in your life you have been searching for.  Creative People are powerful, and understanding and knowing how your mind works, is crucial to giving it the care that you need.  Start Creativity Counseling or Creativity Coaching today: 
1) Book a Free Consultation.  All new clients to Creatively, LLC are entitled to a 15 min, free consultation to sit with me and discuss your needs, services available, and we can problem solve and hand-pick best next steps to help you succeed.
2) Book a Coaching Package. Are you a working Creative in need of specific support? I offer a range of Coaching Packages- let's get started with one that is right for you.

The Power of Thoughts, Intuition and Anxiety, Safe Space and Self Soothing, Creative Personality Paradox

Creativity Coaching and Creativity Counseling are a great place to start if you are unsure of your creative priorities.  One of the main reasons Creative People begin working with me is with this very question in mind.  That is because having clarity here is very powerful! Once you know where you are going, the full powers of your Creative Personality are formidable in getting you there.  If you would like to get started, I would love to help: 
1) Book a Free Consultation.  All new clients to Creatively, LLC are entitled to a 15 min, free consultation to sit with me and discuss your needs, services available, and we can problem solve and hand-pick best next steps to help you succeed.
2) Book a Coaching Package. Are you a working Creative in need of specific support? I offer a range of Coaching Packages- let's get started with one that is right for you.
With love and wishing you clarity in finding your North Star,


Cindy
(c) 2022 Creatively, LLC
​www.creativelyllc.com

This is a blog post that was written originally in 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic officially came to the USA and lockdowns started happening for the first time. We were entering into week four or so of the health crisis in Maryland. Many of us were feeling patience wearing thin, cabin fever growing strong, hairs on our head growing unruly, and overall uncertainty and impatience waxing. I had been meeting with clients virtually from my home office, and for the first time both watching and experiencing the emotional toll from the same stressors as my clients. In that spirit, on the Creatively blog, I composed the 3 main recommendations I was sharing to survive a crisis and support healthy creative minds in the best possible way, during the early stages of the pandemic.

My goal is always to support you in your own effort to manage a crisis with your existing support network in place (need a support network? Scrap this article and start there. Not sure where to start? Feel yourself approaching crisis? For a mental health emergency you can STILL CALL 911. Urgent, not emergent? A list of operating mental health urgent resources can be found here under "urgent resources".)

These three steps are specifically designed for Creative Minds, to help stabilize yourself during a crisis.  They will not "fix" the crisis, nor are they for urgent or emergent problems (see "priorities" above). They are meant to help you roll with the powerful emotions that are a part of your creative brain, make meaning from what has suddenly interrupted your personal storyline, and readjust your expectations during a difficult time.  Let's go a little more in depth to each one of these: 

Artists- this is a loaded subject that could use so many blog posts- and maybe I will write many more.  But let’s dive in. I have much to say.

In the simplest terms, gaslighting is when your narrative is stolen by another voice.  It is when you begin to question your own reality, based upon the willful (usually) manipulation by someone else. You feel convicted and clarity turn to doubts and confusion, because of feedback from external sources. 

There are classic phrases that you can use to recognize gaslighting, such as “why do you always” and “you are so emotional,” and “can’t you just,” but the theme here is your reality is cast into doubt by blame, accusation or otherwise discrediting you.  Oftentimes we hear about gaslighting in relationships.  Gaslighting also exists in groups- communities, families or even societal groups question or weaken each other’s points of view in order to elevate their own.  Gaslighting is never ok.

Sometimes gaslighting comes from insecurity and the insidious need to elevate oneself.  Other times, gaslighting comes from cultural, familial or societal misunderstandings that become handed down that serve one body of people over another in some way.  I believe both exist in the arts community, but the second more than the first is what I have seen most often.  There is a lack of information and some broken systems that persist and we continue to believe in.  While gaslighting does infer that the perpetrating party is aware of the misinformation and manipulation, even if they are not, the impact to you as the artist, is the same.  So for the sake of the next illustrations, we may believe that the parties precipitating the gaslighting behaviors may know better (true gaslighting), or may not (inadvertent or accidental).