328 – The Intersection of Art and Healing in the Brain, with Dr. Harriet Hill

Ending Human Trafficking Podcast

Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Dr. Harriet Hill as the two discuss the power of art as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma.

Dr. Harriet Hill

Dr. Harriet Hill was born to Dutch parents in Los Angeles. Her art is a unique fusion of her Dutch Heritage and Africa’s vibrant colors, where she lived for 18 years. For over 20 years, she has worked globally with survivors of war and violence, using the power of art to unblock emotions and facilitate healing. Those who experience her art are brought joy. Now, Dr. Harriet Hill advocates creativity as a tool to enhance perosnal flourishing.

Key Points

• Art serves as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma, particularly in communities affected by war and violence as it has the ability to help individuals express emotions that may be difficult to articulate verbally.
• It is important that ordinary people have access to trauma healing exercises and resources, especially in communities with limited mental health professionals. Dr. Harriet Hill’s work includes development of materials that allow non-professionals to facilitate healing through art.
• Dr. Harriet Hill emphasizes that experiencing beauty, especially in nature or art, is essential for mental health and nourishment of the soul. Engaging with beauty is not a luxury but a necessary part of self-care and overall well-being.
• While individuals have different cultural backgrounds, the experience of suffering and the need for expression through art are universal. Art transcends language barriers, allowing for shared healing experiences across cultures.

Resources

• 325: The Cost of Burnout, with Dr. Alexis Kennedy
• Healing Invisible Wounds by Richard F. Mollica
• www.harrietspaintings.com

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14
You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #328: The Intersection of Art and Healing in the Brain, with Dr. Harriet Hill. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Our guest today is Dr. Harriet Hill. Dr. Hill’s art is a unique fusion of her Dutch heritage and Africa’s vibrant colors, it brings joy to those who experience it. For over 20 years, she has worked globally with survivors of war and violence, using the power of art to unblock emotions and facilitate healing. She now advocates creativity as a tool to enhance personal flourishing. Welcome to the podcast, Harriet,

Dr. Harriet Hill 1:36
Thank you, Sandie. Thank you.

Sandra Morgan 1:38
When I first met you, Harriet, you were introducing me to materials on trauma that were designed to use with children, with families, with people outside the clinical arena. I was so impressed with how accessible you made brain healing to every person, and it wasn’t just something locked away in a clinical textbook that you could use for weightlifting. Tell us a little bit about your current work.

Dr. Harriet Hill 2:23
Okay, my current work. I have been working full time as an artist, painting for the last four years now. I had always painted a bit and used art in life, and in the trauma healing work I was involved in. But in the last four years, I’ve been painting full time and having a ball. I worked in minority languages for most of my career, in verbal communication, how we get an idea from one person to the other, through words. I’m very interested and excited to have time to explore how we communicate through visual images, because there’s similarities and differences, and I’m liking it a lot.

Sandra Morgan 3:13
Well, just for our listeners, I subscribe to Harriet’s newsletter and it pops up in my inbox, and I open it, and there is a blaze of color, and I can feel my response lifting. The more I thought about that, I thought, ‘I need to have her come on the podcast.’ A couple of weeks ago, we talked about burnout, and we talked about ways to avoid it, and why it’s so important. But how do we start building in practices that maybe we haven’t used before? Instead of being cautionary about things, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that,’ how can we build in positivity and maybe even a newsletter from Harriet Hill once in a while? Harriet, one of the things that I want to understand better is how your focus on the intersection of art and mental health can be used as a therapeutic tool to aid in healing the brain. Talk to us about that.

