How Art And Creativity Helped Me Navigate Complex Grief

Why we need art and how it helps us process emotional pain and explore personal growth

Photo by Frankie Cordoba on Unsplash

My dad (Baba) died over 2.5 years ago and it broke me.

He got cancer during the pandemic but died of COVID during a second round of preventative chemo he was expected to survive.

I felt cheated twice over. F**k you death.

Baba was the sweetest man. He'd had a difficult life and although we hadn't always seen eye-to-eye, we were always close and in touch every day.

Devastated didn't describe the loss. I was utterly broken.

I understand now when they say you lose a part of yourself when a loved one dies.

My soul felt empty. Into the ether with him. It still does at times.

There were several endings during that period.

My freelance coaching project came to an end, as did my 2-year contracting day job.

Within a month of losing my dad, I was unemployed on two fronts.

Art and grief counselling helped me reconnect to life, and regain a sense of purpose and drive.

As new Father’s Days appear, another reminder of the loss kicks in but the impact is different.

Loss never leaves you but it changes with time.

The fog of complex grief blocks all light

Being the ‘sensible and strong one’ in the family, I had to sort out the funeral, probate and other practicalities.

I pushed through the first few weeks and once my employment ended, I hit a wall.

From what I’ve seen, those in grief either shut down and want to sleep all the time, or get wired and can't switch off.

I was the former. When my system gets overwhelmed, I'm like a robot with flat batteries.

Frankly, I can't remember much of the first 3-4 months of 2022. I don't know what I did with my time. My memories are patchy. I’d ended up with complex or complicated grief.

Complex or complicated grief is when intense, long-lasting symptoms of grief, together with ongoing problems and difficulties in coping with life, go on for more than six months after someone dies

Cruse Bereavement Support

I withdrew from life and vaguely kept in touch with others.

My mum had a knee replacement operation in January and I struggled to support her on top of our collective yet individual grief.

There was nothing left to give. As a people-pleaser and self-sacrificer, this was new territory. I couldn't even muster or feign interest or focus on others.

My mother hated it. Our relationship is still strained and the worst it's ever been for various reasons.

This grieving period was the start of the latest problems - the cracks have widened since. It’s clear that Baba was the glue in our family.

Over the months though, I kept looking at my art materials in the house, longing to create but not feeling able to.

Everything felt like hard work. The colours had drained out of life and it was like a black-and-white film. The days blurred into each other and became joyless.

It felt like it would never end.

Eventually, I reconnected my urge for creativity with the real world. It clicked after watching a YouTube video about poured acrylics artwork.

Baby steps.

This was new to me but looked simple enough to try. It didn’t have to be ‘good’. I just wanted to give it a go and experiment. It worked.

When you feel stuck, reduce friction and the barrier to entry so you take the first step. Done is better than perfect.

Tentative artistic footsteps return

I've always been artistic and creative. Something I got from Baba's side of the family - they were artists and ceramics potters, my grandfather having trained in the 50s in the Staffordshire Potteries before going back to Bangladesh to build his own ceramics factory.

I'd picked this up to as an adult and it weirdly came naturally to me. I never met my grandfather as he died when I was very young - apparently we’re similar and our handwriting is the same. I’ve mistaken his exercise books for mine.

It’s a secret connection to the past.

But since getting busy with the day job and starting a coaching business, art had taken a back seat.

Don't many of our hobbies suffer this fate? It’s sad.

Suddenly, I was inspired by this poured acrylic art process. I had some materials but ordered others from Amazon. I paint on the ground unless it’s a large canvas, which I do on an easel.

The floor was covered in newspaper and foil trays to catch extra poured paint.

I gave it a go and after some initial disasters, I enjoyed it.

A spark reignited.

I felt reconnected again. I got into flow states. I was curious and focused on something tangible in front of me.

All the things I’d lost with the grief slowly woke up.

