Art Therapy as an intervention to finding your FLOW in the Great Resignation

Art Therapy as an intervention to finding your FLOW in the Great Resignation

Assisting clients in the search of their true Ikigai / reason of being

This narrative is aimed at the typical high performer or fast pace corporate / entrepreneurial professional who constantly find themselves in a run, crash or burnout cycle. Individuals who would make radical, or in some cases perceived as ‘irrational’ decisions to change course in search of their ‘ikigai’ in order to find their ‘flow’. Since the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, terms such as The Great Resignation, The Great Exodus, the Big Quit, the Great Reshuffle have emerged, fashioning a total new ‘status’ and validation to what people have been struggling with for decades: the surge in finding their purpose or meaning in what they do and why they do it. Now people no longer have to be perceived as ‘weak’ or 'buckling under pressure', but they are being given the ‘permission by the masses’ to stand up for making sense of themselves and the world around them.

Why Art Therapy is the key intervention for finding your 'flow'

Pre-pandemic, people would have self-diagnosed themselves in a hush-hush way, they would find short term cures to their burnout phases by: taking an emergency vacation; book a retreat, reach out for medical or psychiatric support, numb the symptoms with anti-depressants or the overuse of substances like drugs and alcohol; quit or change jobs or take a sabbatical and embark on the journey of asking significant existential questions. Not only have I personally experienced these cycles myself, but also worked with, mentored and managed many of these professionals in both developed and emerging markets.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed a record 4 million Americans had left their jobs in April. Suddenly, people were reaching for ways to refer to the phenomenon unfolding before them—to brand it, to make sense of it. Taken on its surface, The Great Resignation foregrounds the language of job status, but misses a parallel, arguably bigger story: the radical realignment of values that is causing people to confront and remake their relationship to life at home, with their families, with their friends, and in their lives outside of work. According to Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, who warned about coming of the great resignation in a Bloomberg Interview in May 2021, it’s more about a mental health conversation than anything else.

Though burnout is now more widely recognized, it’s another thing to deeply grapple with its consequences at work and across all sectors of life. Hector Garcia, the co-author of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, describes ikigai as “the intersection of what you are good at and what you love doing.” According to Garcia, “Just as humans have lusted after objects and money since the dawn of time, other humans have felt dissatisfaction at the relentless pursuit of money and fame and have instead focused on something bigger than their own material wealth. This has over the years been described using many different words and practices, but always hearkening back to the central core of meaningfulness in life.” Ikigai a concept defined as 'a reason of being', is a fundamental part of the culture in Okinawa, it gives one a 'reason to get up in the morning', which has been credited for the island having the largest population of centenarians in the world. (source: Medium)

There are four key primary elements to Ikigai: The theory posits that you’ll find your ikigai when you identify the convergence between the following four elements: 1. What you love (your passion); 2. What the world needs (your mission); 3. What you are good at (your vocation); 4. What you can get paid for (your profession) Finding one’s ikigai calls for honest soul-searching and introspection, which is often best achieved in a quiet space away from daily distractions. Most research leads readers to ‘finding their ikigai' by taking a weekend off and reflecting on the questions. On the other hand, philosopher and civil rights leader Howard W Thurman offers an alternative perspective with the following advice: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Passion on its own however, doesn’t pay the bills or put food on the table, which makes the convergence theory more practical in comparison. Though all this advise is sound, it does not assist the Ikigai searcher to reach into the unconscious and ‘peel the onion’ of self to reach true healing and true reason of being. The use of Art Therapy is being proposed as one of the most powerful techniques in assisting the soul searchers in uncovering their true Ikigai or Flow. “The flow state has been described by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi as the "optimal experience" in that one gets to a level of high gratification from the experience.[1] Achieving this experience is considered to be personal and "depends on the ability" of the individual.[1] One's capacity and desire to overcome challenges in order to achieve their ultimate goals leads not only to the optimal experience but also to a sense of life satisfaction overall.”[1] In his review of Mihály Csikszentmihályi's book "Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning", Coert Visser introduces the ideas presented by Csikszentmihályi, including "good work" in which one "enjoys doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself."[62]

“Imagine an elevator in a high-rise apartment building that only goes to certain floors unless you have a key tag.” Art Therapy gives clients their ‘all-floors’ pass, helping clients to access their unconscious by fascilitating the most effective change process. Art Therapy techniques “fuse evidence-based psychotherapeutic principles with verified neurobiological frameworks to both bypass and leverage language centres to unlock, process and transform people.” (Gray, 2019) Clients usually ‘zoom’ out when they hear the suggestion of Art Therapy as an intervention. Let’s demystify Art Therapy for the ‘purpose’ searcher if they have already zoomed out the moment they read the word ‘art’ and classify themselves as ‘the person who cannot even draw a stick person’.

If your perception of Art Therapy is that you are required to be the next Gauguin – you truly have a solidified misconception. The use of abstracts and various materials are a key component of effective Art Therapy. The case study of 'Ruth' will be explained further on in this paper, an example of abstract work in Art Therapy:

Talking therapies are no longer sufficient on their own. Art Therapy, on the other hand, have creative techniques as their strategy, but require a combination of psychological knowledge and approaches such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Positive Psychotherapy, which I propose as key combination in dealing with the challenge of people in search of their flow.

