The importance for any victim of trauma being able to express and share their stories is integral to their recovery.
Using art to aid in rehabilitation often has a flowery wooo woooo sound about it.. but this blog has extracts from my time working with girls who had been rescued from the human trafficking industry and will hopefully show you real outcomes.
In 2015 I was invited to travel with Hagar NZ to the offices in Hanoi Vietnam to work with Hagar’s psychology team and girls rescued from Human Trafficking. Hagar do incredible work in NZ and overseas setting up social business enterprises and schools. These help to provide children and young adults who have been rescued from extreme human rights abuse the ability to gain education and/or work so that they can lead normal lives going forward.
My role was to work with visual arts. I was to up-skill the psych team on the ground but I also brought the girls artworks back to NZ and auctioned them off raising money so that the art program could keep going once we left. We worked with 10 staff and 5 clients with the use of translators. We went in with a focus on building self esteem and confidence and by training staff on how to run the program , staff would then be able to use it during their counselling sessions with the girls.
My colleague and I would travel each day to the Hagar offices in Hanoi where the girls would meet us. The girls lived in rescue shelters near to the offices under security with guards in case the traffickers tried to find them. I worked each day gaining their trust and teaching them how to draw.
Each day started with all of us sitting in a circle on the floor and I would outline my goal for the day, then I would do a demonstration, followed by a workshop, ending back in the circle for discussions on how the objective was achieved.
My first goal was to teach the importance of the circle and when I talk about a circle I mean all of us sitting in a circle at the beginning and at the end of the day. Trauma victims need a setting of safety, trust , reliability and routine. So each day at 9-11am the girls would do music and then 2-6pm we would do art.
The importance of the circle at the beginning and end of the day. In the circle everyone participates, everyone is integral to the functioning of the circle, even if it’s challenging and often it is. Everyone becomes part of a community supporting the kinds of honest, authentic dialogue that is necessary to effectively respond to challenging behaviours and circumstances. The circle continues even when one person leaves (someone else can take their place. This could be one of the clients or one of the councillors). In their understanding of this, it meant we could leave to come back to New Zealand and they would know that the circle would continue without us there.
One thing that interested me as the days passed was the change in the girls attitudes and behaviours while sharing their stories through drawing . They started out being very quiet, agitated, not looking at us in the eye when speaking to us. Then on the last few days I recall after a session, I was astounded to look around me and see the girls were asleep with us on the floor. ( In Vietnam during the middle of the day when the heat was unbearable you would take a siesta) . After their horrific ordeals , It was quite surreal that these girls trusted us enough to sleep soundly next to us. I was really moved and sharing that moment in time has been one of the highlights in my career as an arts tutor.
One young girl was very closed with her body language when we first met her. By the end of the week she was smiling and happy. She struggled with painting and drawing but always participated and completed something. She found herself in music, perhaps finding solace in that the musical note vanished after it was played . I think she found it was a lot less intimidating than the permanent markings on paper from pencil or paint. A lesson for me that in teaching creative art , that if one medium doesn’t work perhaps try another. Clay, music, drama, pouring mediums.
When creating music we used drums and I saw that the girls liked the steady drum beat mimicking a slow and steady heartbeat . We taught them the importance of deep breathing. But they also liked to stomp around banging their frustrations out quickly, angrily and loudly. Its actually quite liberating to stomp around banging a drum loudly!
Trauma has long lasting effects to someone’s mental health.
An emotional response to trauma cause a bodies physiological reaction without you even thinking about it. The sympathetic nervous system makes your heart rate increase, it causes adrenalin, pupils grow larger, food storage shrinks making you feel nausea and you salivation decreases which can give you a dry mouth. All of this without you consciously thinking about it. You may have heard this as a Fight or Flight response.
If a memory is repressed , external stimuli can trigger your senses. Smell and sound can trigger a memory even years later. (This can also be known as PTSD). The Christchurch earthquakes were a classic example. For some people who were in the red zone the day of the quakes, years later a traffic siren or a truck rumbling passed could trigger an emotional hijacking causing a physiological reaction to something that wasn’t really a threat.
The opportunity to be able to express the girls feelings and by telling their stories though music and art in a safe setting meant
As they repeatedly shared their stories with us, their anxiety associated with their memories lowered so their bodies responded with a non traumatised set of responses to their memories, (parasympathetic nervous system kicked in .)
it also helped them to give closure to their past and enabled them to understand more clearly who they were, it helped them to address any shame, fear or guilt
Which enabled integration of their old identity (of who they were before the event) with their new identity allowing them to move forward.
Lastly is one of the stories from one of the girls about her artwork which is on the front page of this blog.
“A new beginning” the bottom layer depicts the struggles of the oppressed. Sadness, bondage, imprisonment, betrayal from family and friends , prejudices from my community thus creating a feeling of anxiety, depression and low self worth. But slowly by being brave, finding a way to escape and becoming rescued from these situations comes support, respect, trust, safety and as the girls in the artwork turn towards the lotus flower, they blossom. Full of strength, made stronger by what they have endured and to become whatever they choose to be.