It took a few weeks of exploration but it helped. I was expressing what occurred in my life, my mind and my soul. It was abstract but I could build on that if I wanted to.

My art has always been layered. At school and during my weekend adult ceramics classes, the teachers always said I never knew when to stop.

Perfectionist, me?

Ha - I just had to keep going until it looked ‘right’. Sometimes that worked, but other times it didn’t. I would ruin works as much as I created them. But I began painting over pieces or adapting them in a new direction.

I explored this layered flexibility more during this grieving period. It was an embodied process - I still had that aspect of ‘knowing’ when it felt right but I didn’t allow myself to get obsessive over things.

I went with the urge to paint over something or change it.

That shift over time has been liberating, even if it still creeps in.

The image below is one of my early experiments with this acrylic pouring technique.

The free-form nature of it makes it easy to start and is forgiving. It doesn’t have to look like anything - it’s about the process and what ‘feels right’.

‘Bridge Across Grief’ by Sabrina Ahmed, 2022 (Poured Acrylic on Canvas)

Take harsh judgment out of the creative process. Creative visual expression is an embodied process - allow expression to come out how it must.

Getting help and integrating art and creativity into living

Since that early pouring experimentation in 2022, I’ve done something artistic or creative most weeks.

Even if it’s small - a doodle, an idea to explore or since December 2023, a weekly watercolour I post on my X/Twitter - it’s a part of life now. Part of the living.

Back in April 2022, I finally felt ready to see a grief counsellor - mainly because I knew I had withdrawn dramatically from life and would have been content to stay like that had my friends and depleting bank balance not nudged me into getting help.

For some reason, being a hermit these days is frowned upon. I’m kinda built for it though.

Talk therapy has always helped, but so has art therapy. I used my artistic efforts in parallel to my counselling sessions and it helped me understand and integrate what we talked about over the next 6 months.

I remember talking to my counsellor about drawing a fish between our early sessions - it had been whole, but it was made up of pieces that were glued together.

Baba was the glue. Since he’d gone, the fish was in pieces. That was how I felt and the impact it had on my identity and life. I had broken into pieces.

It was literal as meaning-making goes, but a shift happens when you see your inner experience outside of you.

You get curious about it but from a safe distance. It’s still you, but not as vulnerable as when you keep it within.

It’s easier to make meaning from it. To extract and extrapolate the unconscious thoughts, emotions, feelings and interpretation that drove you to make those marks.

That logical part of you takes a back seat - you know the one - always jumping to conclusions and categorising stuff so it has an answer.

Our brains do this all the time, even if it’s the wrong answer - it prefers certainty more than not. When you go deeper though, and express those feelings, thoughts, and emotions you can’t yet label, you give that part of you a chance to speak.

Sometimes this deeper processing is instant. Sometimes it takes days and weeks to understand what the creative expression meant. But it triggers an internal process that creates a frameshift in how we see that situation or the world.

That ‘aha’ moment but in a subtle way.

When I’ve been angry and frustrated, getting that onto paper or canvas offers a release that feels healthier than screaming down the phone at someone.

Trust me, screaming down the phone at someone feels good in the moment but there are consequences.

But on paper or other material, you express in a way that’s just for you to know and explore. There are no awkward conversations or experiences to ignore after the fact.

I went through an awful interpersonal experience in my day job last year - it was bullying any which way you look at it.

I didn’t know what to do as I was still raw with grief around the 2-year anniversary mark of losing Baba.

My mood tanked fast towards the end of the year - I felt like I was constantly on shifting sands just trying to get through each day.

Don’t these things just seem to come at once? Life is dumb and annoying sometimes.

Having a creative output saved me though. I had a way to channel those experiences

Find a creative expressive process that works for you - the time, place, frequency, medium, whether alone or with others. Experiment, reflect, find meaning and explore.

The urge to share art and creativity to heal others

Whether it’s serendipity or something I actively searched for, I found an art-based coach who was teaching a Diploma in Art-based Coaching.

