Client's don't often come into treatment with any knowledge of (or interest in) art history, so I try to find as many opportunities as I can to introduce them to visual art. Today's art therapy group drew inspiration from the Impressionist Berthe Morisot and the Expressionist Erich Heckel. I showed them Morisot's Psyché and Heckel's Männerbildnis because I wanted them to use Impressionist and/or Expressionist visual language to produce self-portraits. There was, however, a catch. The two self portraits had to be conceived from the perspective of two people: a stranger and someone who knows you well. This constraint, in addition to the artistic mode of expression, produced the therapeutic effect of the group; namely, creating self-portraits through others' eyes helps to make visible how we see ourselves, how we hide parts of our emotions from view, and how we yearn for others to see the parts of ourselves that we hide. 

Research supports the use of art therapy as a means of fostering emotional regulation, enhancing insight, and promoting psychological flexibility (Kimport & Robbins, 2012; Gussak, 2007; Slayton et al., 2010). The dual self-portrait exercise specifically encourages clients to explore the discrepancy between internal and external perceptions of self, which can be particularly valuable for individuals in recovery who may struggle with shame, self-stigma, and identity confusion (Mezo & Short, 2012; Kim et al., 2017).

Since most clients are highly judgmental, especially when it comes to their own perceived lack of artistic skill, I provided a few extra words of guidance:

• Use of Color: Participants should represent affective states and emotional intensity through color choice (Moon, 2010).
• Use of Line: Use lines to show your measure of self-cohesion and mindfulness regarding present-moment awareness.
• Background Setting: Let the background image or texture act as a metaphorical tool for exploring underlying values, personality traits, and environmental influences on identity.

Here are some of the results:

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. 

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. 

I. Indigenous Cultures Institute
For the 2024 Performance Philosophy conference in Austin, Texas, members of the Miakan-Garza Band informed our group about their ongoing struggle with various educational institutions. The members who spoke to us were:
· Dr. Mario Garza currently serves as board of elder’s chair and is the principal founder of the Institute.
· Maria F. Rocha, Secretary
· Ruben A. Arellano, Ph.D., Consultant

Here is a summary of what they told us:
​"The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) databases list more than 7 million Culturally Unidentifiable Inventoried (CUI) Native American remains of our ancestors that have been unearthed over the years and are kept in “collections” by universities, museums, and federal and state departments.  This has happened in a country where it is against the law to disturb a human grave.

As of 2015, the remains of 3,454 ancestors were removed from our Texas sacred grounds.  Over 2,400 of those ancestors are at UT-Austin. The Miakan-Garza tribe is seeking three of those remains for reburial. “Our obligation, as native people, as Texas Indians, is to obtain possession of these ancestral remains and rebury them as close as possible to where they were unearthed.” — Dr. Mario Garza

UT ISSUED DENIAL OF REQUEST TO REBURY ANCESTORS:
On June 3, 2020, UT denied the tribe’s request to rebury their ancestors.  The Miakan-Garza appealed to President Jay Harzell to overturn this decision and gave him until August 17th to respond. No response was received. On August 20th the tribe issued a press release targeting the university’s unwillingness to turn over the ancestors for reburial. September 7th, the community gathered and united with the UT students to launch a campaign for the ancestors’ release."

Put simply, the University of Texas has transformed ancestors into objects. 

II. The Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory
During the same talk, I learned that TARL made it possible for scientific researchers to rent the remains. That is to say, the Miakan-Garza band cannot repatriate their ancestors because they have been turned into objects, but others who are interested in the objects can pay money to spend time with them. 

III. Alchemical Research Coalition, a division of the Invisible College

Let us imagine that there is a revivification of the Invisible College.
 
Founded by the natural scientist Robert Boyle in the 17th Century, the Invisible College convened around a distrust for knowledge received through inherited institutional frameworks. This ensemble, which included the likes of Christopher Wren, took as its motto Nullius in Verba (‘on the word of no one’), a phrase in which resides a distant echo of the founding Performance Philosophy proposition that we ought to think without knowing what thinking is. The Invisible College’s mission was to think anew by refusing the keywords and presumed certainties that pretended to vouchsafe the bedrock beliefs of the sciences. Engaging in experiment and active observation of the physical world around them, Boyle and his colleagues built their own theories and inspired a new generation of non-conformist intellectuals.
 
As non-philosopher Francois Laruelle sees the discipline of Philosophy as a machine that endlessly produces problems suited perfectly to the answers that the discipline itself produces, I understand the University as an institution that, more and more, seeks to commodify education and produce the language that would legitimate and sanction such an education, all the while blocking students’ paths to forms of learning that would cultivate not workers but life-artists, or, better, performance philosophers. This is something to grieve. The University has not irrevocably ceded ground to the forces of ignorance. But the battle is underway. The question: what is to be done? I have been imagining ways to supplement traditional University offerings with experimentation within the Invisible College. The Invisible College has no defined curriculum but operates within the field of research mapped by Performance Philosophy, and as such it would have two guiding principles: 1.) To think such that we do not know what thinking is. 2.) Doing life is that which we must think.
 
