30 Days of Self Healing – Day 26
How can art heal you?
“Our expressed emotions can be true healers.”
Dr. Fabrizio Mancini DOWN THROUGH THE AGES, every form of art—music, drama, art, dance—has been used as a way to communicate. Through art, you can learn to express your emotions in ways that don’t employ words. If you give someone who is being treated for cancer, for example, a canvas and some paints, a painting will emerge—one that inevitably relates to his or her feelings.
The reason art therapy has become so important in medicine is that it allows us to express what we can’t or don’t want to talk about verbally, but that we can express through painting, sculpture, writing, or drama. It helps us release negative emotions and get to the core of healing.
I am moved by the often-told story of Holocaust survivor Alfred Kantor. He used art as a stress-relieving, emotion-releasing activity during his imprisonment in concentration camps, and in the process left one of the few visual records of that horrific period in history. To avoid detection, Kantor sketched and painted when no one was looking, mainly at night, and he would hide his sketchbook under the floor. His paintings reveal unspeakable horrors committed by the Nazis: naked women being classified into those who would live and those who would die; corpses being dumped from the gas chambers into trucks; the flames from the crematorium chimneys at night; and vicious SS guards.
This body of work was published in 1971 by McGraw-Hill as The Book of Alfred Kantor. He wrote that his art helped him survive and cope with the unimaginable horrors he experienced. I believe that creative expression kept his spirit alive.