Speaker 1 4:35
Yeah. I lived for 18 years in Africa, and then was in and out of Africa for another 15 or so, and came in contact with people traumatized by war. I was actually working in language development, in Bible translation, but whole communities were rendered dysfunctional by the violence of war and the trauma they’d experienced. With some other colleagues and mental health professionals, we put together some materials that could be used by ordinary people in communities to at least help with mental health, because in many places in the world, there’s very few or no mental health professionals. So in countries that have war and trauma, there may be one or two psychiatrists in the entire country, at the time, this was in the 90s and early 2000s. We developed materials to help people with trauma, and then about four or five years in, we decided to try an art exercise, and I was appointed as the one to introduce it. I was with a room full of men, primarily men, some women, but primarily men in Ghana, and I was to ask them to do an art exercise, to express their pain through their drawing. We had clay, and markers, and paper. So I first did it myself to see what it would be like, and shared it with the staff, like what happens? How does this work? And then I shared it with the room, and I had never seen men in Africa, I’d lived in Africa a long time by that time, and I’ve never seen them really drawing, that was something kids did. It was with a bit of fear and trembling that we introduced this exercise to these people straight out of war zones. They took to it like it was their native language. We were very cautious about would you want to share this? You can, if you would like to share it with your small groups. They did it in small groups, and then they had some time to draw or do stuff with clay, and then if they wanted to, they could share it. They all wanted to share. They shared so long they missed dinner. We were at a conference center, and they helped one another to see what was going on and talk about what they had experienced. Because sometimes when we’ve experienced trauma, your brain goes offline, and your frontal lobe, your ‘thinking brain’ goes offline, and that’s the part that has the language. This emotional impact goes in and you don’t even have words for it. You can’t express it in words, it didn’t go in in words, your thinking brain was offline. Sometimes, your ‘feeling brain’ can let that out through art, and then you can look at it and say, “Oh, that’s how I feel. I didn’t know.” Being able to see it and put it into words, and talk about it, gives you a sense of control, a sense of agency, a sense of ‘I can handle this.’ It’s not just this vague, icky feeling, it’s sadness, it’s anger, it’s bitterness, it’s whatever feeling you might have expressed. That’s where I got started with it. I am not a psychologist. I love working with psychologists and psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, but what we did was especially for ordinary people in communities, whether they be churches or other communities, we worked a lot with churches, just what ordinary people can do to heal from trauma. It was amazing. That, I was involved in for about 20 years, and that ministry continues. I just got a message from a colleague in Australia, in Darwin, who is working with women, Aboriginal women who are incarcerated, and they’re doing art with clay and with drawing, and finding the same experience. I mean, it is so basic, it’s amazing how helpful it can be and how universal it is. Because these men in Africa, grown men, took to it like it was their natural language, found it extremely helpful. Because sometimes words fail us.

Sandra Morgan 8:56
Words fail us. Let’s go back to what you said about why they didn’t have language to express. We really promote talk therapy a lot, and often realize that there are no words to express. Explain that a little bit more, how that process happens with the prefrontal cortex.

Dr. Harriet Hill 9:29
I just did a skit with adults and with kids here in Pennsylvania, on our brain. It was sort of like that movie Inside Out, where you don’t see the main character, you see inside his brain. We had a thinking brain, we’re just using ordinary language. You could call it prefrontal lobe, etc., but we just call it our thinking brain, our feeling brain, and our reflex brain. The thinking brain is analytical and it uses language, and when it is overwhelmed by horror, by trauma, it goes offline, nothing goes in. Those experiences enter into you on an emotional level, but you might have struggled to put them into words, unspeakable horror. It was unspeakable, you don’t have words. Those things can just be a nebulous force inside of you, and you don’t understand it, and they come back in unexpected times. Because your thinking brain is chronological, it puts everything away in words, in your memory labeled with words and in a chronological order. That’s great, but when your thinking brain goes offline, that trauma goes in, and it’s not put in order. Things are just popping up, here, there ,and everywhere. You can’t make sense of it, and that’s where the art can help, because you are not thinking, you’re just making something, you’re making marks, you’re shaping clay. It can be dance, it can be song, it can be any sort of art. I’m more involved in the visual arts, but those things can come out. And then, your thinking brain can look at it and say, “Oh yeah, that’s how I feel,” and then you can start talking about it a little more. But there are things that are very hard to get out with words, because they weren’t put in with words. They didn’t enter you with words.

