Trauma can damage anyones creativity.
Recently, I’ve gone through a lot. Very traumatic events have taken place that resulted in mourning the lose of relationships of 10 plus years. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid the lose if I wanted to regain my spiritually emotional freedom. The lost effected my husband and I so much that we had to move. The simplest way to explain it is that we discovered we were being spiritually abused. I won’t go into great detail regarding that but I will say church abuse is real but we still love God’s church and believe in the local church.
We aren’t those people who have incredibly bad experiences with the church and God’s people and turn our backs on everything related to Jesus. However; this experience has shown me that it’s real and I can understand to a degree why people go through those type of seasons where they need the grace of God to meet them heavily.
Throughout this experience I have been noticing some elements of my life that have been oppressed by other people’s opinions and thoughts of myself personally and creatively that distorted my actions. When I first began to blog in 2006 many of my blogs were about how I was processes what God was doing in my life and how I wanted to offer encouragement.
With all that is going on I am realizing that the value I add to this community is encouragement. I don’t know what traumatic experiences you have gone through personally but I do know that trauma will completely alter the way you view your own creativity and ability to be produce.
One of of the major issues with the creative soul is that it is stained by the opinions and thoughts of others. Don’t get me wrong! Creative critique is good and needed. It takes a humble person to allow others to give input on what they have created from there souls.
However; many of our creative entrepreneurial souls need to be restored from the opinions of others. We have stopped creating freely. There is an overload of blogs, books, and YouTube videos about the five steps to monetizing this and that. The concepts are very alluring and suck you in. But is that what you are called to. I believe in monetizing. I believe in marketing. I believing in developing yourself. What I have been a victim of is adding the value others want me to add to others and not the value I’ve been created to add to others.
Our creative soul are in need of healing. We have become victims of the Instagram, follow, like, scaleable systems of this world and that is not how our creative souls were designed to work. Johnathan Golden has a new book releasing in Be You. Do Good.: Having the Guts to Pursue What Makes You Come Alive in the books he speaks about purpose. When we think of the work we do we must shift our focus away from the money, exposure, and thoughts of others. He states, “All of our work is a means of making God’s world on earth a bit more like heaven”.
Our creative souls will experience healing the more we do work that matters. You can pray, hustle and repeat but is that the hustle your supposed to be grinding at.
How have trauma tainted or flourished your creativity?
-Reflections for a person suffering with post traumatic growth.
When Trauma and Creativity Collide March 4th, 2016christinafaith