If such a narrative ended here as it might well have, both you and I would be left dissatisfied, frustrated (even angry) - no healing has occurred, no resolution reached. I have been left dislocated and ‘other’, my children emotionally motherless, and you with no information to perceive us in any other way. For the story to satisfy us both, I must move beyond this painful period and share with you how I recovered - both my physical self and my place in the world. I must complete my story to our mutual satisfaction.

Fortunately for us that was not how the story ended. My instinctive answer to this dilemma of dislocation was to initiate circumstances in which I could reconnect with those aspects of my life from which I had felt myself cast adrift. My family needed re-gluing and I needed to reclaim my capacity for deep engagement with the world. The most valued aspect of my life, aside from family and partnership, had been my creative life. I needed to reclaim my clan. It was by this means that I believed a sense of wholeness could be restored for myself, and my family. The question was how? We lived in the country, a long way from any city centre with not much on offer close to hand. I could venture out alone into a potentially indifferent world – take a chance on what creative opportunities I might find there – or invite the world to come to me. I decided on the latter and organised (with the support and hard work of my then partner) a residential summer art school on our farm, bringing forty-five people together for two intensive weeks of art-making in the woolshed and the haybarn and under the canopy of a huge brightly striped marquee. In this way, my family could share in the experience, my children participate and watch and play in their own (transformed) environment where they felt completely safe and at home. We could be restored together, reconciled in our life together.

recovery - transformation

Creativity = Reconciliation =Healing.

restoration - resurrection

While the initial impulse was intuitive, by the time the school was over and plans made for a second the following year, my sense of what I was doing had shifted and the link between creativity and healing became firmly established as part of my personal and professional life.

I did not think of this creative time with others as therapy at the time, nor do I see it that way now. The fact that I benefited enormously (as did others) was a product of our collective engagement in a natural, fundamental process of life, something extraordinarily normal, rather than the outcome of any therapeutic intervention in response to a particular pathological case history.

During my period of recovery after the accident, I made another crucial and fascinating discovery. My usual medium of visual expression, painting and drawing, could not communicate with sufficient subtlety, nuance and depth what I now had to say about language, memory, selfhood, communication and connectedness with others. Which is not to say that painting and drawing couldn’t express profound ‘truths’ about all of these things. Quite the contrary, but I found that I could no longer breathe the life I wanted into painting and drawing and that those activities were no longer breathing life back into me. I was literally dreaming about the symbolic power of words, seeing them form and reform in my mind’s eye. I had become entranced with the taste and feel and texture of words on the tip of the tongue. To feel that enlivening inspiration once again, I needed other forms of expression and happily found performance and writing. Writing and theatre became, in time, my dominant creative preoccupations , along with documentary film. Why that is so is one of the many questions I have asked as I have undertaken this research. Australian playwright, Louis Nowra, recently identified that the trigger for his writing passion was a serious head injury as a child. It seems strange, and exciting, to me that the sudden emergence of an impulse to write should coincide with being knocked sideways. What happened in those jangled synapses that would make someone need to pick up a pen and write?

Here began my life-long fascination with the ‘reason’ for art-making in different media – the ways in which different forms of creative expression, both in the making and the receiving offer different ways of communicating. I sensed an order in there somewhere, that the sequential evolution of different media and modes of expression had some purpose, that it wasn’t random or simple aesthetic preference either in the life of a single person or the whole of human kind. I began to wonder if the symbology of different artforms and the way they are embodied might offer a key to exploring how ‘new’ things come to be, how new pathways are accessed in the brain, particularly when existing pathways have been damaged or impeded in some way physically or socially.

I have experienced many, sometimes startling, instances of this triggering process in action - triggers that cause a person to respond in a completely new way to what is happening around them, to communicate in a completely new way with others around them - insights gained through music, through dance, through drama and story, through visual image.

In an arts project in a psycho-geriatric ward in Whangarei, NZ, a life-sized image I had drawn (in coloured pencil on canvas) of three children looking intently out of a window, caused a surprising reaction. An elderly woman who had stopped communicating some years before (she was virtually bedridden apart from being taken for occasional walks in her wheelchair) began to show a keen interest in being taken down the corridor to see the picture of the children. She would wave the nurse away and sit by them for hours, telling lengthy, coherent stories. While she still did not speak directly to those around her, she began to have conversations via the painted children with those real people who shared her life. A Croatian friend suggested that she was talking through the children to ‘the shades’. I wondered if she might be saying to us all, “Well none of you have been hearing me for years, maybe these three will.” What the image stimulated in her, or why, is impossible to know, that it triggered a response is a simple fact.