Sandra Morgan 11:30
This idea, it didn’t come in in words, then there’s no words to come out as a result. Let’s hear the rest of the skit, what did they do?

Speaker 1 11:46
Well, this was not a war skit. This was just a skit of an ordinary guy who was stressed, and then he saw a shooting, there was blood everywhere. He didn’t get hurt, but he was traumatized by that, and then he also took an art class, and as he drew, he was able to express his pain. We had the thinking brain, the feeling brain, the reflex brain, which just keeps all of your hearts and lungs and everything functioning, and that takes over with freeze, fight, flight when there’s no time for feelings or thinking, you just got to get out of danger. We had good chemicals, and we have good words for those. What are they? Endorphins and all of those wonderful chemicals that are released, and there’s a whole field of study called neuroesthetics, that when we see art or make art, those good chemicals are released, and our brain starts to feel better, and over time, we can really heal from those bad feelings, those stress chemicals. We have good chemicals, and then we have stress chemicals, so we had people acting out these parts. The stress chemicals are good when there is a crisis, they get you out of danger, adrenaline, etc., but sometimes they are triggered when there is no danger. There’s a loud noise like the sound of the gun being shot, but it really was just a drawer slamming shut. But that can release those stress chemicals in the same way as an actual trauma. The other thing that the stress chemicals can do that’s not healthy is they can just stay on. I think in your earlier podcast, talked about the pedal going down and getting stuck, and that can just wear out your body really quickly. So the skit that we did was trying to see how our brains work, how we respond to art, it does make us feel better. It releases the chemicals, and this is proven by a very careful scientific study, and how it can also help us express in visual form what we may not be able to express in words. I think of the New Mexico artist with her flowers, Georgia, O’Keeffe. She said, “If I could have said it in words, I would have,” and that was just about art and beautiful things she drew. But it also works for trauma. If we can say things in the talk therapy and get to the bottom of it, great, but there are things we can’t express in words. The idea is, if we can use some sort of artistic expression to get those things out and see them, then we can bring our thinking brain around it and say, “Okay, now let’s integrate this so that we have one story and we’re not in bits, not divided into strange things happening, flashbacks, triggered, etc.”

Sandra Morgan 14:50
My response to following your art and then beginning to see how you integrated healing the brain in your public presentations of your art, in gallery presentations. I don’t know art world language, but I started really being interested in that, and I’m curious, because of our listeners, we’re predominantly working in the area of anti human trafficking and aftercare for trafficking victims. So how do you see art therapy as a way of healing brains that have experienced the continual assault on dignity and personal agency?

Speaker 1 15:42
I see it in two ways. One is even early in Boston, Dr. Mollica published his book, which was “Healing Invisible Wounds,” I don’t know if you’ve read that, Richard Mollica, but he found with refugees, they need beauty. They need art. They need to be in beautiful places that are ordered and not chaotic, and not destructive. Beauty releases good things in us, and if we release those good chemicals often enough, we actually began to feel better in a in a more permanent way. It’s not like you’re going to look at something beautiful, a beautiful painting or something that calls you and be changed instantly, but little by little, we begin to get a handle on, we begin to have more and more of an experience of feeling good inside and remembering what that felt like. Beauty is really important, beauty and order, not chaos and destruction. The second way, I think, is when we are engaged in art, it engages us. We don’t have to be artists. We don’t have to be professional artists, even. Any class or any group that I’ve been in where people are making things, making art especially, there is a hush that falls over the room. People get so engrossed and so present, and they’re able to put things out and look at it and say, “Wow.” That experience also can help trauma victims, and the trauma that you’re talking about with trafficking, you have to tell your story lots. You have to tell it over and over again, it’s not just a one time thing. The art may give you some tools to express things you don’t even know are inside of you, until it comes out, and you talk about it and look at it and say, “Wow.” When I do art, what’s coming out of me a lot is happiness, joy, beauty, celebration, and it makes me feel happier actually. I just feel that, that’s what comes out. It’s very interesting. Every person has a story, every person’s art will look different. You can tell if you’re in a group, who did what without them signing it.

