Creative arts as self-care: vicarious trauma, resilience and the trainee art therapist

ABSTRACT

Background

Research shows that indirect trauma can negatively affect professionals in helping professions, with students and young professionals at greater risk, particularly if they have a personal history of trauma. Research suggests that engaging in the creative arts may help professionals process vicarious trauma and promote resilience.

Context

This paper explores the use of creative arts practice for self-care by an art therapy trainee with lived experience of somatic disorder symptoms and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), working in a secure setting.

Approach

Using a trauma lens, the paper discusses how the creative arts can ameliorate the effects of indirect trauma when working as a trainee art therapist in a challenging context. The trainee’s early life experiences elucidate the challenges of countertransference and trauma. The creative arts process supports the reflexive skills an art therapist uses for effective practice.

Outcomes

The creative arts as a self-care practice supported the trainee art therapist to negotiate her dissociative defence style. It was an effective tool for managing the ill-effects of exposure to trauma, including somatic symptoms, and benefited the trainee’s development.

Conclusions

The creative arts helped the trainee to reconnect with her body and emotions, and subsequently benefited her clinical thinking.

Implications for research

Art therapy training programmes could include explicitly teaching about the risks and benefits of working in the profession, as this may promote longevity and improve therapeutic outcomes for service users. Further research on dissociative responses to trauma and creative arts as self-care for therapists would be valuable.

Plain-language summary

Research in the past 30 years has found that people working in helping professions are at risk of experiencing trauma symptoms through their work with service users. This can have a negative effect on their health and wellbeing, as well as their relationships with others. If unaddressed it can also negatively affect their ability to provide effective therapy. Students and people with a history of trauma are at greater risk.

This paper explores the personal experience of a trainee art therapist working in a secure hospital setting. It describes how creative arts practice helped the trainee to cope with the challenging content of therapy sessions and promote their own wellbeing. It uses the trainee’s experience as a young carer to elucidate the emotional and physical toll of caring and the long-lasting impact it can have.

The trainee’s experiences suggest that the creative arts can help with high levels of stress and hypervigilance, negative physical symptoms and personal trauma triggers, and promote greater wellbeing. The article calls for research into the value of including teaching around trauma, including physical symptoms, in training programmes for art therapists, and how the creative arts can be used as a self-care tool.

KEYWORDS:

• Vicarious trauma
• self-care
• post-traumatic growth
• C-PTSD
• art therapy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my supervisors at Queen Margaret University for their guidance, and my supervisors and colleagues from placement who provided a ‘good enough’ learning environment and a lot of laughs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dayna Ortner

Dayna Ortner graduated from Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh with an MSc Art Psychotherapy in 2022. Dayna works as an art therapist in community mental health, and also supports adults with disabilities and autism in creative workshops. Dayna is passionate about promoting the wellbeing of carers and people working in helping professions. She has presented her research ‘A Good Little Mouse Learns to Dance: an art-based autoethnography’ at the QMU Arts Therapies Learner Conference 2022 and is keen to expand the work through further research, practice, and teaching.