Seeing people take the momentous step of reaching out, symbolically at first, in a ritualistic way to one another, got me thinking about ‘Us’ as biologically social beings, our need to be ‘related’ to survive, and our need to fashion, and re-fashion stories about who we are and where we belong – stories that describe and lay claim to the clan.

It was clear from my own experience that to become or be defined as ‘other’ places anyone at substantial risk. If we are ‘other’ we lose our connection with the language of our common-unity. Without that language we cannot update or be updated in our ‘tribal’ narrative – we get left behind in the backwater of the neurosurgical ward, the looney-bin or the old folks home. Without the story of who and what we are we become totally dependent on the protection of the larger group, which has the privilege of knowledge. Protection that can be at any time withdrawn. Such a loss of agency, the state of ‘being other’, is a frightening, perilous state to be in.

At the same time, I was acutely aware that becoming ‘other’ is a necessary state to enter when change must occur, for example becoming an adult, becoming partnered, becoming a parent, becoming old, becoming well, becoming a bi-cultural or multi-cultural nation. The danger for individuals and social groups, it seemed to me, lay in becoming chronically, conservatively, immovably ‘other’ either by choice, by circumstance or by institutional force.

In 1987 during the final rehearsals of a four month multi-media performance project in a major psychiatric hospital in Dunedin, NZ, a thirty-eight year old man marched in the grand parade yelling, “Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood.” In the collective memory of staff in this institution he had never spoken an intelligible sentence, his intellectual disability supposedly precluding spoken language. What happened? Why did he choose that moment to verbalise? The gripping thing for me, and others present at the time was the word he chose, the complexity and brilliance of the association and its triumphant delivery. What the performance stimulated in him, or why, is impossible to know, that it triggered a response, is fact.

A transformative moment such as this - for an intellectually disabled man, for an Alzheimer patient, or a young woman temporarily damaged as I was – is the moment when the ‘part’ can be reunited with the whole. The time for reintegration has arrived. What is crucial at this point is how other people respond, whether the wider social group where a person should belong, can enter into the process of transformation and embrace the change without fear. “What changes will I have to make to allow him/her to speak and act independently? If she speaks will she become my accuser. If he becomes independent will I loose my power or my usefulness?”

I thought long and hard about whether to include these personal stories (my own and others) and they are told with some trepidation. I do not want to lay emotional snares for the unwary or engage in any form of emotive evangelism at the altar of recovery. I am aware of the danger in this, in the reading as well as the telling. Transformation narratives have become big business. They create heroes among the wounded and heroic healers too, and in so doing a class of wounded failures - those who have remained in crisis or oblivion, those who have failed to “successfully” reconstruct themselves. I challenge that kind of boxing in with story. The narrative of recovery moves somewhat more fluidly – between heroism and victimhood - and not always in the same direction. No-one can be said to be all one or all the other at any given time or through a lifetime. Recovery is as much about what we manage to relinquish as it is about what we manage to reclaim.24

A well-told story helps us better understand how another person feels, what part, if any, we could or should play in alleviating pain and suffering. Personal stories do help to guide us in helping others and bolster our courage to help ourselves. They can also be a dangerous balm helping to satisfy the need to feel that we are compassionate, that we truly empathise as we applaud the single heroic reconstructed soul or mourn the multitudes of shattered victims. Listening from afar can make us comfortable and sentimental - we heard, we watched, we wept and we offer up our tears.

This sounds harsh, after all everyone responds this way from time to time, and we can’t reach out to everyone, but sentimentality (as distinct from sympathy and empathy) requires an object, a ‘victim’ or someone/something cute and helpless. It is our greatest enemy in responding to another's pain, the greatest hindrance to ethical compassionate action.  It demeans the person(s) in need of our support, (by labelling them victim), and prompts us to do the easiest, most direct thing (wear a ribbon, buy a red nose, walk across a bridge) to assuage our discomfort, rather than to take the trouble to fully inform ourselves and consider what other human beings really need or want. It is an, ‘arms length’ emotion. Sympathy prompts us to step a little closer as we begin to read the meaning of another’s story and feel their presence, and empathy closer still as we step right inside the story, forgetting about ourselves for the moment, to walk in another’s shoes. I realise I am telling these stories as a ‘call to arms’, a gentle and respectful challenge. I include myself in this.

24 In a Radio interview in Australia in 2002, philosopher Martha Nussbaum related the response of a reviewer who had said that there was “something chilling” in intimately personal suffering being put to the service of academic thought and philosophical investigation. Nussbaum made it plain that in her view there is value in putting forward something personal that explains the importance and magnitude of a concept in individual terms, thereby allowing the reader to mine their own experience for clues to understanding more universal concepts.