Sandra Morgan 18:07
As I’m listening to you, I’m in my mind, because my prefrontal cortex is fully engaged in this conversation, I’m processing this, and I’m starting to analyze and prioritize where, if I’m making a list of things for my budget and taking care of victims, making sure we have food and shelter right up there, the beauty piece, the flowers, the art, that’s if we have resources “left over.” Can you convince me that I have to do beauty on my budget, just like I do food? Is it that level?

Speaker 1 18:53
Yeah, I worked with Diane Langberg, who’s a psychologist who’s worked with trauma victims her entire life. She says you have to get out and just be in a beautiful space, whatever that is for you. Often it’s outdoor spaces, it depends what people consider beautiful, but it nourishes your soul. Beauty is nourishing and we need it. It gives us hope, it’s not an extra. I don’t think so. I would say art can help us through the trauma, but it also can help us flourish in normal life. I mean, you don’t have to be carrying around a lot of trauma to benefit, because we can all improve and become more alive. I think in America, we feel like, “On our budget we can’t afford time for art. We can’t afford art. Let’s just keep it all to the absolute essentials,” and I would say no, art is an essential for well being, for really being well, which I think is what we’re all after anyway. Not having more stuff, we’re after being well.

Sandra Morgan 19:56
I think I started putting two and two together after interviewing Dr. Alexis Kennedy about burnout, and realized that every time I opened your newsletter, I was a little lighter for the day. The aspect of vicarious trauma in this line of work is something that caregivers and activists, abolitionists, advocates, we often do not do that well, and this is such a call to engage beauty as a way of keeping our brain healthy, just like we would eat our greens and make sure we get enough vitamin C, etc., all of that.

Speaker 1 20:52
Exactly, it’s part of a self care diet, really. It is as important as your green vegetables.

Sandra Morgan 20:57
That’s it. Now we’re going to tell everybody, “Sorry, I’ve got to go to my art class, and it’s just like eating my broccoli.” All right, so what are some challenges that are pretty unique to using art therapy? I would start with guessing that it’s not part of the program because of budget.

Speaker 1 21:29
You can have an elaborate art program if you have the resources, but people are doing art exercises with children and adults, teens, with nothing but a pencil and a piece of paper. If you can have markers with color, that really helps. But one of the most compelling art exercises I did was with a guy who had a folded piece of paper, he unfolded it and a blue pen, and it was an incredible experience. I don’t think budget is necessarily a barrier. In the trauma healing work we did around the world, we’re very committed to making it affordable to local communities, because otherwise it’s not sustainable. So you don’t need a kiln, you don’t need a lot of paint. You can do it simply, if that’s what is appropriate for you. Of course you can do all the bells and whistles too.

Sandra Morgan 22:27
Yeah.

Dr. Harriet Hill 22:27
We even have children’s camps where it goes on for a week, and some places are able to work with the kids for a very minimal budget.

Sandra Morgan 22:37
The other thing that I observed in your work is the cultural diversity, and maybe I could even use the term relevance. How do you build that into the healing aspect?

Speaker 1 22:54
Well, we all are different as individuals, we’re different culturally, but we’re all the same in some ways as well. The experience of suffering and expressing our pain is pretty universal. We might do it with different sorts of designs, but it gets out there. I have found it to be more of a universal kind of experience, rather than being distinctive by cultures like here, you have to do it this way, there, you have to do it that way. I mean, there are some things like that, who could be in a small group together, for example, how the group is conducted. But the art itself is more universal than language, that’s for sure. When you get to language there, you have a lot of differences. Oh boy.

Sandra Morgan 23:42
Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 23:47
One of my colleagues and friends, Robin Harris, leads the Center for Excellence in World Arts at Dallas International University. They work more in music than they do in the visual arts, but they also work in visual arts. They have an MA and PhD programs in world arts, so they are actually documenting, studying, identifying all the differences, cultural differences. Music, for example, is a universal language to a certain extent, but then there’s differences in it. I would say the visual arts, I just find there’s a lot of similarity in how this art exercise works. I have not found it to be nearly as different as I expected.

