Wrong-handed Hope

If you've ever tried to throw a ball with your non-dominant hand, then you remember the feeling. Awkward, alien, confusing. Use your "off" or "wrong" hand to brush your teeth, put your contacts in, or write a few sentences on paper, and the experience is similar. Even someone with five decades of life experience can feel new to their body simply by altering daily tasks in this one simple way. 

Building from that experience, I designed an art-therapy group called "wrong-handed hope" in which I asked clients to draw two different images. One image, drawn with the "wrong" hand, would represent hopefulness. The other image, drawn with the dominant hand, would represent hopelessness. After completing both images, clients placed them in a group that I arranged in a salon-like manner. The group perused the artworks and had to determine which images depicted hopefulness and which ones depicted the opposite. Check out the three gallery images for the results. 

The activity aimed at accessing several non-dominant "muscles" at the same time. The first of these is the muscle of playfulness, which, if not cared for, atrophies with age. Every time I ask adults to pick up crayons, color pencils, and markers, I hear the same replies. "I'm a terrible artist." "I can't draw." These comments are not much different from the self-judgments of "I'm a terrible person" and "I can't do anything right," both of which I hear too frequently in therapeutic environments. Where do the statements come from? Even when they come out of the mouths of the people I'm working with, I always say that the words aren't theirs. They are, instead, words they were told or names they were called by others when they were younger. If we tell children or suggest to them in any way that their artistic forays are mediocre or just meh, then, given the lack of value placed on artistic thinking in our school systems, it's only a matter of time before the children will infer that they aren't "meant" to do art, or that art is "not for them." This is a catastrophe. Imagine a world in which art is meant for only a few. Sadly, that's this world. And look where's it gotten us.

Second, the activity secretly plays mischievously with our sense of certainty. Of all the "dominant" mental "muscles" we have, the sense of certainty is one of the most annoying. It seems so great, as if to not want it is pure stupidity. And yet, the muscle of certainty is, at best, a defense mechanism, and, at worst, an obstacle barring us from true learning. By contrast, the non-dominant muscle of uncertainty is far more useful in the long run. If you're tracking the metaphor that I'm unspooling in this post, then you'll see that uncertainty is the traveling partner of "wrong-handed" activities like brushing teeth with "the other" hand. "Wrong-handedness" and the feeling of weird alienness that it brings into lived experience is akin to privileging uncertainty and not-knowing in the learning process. While that might seem scary or risky, it is in fact the only way one learns anything. To commence learning from a place of certainty would be a non-starter. The only way to learn is to is acknowledge that one does not already know. Thus, uncertainty is the pathway to knowledge.

By asking clients to draw hopefulness with their "wrong hand," I am inviting them to conjure into being a sensation that, for addicts, has essentially been foreclosed, and, what's more, to do it while embracing the awkward, alien, and confusing sensation that comes from assenting to non-dominance. In the same stroke, to draw hopelessness with the dominant hand is to silently acknowledge something that is always true but that we don't like to admit. Namely, whenever we become sure that there is no hope, we begin to actualize that surety with the same confidence of a middle-schooler drawing this: 

You've heard the factoid about how it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile, which infers a connection between the (greater) effort it takes to sustain a negative affect compared to the (lesser) effort it takes to tilt toward the positive. Well, the same principle is in effect here. When we produce hopelessness, we tend to do so with the same surety as we bring to drawing a "Cool S" with our dominant hand. By distinction, when, or if, we produce hopefulness, it usually ends up looking like a child's drawing of hope: innocent, naive, shaky, but brilliant, inspiring, beautiful. 
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The relationship between these ideas and the work of recovery will likely be clear to you by now. For addicts, the future can't help but appear bleak. If they base their image of the future on the experiences of the recent past, then the road ahead is daunting. The work of recovery, however, is essentially the work of honoring your "wrong" hand. You are producing a reality with the fine motor skills of a child. This is not a bad thing. Instead, it's a reminder that the fine motor skills of children are what produce the most imaginative artworks of humankind. After all, Picasso is famous for having said, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." Such a beautiful reminder for people in early recovery: your aim is not to produce a masterwork like those of the Renaissance elite; rather, it is to play with the aplomb of a child learning what it means to live.