Anna Sheather from Art in Coaching created a year-long in person coach training course I had to join, to bring art into my coaching approach with others.

Whilst painting, drawing and being more creative, I found peace over time. I felt more connected to Baba and other parts of me that needed to heal.

We loved the creative process - even though he didn’t paint, he appreciated it from his years as a ceramicist. He could see the effort I put into a piece at a deeper level than ‘oh that’s nice’.

He realised how important it was to me - that was what I lost when he left. Someone who got me and how I saw the world.

At the start of my Diploma, we created a piece about our art story. It was incredibly emotional for me - I realised how intrinsically linked Baba was to it.

Encouraging my creative spirit as a child to right now, after he’d gone. There have been many tears during my study as I’ve developed a creative reflective process and art journalling practice.

There’s resistance often - sometimes you don’t want to go there.

You’re not ready. You know it will be painful, and overwhelming, and snotty and messy. You don’t want to deal with it or the flat, almost dead feeling afterwards.

I’ve realised though that’s often when I need to lean into it. To feel what needs to be expressed so it’s no longer pin-balling around inside my mind and body.

‘Better out than in’ as Shrek says. Who doesn’t get life lessons from animated movies?

I feel lighter afterwards. Not always, but the majority of times. A sense of relief that what needed to be expressed was able to be shared.

We all need to be seen, heard, accepted and to belong. These are innate human desires the world over. If we aren’t comfortable expressing these to ourselves, how do we have a chance of communicating our needs to others?

Art, visual expression and a creative reflective practice give us the tools and the space to do this. Humans have been doing this from cave walls to canvas for over 50,000 years - that’s no small thing.

During my art-based coaching sessions, I see the frameshifts and insights people get at a profound level, for example:

• How clients recognise the words of others are dangerous

• How they fill the void of a lost parent by over-eating and ignoring self-care

• That their work-related irritation and burnout distracts them from feeling the pain of grief

Emotional pain is physical pain when we ignore it, and don’t understand the lessons to take forward in life. Otherwise, we repeat the same mistakes until we do learn.

No one wants to do this - why should we feel pain at all?

Well, pain and pleasure are at opposite ends of the same spectrum - it’s hard to have one without the other.

Lean into discomfort. To get to the sunny side of the valley, you often have to wade through a river of sh*t. You get better at doing it the more you practise.

Key takeaways

I was going to share the neuroscience of grief and neuroaesthetics in this post but it ended up a personal expression of my story.

I’ll go into those topics another time as they are fascinating and the research grows. There’s much to learn and explore as it gets more funding and focus.

More importantly, I want to remind you that grief is a normal part of life and we don’t have to remain a prisoner to it. It takes as long as it takes.

These are earth-shattering experiences, cause us to question our identity and purpose in life, leave us alone or lonely, and much more besides.

From my observations though, the more we ignore the reality of grief, the harder it is to make sense of what’s happening.

The body remembers and it comes out in other ways over the years, whether physical or in your relationship to yourself or others.

Here is the TL;DR list of key takeaways for how art and creativity helps navigate grief:

1. Loss never leaves you but it changes with time.

2. When you feel stuck, reduce friction and the barrier to entry so you take the first step. Done is better than perfect.

3. Take harsh judgment out of the creative process. Creative visual expression is an embodied process - allow expression to come out how it must.

4. Find a creative expressive process that works for you - the time, place, frequency, medium, whether alone or with others. Experiment, reflect, find meaning and explore.

5. Lean into discomfort. To get to the sunny side of the valley, you often have to wade through a river of sh*t. You get better at doing it the more you practise.

There’s no one way to navigate grief.

Art, creativity and creative expression give you tools and methods to support you along that difficult process.

Start simple and experiment with what works for you - things will get better and you’ll create a legacy to the love you’ve lost. 🚀

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What art or creative activity to you want to experiment with to explore your grief?