Sandra Morgan 24:33
We will make sure to put links to these resources that you’re mentioning, because I’m sure people are going to want to study this more. Can you give us just a little bit more around the role of neuroplasticity in the healing process through art therapy? I think sometimes people get a diagnosis of PTSD, and now they’re in that straight jacket for the rest of their lives.

Speaker 1 25:06
Yeah, and you can feel very stuck because things are happening that you don’t feel like you have much control over. I remember one of my colleagues was a genocide survivor from Rwanda, and I remember in the late 90s, she said, “I will never heal from the trauma,” that she experienced during the genocide. She was pregnant, she gave birth to a baby that died right away, she fled. Everything was, as you know the story, it was horrific. I would say in recent years, I have found that she has healed to a great extent. We will always be impacted by any of the experiences we have. So if you have lived through trauma, it’s going to be part of your story, but it’s not going to be the defining part of your story. You can heal little by little, not overnight, but little by little, with these positive experiences, with telling your story over and over again, until you find that light inside of you, until you find your way out of it. But Diane Langberg talks about healing from trauma is the 3 T’s: talk, time, and tears. As long as that trauma is inside you and you have no way of getting it out, it’s going to be in control, pretty much, in ways that you you don’t like. You don’t recognize yourself, “I’m not that kind of person. I don’t blow up, I don’t get angry. I don’t insult people. I don’t do drugs, alcohol. I’m a good person.” You’re acting in ways you don’t even recognize. We do an exercise, we started with adults. We take water bottles and get a bucket, and fill the bucket with water, or the basin with water, and then ask the kids or the adults to try to hold down one bottle. An empty water bottle just filled with air, try to hold that down. Now, another, now, another, now, another, and before long, of course, the bottles are popping out of the water and they can’t control it, and that’s what those emotions are like. They’re in there, and it takes a lot of energy to keep it all down. I mean, I’ve seen people go through horrific experiences and try to minimize it. “Well, it wasn’t as bad as the other person. Well, it’s just part of life,” but actually, those wounds are in there, and they need to come out. They need to come out and get out where you can see them, and work with them. Just by telling the story and finding the hope that is there. What I found is when people feel safe, they want to tell the story because they can’t stop thinking about it, but they don’t want to think about it, but they can’t stop thinking about it. But when they’re safe, they can come out and then get out there, and then they can begin to heal. The tears are, I’ve read different things on tears, but I think they do carry some of the pain away. They’re a good sign, they’re your friend. When you start thinking of something, and people say, “I couldn’t cry, I felt nothing.” Well, when you start crying, it means those feelings, you’re feeling them finally, and they’re coming out, and it’s a good thing. The time, the talk, the tears, and the talk can be around a painting you’ve done or a drawing that you’ve done. It doesn’t have to only be the words initially, but those things reshape your brain, and the more charged it is, the better. In the trauma healing, people remember a 10 minute conversation when someone was really listening to them, and they can remember it like it happened yesterday. I’ve had people bring up things that happened in their childhood. Their sister died, and they talked to somebody about it for the first time, and they remembered, because it was a time when their brain was like recasting, reframing the story into something of beauty. There’s always beauty in the ashes.

Sandra Morgan 29:21
I love that.

Dr. Harriet Hill 29:22
But it might take you a long time to find them.

Sandra Morgan 29:23
I think you really have identified one aspect of moving it from trauma to a controllable memory, not something you have to keep pushing down so that it doesn’t suddenly erupt. This idea that in the healing, you’re left with a scar, so you have a reminder, but you don’t live in that open wound. You’re not constantly caring for it. I love that metaphor, because it shows that we are designed for healing, and I have scars from childhood and some from adulthood that are just reminders that I survived something. I’m going to reframe that. Not, “I went through this, but I got through this,” is my new story.