According to Gray, the combination works well in cases where art therapy has fostered the client’s insight into deep psychological problems, CBT can assist with rebuilding the thinking and behavior of the client.

Art can often bypass vulnerability and defense mechanisms that are inherent to verbal communication, making visible an image in one’s inner world (Swan-Foster, 2016). When the unconscious has been made conscious, art therapy can enable significant ‘shifts’ that alter conscious thoughts, feelings and behaviors for the better. (Gray, 2019). As observed by Freud and Jung, imagery in various formats can encourage a person’s unconscious to rise into their conscious (Gray, 2019).

Gray further explains how art therapy works to uncover ‘stuck feelings’ in the body and mind. It uncovers the hidden aspects, allowing them to understand their emotional condition. Art therapy (focused on the unconscious) combined with CBT (focused on the conscious) assists in helping clients to understand themselves. The great advantage of art therapy versus the Freudian talking cure is that pictures remain available over time. The significance of the inner story never gets lost, but remains in the picture through different levels of meaning, with some easier to understand and verbalise and others not so (Case & Dalley, 2014) as explained by (Gray, 2019).

Using Art Therapy for high flyers who are at the tipping point of burnout can assist significantly in uncovering the unconscious to bring them closer to understanding their reason for being and finding the balance within themselves. They are often emotionally frozen, empty, blunt and fossilized with a loss of sensual and emotional receptivity and all experiences become narrow, rigid and inhibited (Spreti, 2012). According to Gray, depressed clients rarely draw dark depressive pictures, as some might assume, but rather they draw fragile, cute little landscapes with little flowers, or a tiny stream meandering through the landscapes. Usually everything is extremely soft, and the textures and colours are very faint and hardly visible. Gray further explains that this type of drawing mirrors their experience of not feeling anything, of being ‘frozen’, or feeling ‘dead’. (Gray, 2019). As the art therapy progresses, the textures and colours usually become stronger and more visible with ‘statements’, mirroring the state of the client.

Art Therapy assist ‘numb’ clients who and burnt out and have lost a sense of meaning, with some time out, allowing them to regress and when they are ready, to find their way back to the present and come to ‘life’ again, finding clear perspective. The case study further on in this narrative will assist to give colour to the concept. “We are living in what is possibly the most informative time in the history of the world, and humans on a large scale can immerse themselves in an enormous amount of information. Technology that can give people immediate results, access to games, recipes, friends, fast communication, entertainment and so much more. And yet this world of play and pleasure, coupled with work commitments and a bucket list of activities, may not be much ‘happier’ than the world of Socrates (400 bc), one of the first philosophers, who asked the question, ‘What is a good life?’ ”The Pagans used rituals to express their desire for a good harvest. Buddhists practice the principle of ‘letting go’ in order to achieve inner peace and Christians use prayer. Shamans and healers use chanting as a way of healing the mind and body; all systems of belief for the purpose of making a better life.” (Gray, 2019)

One of the best Art therapy techniques used with clients who are in search of their ‘why’ and who have the need to rekindle ‘life’ in themselves again, is the technique of Inner Resources. Often these clients would struggle with a ‘dead’ or depressed sense within themselves. Inner Resources is focused on an exploration of early childhood, adolescence and adulthood to discover what makes people happy in life, and what they might have forgotten that can still make them happy. Inner Resources use the technique of Art AS therapy and Art IN therapy. Before I take you on a journey of an observed client example, you need to understand the different nuances between Art as Therapy and Art in Therapy.

Why Art Therapy as a key therapeutic intervention to finding your 'flow' and 'ikigai'?

Art as Therapy: (Drawing, painting or sculpting as the main focus) is about the ‘process’ and not so much about the content. The client is asked about the process and how they felt while doing the picture. There is often a shifting between the unconscious and conscious through the expression and reflection. Psychologically and medically, several health benefits are found for clients through art as therapy, similarly to meditation. Researchers found a rise of alpha wave pattern, typical of restful alertness, a relaxed state of the mind (Bolwek et al., 2014). Serotonin levels also appear to increase, alleviating the feeling of depression (Malchiodi, 2007), a hormone that the body produces as a response to stress. These are only a few examples of many. (Gray, 2019).

Art in Therapy: Here the therapist works with the client to look at the content and explore the deeper meaning of the picture. Usually the client has to describe what he or she sees in the picture. It’s all about what they have drawn from their unconscious and how that is then interpreted by the client, for what it is not what they think it is. Art Therapists use pictures as the representation of free associations (Rubin, 2016b), to better understand a client’s underlying problems.

Through the picture the client makes free associations between the images on the page and their own unconscious (Gray, 2019). The work of the art therapist is critical in this facilitation to verbalize the picture giving descriptions back to the client within the context of their life, so they can reach deep insights into what is really happening for themselves, in their own thinking and in their own lives. (Gray, 2019). This process takes place by using various art therapy techniques. To quote Rob Gray, ultimately: “Art therapy empowers people. It is, to put it simply, turning shit into gold, or turning manure into something that keeps growing and becoming stronger and more beautiful than ever predicted. ‘Gold’ and ‘growth’ is the aim of art therapy.” (Gray, 2019).