Silence Is Golden
Individuation is a process of psychological development and integration that marks when a person begins to gain autonomy from family or the collective group (Jung, 1960, 1964). As Landgarten (1975) has noted, art therapy is not only an integrative experience, it is also a pictorial journal that can be recorded and reviewed in the future, but the tangible and visible overlap reflects a person’s struggle for individuation. This developmental stage can often be fraught with social anxiety where, for some, the experience is confusing, frustrating, and filled with shame. This kind of shame generally refers to a belief in one’s inadequacy (Potter-Efron and Potter-Efron, 1989).
When people are socially anxious, they lose the mastery or the capacity to engage with others, particularly for those who find it difficult to pinpoint the source of their anxiety. With increased mindful awareness comes the ability to confront social anxiety with psychological safety and work toward autonomy and competence. The case study illustrated below shows how calming through mindfulness aided this client’s capacity to speak through his images.
Vincent
Vincent, a 19-year-old university student, was referred by his GP for generalized and social anxiety. Having been raised in a close-knit family, Vincent grew up knowing most of the people he currently conversed with. Although he wanted to “branch out and meet new people, to learn from them,” he was painfully shy and didn’t know what to say or how to strike up a conversation. In light of his anxiety, it was not surprising that Vincent was reticent in therapy, often looking down or away while talking to me and role plays were initially too confrontational. Like many young people, Vincent enjoyed listening to music, although he preferred techno music without words.
Vincent took easily to the guided meditations where his anxious demeanor visibly shifted to a calm, relaxed state. Despite that, he often struggled with “what to draw,” and his earlier images consistently characterized his goals for therapy: a fan or a calm wind to “blow anxiety away;” a small bunny that he said stood out most because it “could speak for itself,” and so on. As Vincent continued to attune to the process, he gradually found a visual voice that he could emote through.
In the eighth session, Vincent drew a prominent red stop sign on the corner of two intersecting roads that he said represented “shame.” This was the beginning of naming and leaning closer in to the underlying feelings that were tied to his frustration of wanting, but not knowing how, to converse with people he didn’t already know (friends of his friends, fellow students, lecturers). Shame here seemed to represent more a lack of mastery rather than personal dejection. In the tenth session, he embodied the nature of this struggle more succinctly as shown below in the image of a tightly closed clamshell (Figure 9.1), which Vincent described as “empty…with nothing to say.” The strong kinesthetic fervor of bold, sketchy lines underscored by the word “empty” further emphasized the angst of feeling verbally stifled.
Getting this image out into the open seemed to deepen Vincent’s understanding of his demise, bringing insights, hope, and a way forward through both visual and verbal expression. Firstly, by recognizing how “feeling empty with nothing to say” was not just “nothing,” but rather a direct experience of his inability to be independent. Recognizing this then led to the construction of a rating scale illustrating the kinds of conversations Vincent wanted to have which he rated from the highest to lowest in anxiety. For example, “talking with a friend’s friend was a four; talking to his university lecturer was a seven; and speaking in a job interview was a ten.”
In a second spontaneous image following this one, Vincent drew a green “go” sign positioned along a grass-lined brick pathway. In sharp contrast to his earlier red stop sign (two sessions earlier), the go sign represented a choice and the possibility of moving on. Vincent reasoned that conversing with new people is “awkward, but I can at least find out something interesting for later use.” This was his current goal for therapy, which despite social awkwardness was something he was determined and hoped to master.
Feeling more comfortable with the therapeutic process by now, we engaged in role-play using The Art of Conversation cards (Lamb and Howland, 1995) to rehearse various ways of approaching and navigating conversation. Over the next few weeks, Vincent continued to document what he perceived as “successful conversations” on his rating scale, and he also colored in a brick leading up to the go sign for each positive encounter. A few weeks later, and in light of these therapeutic gains, Vincent returned again to the go image, this time adding a doorway. He explained that “each time I have a conversation, it’s like going through another door.”
The cliché “silence is golden” features prominently in this case study, where mental distance afforded by reverie facilitated opportunities for Vincent to establish links between heart and head. Through the method, “tuning out” meant “tuning in” to deeper levels of awareness and a much-needed voice that resulted in therapeutic gains.
The accessibility of the method enabled Vincent to speak figuratively and narratively about his social anxiety. As he struggled with autonomy and his desire to branch out and meet new people, he used mindfulness to anchor to and confront his deeper feelings, and he used art to express visually how he felt about it. Through the method, he was able to delineate his own path (literally and metaphorically) using the same visual language to move from feeling stuck (stop sign; clamshell) to gaining self-empowerment (go sign; doorway). Moreover, despite his inability to verbalize what he was feeling, visual metaphors enabled him to dialogue with his emotions and access a much-needed voice that he felt he was lacking.
The capacity to reappraise life experience mindfully can help clients break through anxiety (Kashdin and Ciarrochi, 2013), where in the absence of words, art can serve to help people speak through images (Flynn, 2004). At this deeper level, Vincent was able to re-experience, symbolize, and communicate “wanting to converse…not knowing what to say” through art. This reflects the power of mindfulness in helping him turn toward his social anxiety, and art in moving him beyond feeling stuck (Kramer, 1981; Rubin, 1984), for example, in how “feeling empty…nothing to say” found a voice in the visual image of the clamshell. Furthermore, speaking through art provided Vincent with opportunities to express feelings of shame with minimal guilt and greater acceptance (Knill et al., 2005; Kramer, 1987).
Learning to listen and speak from a place of silence through mindful-based art endeavors has important implications. Vincent embodied in visual language what he initially couldn’t say in words. As he continued to symbolize inner conflict (social anxiety, wanting to speak for himself, shame), he began to feel less helpless. Gradually, the shift from feeling stuck, to feeling more empowered, led us to develop tasks for conversing with others that were consistent with Vincent’s desire for autonomy. As he continued to reclaim his voice mindfully and artistically, Vincent’s progress became a “pictorial journey” (Landgarten, 1975) of therapeutic gains.