Speaker 1 30:30
Yeah, and you know when the healing is happening, because you talk about it and feel about it in a different way. You don’t have to badmouth people anymore, suddenly you maybe forgive people who hurt you. You can tell when it happens. A wound has to heal from the inside out, I had a granddaughter who had to have surgery as an infant. Her intestines were on the outside of her body, and they had to put them in. So she had a gaping wound across her abdomen, and it was hard to look at. I was like, “Can’t they sew this up?” They said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no. This has to heal from the inside out. Sewing it up, you’re just going to trap all the infection in there. It has to heal from the inside out.” That’s, I think, what we have to do with trauma. It will heal. Our bodies and our minds are meant for healing. The neuroplasticity that you you mentioned, our minds are changing all the time. We can have a hand in that by surrounding ourselves with beauty, by expressing ourselves in some sort of art. It doesn’t have to be visual art, it could be something like cooking, it could be dancing, it could be theater, it could be any of these things, but something where we are expressing ourselves and being creative is like your brussel sprouts.

Sandra Morgan 31:55
Oh my gosh. Harriet, what I saw during COVID in my community, is everyone was posting pictures of their latest charcuterie board. They’re showing you how to make little flowers. Instead of clay and markers, they literally are playing with their food, just like when you were 18 months old in your high chair. It feels like we’re designed to be creative, and we want to create opportunity for people to integrate that into their healing process.

Speaker 1 32:35
Yeah, and so we’re designed to be creative when we have trauma and other grief, loss, but also in ordinary times, it helps us be alive. It really does help us flourish.

Sandra Morgan 32:49
I think your guide in this art experience, you are particularly experienced. When you talked about your granddaughter’s healing from the inside out, and how hard that was to look at it. I have seen victims of trauma who have produced not beautiful, colorful, vibrant pictures. People have said to them, “Oh, don’t draw that.” What would you advise someone supervising an art program?

Speaker 1 33:28
Let it out, let it out. All of the ick, just let it out. In Africa, so often it’s pictures of airplanes dropping bombs, people with machetes, villages burning. I mean, really let it out, let it out, let it out. Do not shove it down, it’s not going to dissolve. I mean, there are some things we recover from, just in the normal process. If it’s not too serious, and we’re in a position of feeling resilient, we can heal. But those things that are lurking deep down inside us, and sometimes we have shoved them down for so long we’ve forgotten they’re even there, what life would be like without those things rumbling around deep in the dark, inside of us. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, what might come out is pain, but under that pain, there might be something really joyful that’s being trapped. What happens when you have trauma is, you want to avoid feeling the pain because it hurts so bad, trauma or grief, but when you avoid feeling the pain, you also avoid feeling happy emotions, and so you just become pretty much numb to any emotion, very flat emotionally. You’re not feeling the pain, but you’re not feeling happiness either. Once you can draw that picture of that horrific scene, great, get it out, that’s wonderful. And maybe now, what will come out after that might be something you never imagined was being held under it.

Sandra Morgan 35:07
Harriet, I am going to keep following you. Can you tell our listeners how to find you online?

Dr. Harriet Hill 35:14
Yeah, I have a website: wwwharriet’spaintings.com., and the same on Instagram. That’s Harriet’s Paintings, and it’s on Facebook as well. At the website, you can sign up for my newsletter, which I’m so happy to hear that you enjoy it, and I’m so glad that it brightens your day from time to time.

Sandra Morgan 35:41
Thank you. Thank you. I’m so grateful that you joined us today, and I’m going to be looking for ways to add just as much beauty as broccoli to my day. Thank you, Harriet.

Dr. Harriet Hill 35:58
Yes.

Sandra Morgan 35:59

All right. To my listeners, we’re inviting you to take the next step and go over to endinghumantrafficking.org. That’s where you can find resources that are often mentioned on the show. You can find out about the anti human trafficking certificate, and if you haven’t visited before, it’s a great first place to become a subscriber. And then you’ll get an email with the show notes when a new episode drops. Of course, I’ll be back in two weeks.