On Escape Road - The Inner Place Where Creative Compassion Comes From

Art is a pathway to Relational Empathy when worst trauma is sealing us down. Art is a bridge to life saving connectedness. Art, even coming along as imaginative art, is an act of living.

Late in life I dream of a fellow prisoner in a concentration camp secretly passing over to me a drawing as a reminder that no matter what, I am not alone.

The scenery never happend to me in life. How come that my dream force puts me at a place like this with a stranger from the men's camp offering me a gift of love?

His picture shows his face on a piece of wrapping paper. It is created roughly with chalk crumbs (in the primary colors of yellow, red and blue). The picture is small enough to be carried under my cloth. It has been made just for this.

Carrying it around at women's camp I feel less frightened. The man's self protrait is like a true friend and companion encouraging me to keep up hope.

The scenery of this dream could be interpreted as a symbolization of a woman's animus shifting from a negative force to positive support. Such depth-oriented interpretation is missing out the implicit power of the dream. Taking the dream force as the overal life force (Eugene Gendlin), I see the dream as an answer on how to heal from aesthetic trauma.

What do I mean by 'aesthetic trauma'?

Atmospheres of our surrounding can hold something we react to with trauma response because something has happened and it happend not to us. Background feelings (occuring e.g. in dreams) speak of such kind of atmospheres. Trauma hidden in vage atmospheres is very hard to grasp as no trauma event has happened we can recall.

Our senses are an open system to all kinds of environmental aesthetic input, input of the current situation and input from across generations. We bodily respond to aesthetic inputs of all kind, and the inputs can hold trauma material. Our body does respond due to the fact that we as humans are aesthetic animals having an 'animal body' (Eugene Gendlin). The term 'aesthetic trauma' is standing for this phenomenon.

I am a school kid sleeping in the family room (the couch is my bed for 16 years). I am looking up at a hudge oil painting in a golden frame hanging at the wall. The picture is showing a dark landscape painted in wild strokes.

Waking up at night I have to turn away from the picture. It is frightening. Waves of anxiety are flooding me. Comfort through caregivers is out of reach.

My coping strategy is to let my eyes slide along the patterns of the persian carpet on the floor in front of the couch. Those patterns are real, colorful and repetitive. At the edge of the carpet they go on and on like an endless caravan, defining a rectangle. This rectangle is serving as a holding container.

The carpet patterns show marks I decide to be little animals.

The animal shapes are helpers. They allow me to escape to a space of imagination that is friendly (they put me to a desert under the sun). Out there the shapes are getting alive. They become living creatures carrying me on their backs.

I follow the marks with my eyes as if painting them in detail. I do repetetive imaginative painting. It is a kind of re-experiencing over and over again what feels good. I am on escape road calming myself down with an imaginative brush on threads of indian yellow, red and blue.

I am a young adult when my father reveals that the picture has not been purchased. The oil painting has been produced by one of the family hobby artists (there were two). It was the biggest painting of the family artwork and it differed in style.

My greatuncle had painted the picture shortly before he shot himself with a pistol in Nazi Germany. He had been a pharmacist and a respectable member of the city council, painting for leisure. He was excluded from city council and expropriated though he decided to divorce from his wife to keep his pharmacy. She then was deported.

Decades later I realize that my body has felt the historical Befindlichkeit of this artist ancestor as a strong background feeling of horror. It has been implicit in the art aesthetics, invading the body.

My body wisdom has served me wonderfully when being exposed to his painting. It has helped to find ressources in ornamentic art craft bridging to imagination and peace.

My dream illustrates how to escape from transgenerational and aesthetic trauma. Life force is stepping in when dialoging with arts is possible and taken at risk.

Trauma healing needs to connect to another person in order to reconnect us to life. When there is no other person around, this supportive other can be someone living behind a picture. The presence of this person comes through like a portrait of its maker, even on a scrap of shabby paper. Connecting with the artist-within-the-picture makes him and me one people, and a feeling of Us can emerge.

There sure is more in the dream than I can tell. The overt message is the image of a man sharing his self-made portrait to keep one of his fellows alive. This image is a strong symbol of Relational Empathy and courageous empowerment. It is depicting an inner place where deep compassion and resilience come from.

 © Freda Blob https://www.artsfocusing.com/creative-compassion/blog

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