Art Therapy for Trauma: How Creative Expression Helps You Heal

Most trauma therapy asks you to talk through what happened—to put your experiences into words. But research now shows that many aspects of trauma live far deeper than language can reach.

Art therapy offers the ability to heal your mind and body by exploring difficult memories and feelings through words as well as creative expression—incorporating elements like color and metaphor, as well as the movement that comes with making things with your hands.

I'm Heather Montemarano, a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist, and I've seen how powerful this approach can be for people impacted by trauma. Let’s talk a little bit about the nature of trauma, and why art therapy can work so well to heal it.

"Big T" vs. "little t" trauma

According to the American Psychological Association, psychological trauma is any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, or confusion intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on your attitudes, behavior, and functioning.

That means that only you can say whether something you experienced was traumatic.

We often talk about "Big T" traumas—life-altering catastrophes like war or major injury. But there are also "little t" traumas: chronic, sustained exposure to something harmful, like being bullied. Those small-t traumas can add up significantly and lead to the same or even worse effects than a big-T trauma. With little-t traumas, we tend to see more struggle with self-esteem and self-worth.

How trauma disrupts your system

When we've been traumatized, we experience fragmentation in our internal world. What once felt cohesive now feels scattered. We struggle to be present and may not be able to overcome difficult thoughts and emotions when they arise.

Research has found that trauma disrupts three key feedback systems (Payne et al, 2015; Schwartz, 2018). Those systems are:

• Exteroception (how your five senses relate to your brain)
• Proprioception (your body's relation in space—gravity, posture, balance)
• Interoception (sensory experience inside your body—am I hungry? How's my breathing?)

So your response to an everyday situation might be very different if you've experienced a certain type of trauma versus if you haven't.

Trauma responses can vary widely and be more or less extreme. But let’s take an example: walking into a crowded room. If you have not had any significant trauma related to this scenario, you can feel relatively trusting of your environment and stay present in the moment.

If you have experienced trauma and something about that setting is triggering, you might start sweating, your heart might race, you might lose your focus, and even feel like you're out of your body. It's going to be really hard to connect to the people around you. You may feel like you can't trust anything.

How trauma impacts your life

When you’re dealing with unhealed trauma, it's common to seek the path of least resistance—things that make us feel comfortable or numb. This often looks like behaviors that feel good in the moment but harm us long-term: different forms of addiction or destructive patterns. They feel safe because our body is working off survival mode, stuck in constant fight or flight.

You might notice difficulty sustaining relationships, holding a job, or feeling present. Sometimes it's a vague sense that something's not right. Sometimes it manifests as autoimmune illnesses—we somaticize more as time goes on, stress actually manifesting as physical health conditions.

Healing through creative expression

Neuroscience has recently proven that we need to involve the whole body in trauma treatment—talk therapy alone won't always heal us completely (Porges, 2022). The fact that we can use creative expression to engage both the mind and body in the healing process is something we’ve known for generations.

If we look at how cultures around the globe have processed grief, loss, and trauma, we see it embodied in creative expression over and over.

Think about candlelight vigils where people sing together. Protests where people create signs and artwork. The AIDS memorial quilt stitching together small pieces of art to memorialize and signify togetherness. Traditional music and dance ceremonies for rites of passage or loss.

We've always used expressive mediums to return to psychological equilibrium.

Art therapy and bilateral stimulation

Part of the healing that can happen in art therapy is likely due to bilateral stimulation, in other words, engaging in activities that involve accessing both hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere handles cognitive processes like logic and language; the right handles emotional processing. Art allows us to access both because we're representing our emotions through things like color and shape while also thinking about composition—how we organize the work.

Research, especially studies on EMDR, shows that this type of bilateral stimulation helps create cohesion out of fragmentation in individuals dealing with trauma (Reichel et al., 202).

When we use both hands to create art, we’re also engaging in that bilateral movement. With paint, brush strokes moving left to right cross the midline of your body. With clay, you're using both hands to manipulate the material. Creative expression can also include things like drumming, tapping, and weaving.

More simply, the rhythm and repetition help you come back into your body. Healing comes from within—we have all the tools; we sometimes just need assistance to access them.

Processing without reliving trauma

In art therapy, divulging details of a traumatic event is typically optional. The art therapy space is a container where you can process internally, and sharing your artwork is an extension of that—but only if you want to share it.

We can access difficult traumatic material through metaphor. The materials you chose, the way you represented lines, the shapes you made—these can represent your feelings without you having to relive the trauma. You can explore thoughts and feelings while keeping them at a distance that feels comfortable.

This matters because you have agency in the process. When we were traumatized, we often didn't feel agency—maybe you couldn't talk back to the bully or control the violent situation. In healing, accessing agency is essential. You can choose your materials, how you move your body, the song you connect to. These micro forms of agency are powerful.

Taking risks through art-making

After trauma, our body just wants to survive, seeking the path that feels safest—which might not be what's actually helpful. We might find ourselves choosing relationships or situations with a familiar sense of chaos because it's what we know, even though it's not healthy. Transitioning to something different, something healthier, may feel scary or risky.

Creative arts therapy involves healthy risk-taking on a small level. By taking that small risk, you show yourself you have capacity. You start to trust your ability to do something different, and this folds out into how you interact in the world.

I might ask you to draw what that familiar energy looks like, then give it a movement so you can feel it in your body. What sound would that energy make? What would it feel like to shift that sound, posture, or colors? This can be the beginning of positive change.

Even setting up materials and cleaning them up sends a message that you can handle change: a mess was made, but you can contain it.

A safe place to let go of shame

Shame might be the number one trauma emotion. It's insidious, keeping trauma alive and stuck. Art externalizes this thing festering inside of us, getting it out of the body.

When you work with a creative arts therapist, you have a witness who won't shame you. This reduces isolation. You might have carried a fear of being shameful or unlovable your whole life. Suddenly, somebody can hold that with you. That changes everything.

Is art therapy right for you?

Art therapy works for many types of people with many types of traumas. It may be particularly effective if you want to explore feelings around your trauma without fully activating them. You can use metaphor and creative expression, and we'll always meet you where you're at.

If you feel expressive arts therapy might be helpful, I'd encourage you to schedule a consultation. It might be your ticket to finally feeling unstuck.