Places We Practice • 227so strong and vibrant—while it probably can’t win—may well slow down the progress of
even a terminal illness.
Art Therapy for Bereavement (DVD 10.5)
When you lose a loved one you need to grieve, to deal with feelings like guilt about surviv-
ing, and anger at being abandoned. Making art allows for a visceral expression of feelings
too raw to put into words. I remember how badly I needed to paint after my friend Peter’s
sudden death, when I was about to turn seventeen, which I described in Chapter 1. Painting
the picture did not take away the pain of loss, but it helped to release some of the rage and
anguish I was feeling, which had made me literally ill with a high fever after the funeral.
Years later, I was surprised that my mother—who was not an artist—became deeply
involved while working with clay after my father died, sculpting his head (A). She was able
to discharge her feelings by squeezing, forming, and caressing the clay, while at the same
time creating a concrete image of her lost spouse—a lasting memorial. Just a week after her
death, I found that making a series of “free association” drawings was amazingly helpful to
me in the work of mourning, as detailed in Chapter 1.
There is more sensitivity now to the need for crisis intervention for losses—giving help at
the time of the trauma. If I had been offered art therapy after having a stillbirth—as one art
therapist did for women following perinatal death—I might have been spared considerable
psychological pain. As with a miscarriage, the loss is to all except the mother, “grief unseen”
(Seftel, 2006).
Children who have lost parents have been helped to work on their grief through art ther-
apy support groups in schools (Virshup, 1993) and in hospices (Wadeson, Durkin, & Perach,
1989). Art therapy has been used in grief support groups (Rogers, 2007) in settings all over
the country, from Philadelphia (B) to Michigan, where art therapist Barbara McIntyre not
Figure 10.8 “My Fighters: The Swordsmen” (T-cells).