So imagine that this Invisible College is alive. And imagine further a group called the Alchemical Research Coalition. Within this coalition, 4 researchers have formed a multidisciplinary humanities research cluster to function as a node of the Invisible College dedicated to completing the work of the great alchemists of the past. Let us imagine that the names of the researchers are Ahmed Adel Awni Al-Dous, Mays Hossam Jamil Al-Zaanin, Ayla Ahmed Ali Obeid, and Niveen Khaled Saleh Hassouna. They partnered with the Miakan-Garza Band and submitted a fellowship application to the American Council of Learned Societies. The stated goal of the proposed research project was to enact an alchemical transformation of objects into ancestors through a fusion of Occult Philosophy, such as that used by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and song, such as that produced by members of the Garza band.
 
The project proceeded in this fashion. First, the team used ACLS funding to rent the remains of the Miakan-Garza ancestors from the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory. Second, once in their possession, the remains were buried on the Sacred Ground of the tribe. Third, the researchers and the tribe members performed alchemy that transformed objects—remains held by the university—into ancestors—participating members in the daily lives of the Miakan-Garza people.

The University sued the researchers and found themselves in the position once occupied by the tribe. No longer the ones in possession of anything, they had to request the return of the ancestors in order to transform them back into objects. The tribe denied the request. Thus, a second alchemical transformation had taken place. The University became those who are denied.

IV. What can imagining do?
It is perhaps an understatement to say that imaginative and creative thinking are needed in the present moment. Is there a way to intervene creatively, perhaps through fiction, in our daily reality so as to produce a kind of change that seems magical upon initial inspection but turns out to be fully material? Might grief be the affective source material upon which we can draw to produce cracks in the smooth façade of daily life?
 

A large part of group therapy in a substance use treatment center is “psychoeducation,” which typically covers topics like the science of addiction, medication information, and models of addiction. Absent from these typical topics are those that students would find in a college or university environment. That absence has been made on purpose. Social scientists tend to disqualify certain topics from the treatment programs in substance abuse facilities because they (appear to) have no bearing on the problem of addiction and the practice of recovery. One example of an excluded topic is epistemology, the study of how we know or come to know anything at all. I have not encountered any research discussing this specific topic within the realm of substance abuse treatment, but I would not be surprised to find comments suggesting that clients either aren’t able to fully “get” epistemological issues (because of withdrawal symptoms, assumed levels of intelligence, or lack of formal educational experience), or, if they “get it,” then the topic itself is too boring and/or disconnected from the real world of substance abuse. People who know me will anticipate that both possible objections hold no water with me, and they may even be able to hear me thinking, “Let me give it a shot. Let me see if I can make this interesting.” 
​
And that’s what I recently did in a group therapy session titled, “On not liking asparagus.” I was not going entirely rogue with my decision. The National Philosophical Counseling Association stakes its theory of change on the value of shifting epistemological frameworks in order to see oneself and the world anew. To interest clients in the task at hand, which, admittedly, has nothing to do with addiction, I introduced them to this imaginary child-like statement I first encountered in Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989):

I’m so glad I don’t like asparagus because if I did then I’d eat a lot of asparagus, and that would be terrible because I hate asparagus.

And then I transposed the same logic to a more familiar topic:

I’m so glad I don’t go to NA/AA meetings because if I did, and if I started liking the meetings, then I’d be at meetings all the time.

Researchers of narrative therapy such as Freedman and Combs (1996) and White and Epston (1990) have argued convincingly that healing from mental health issues requires externalizing phrases, images, and emotions that we believe to exist "inside" of us. Once "outside," these phrases, images, and emotions take on new characteristics as they tangle with the material world. Storytelling, for example, accomplishes this goal. By telling our stories, i.e., by narrating our experiences, we package our lived history in ways that appeal to others and, in turn, we create the possibility that others will validate our experiences, shed light on certain mysteries, and provide insights into our personal struggles, thereby fostering a sense of togetherness in the world.  

I adapted these ideas in today's art therapy group. (See the previous blog post for another analysis of art therapy in action.) This group invited clients to practice externalizing the substance use and mental health problems that they typically restrict to their “internal” or “mental” self. The purpose of externalizing problems, again, is to gain perspective on something that often masquerades as “natural” or “given” but is, to the contrary, constructed, in part through our thoughts and beliefs about the malady. By undertaking this externalization process in a group therapy setting, clients can collaborate on the production of new perspectives and generate viewpoints that could be pleasantly surprising and/or unexpected.

Here are the instructions I gave to a group of seven clients

• Each person starts with a piece of paper and a pen, colored pencil, crayon, or marker. The first instruction is: draw a line on the paper that represents your struggle with addiction
• Hand the paper to the person to your left. With the new piece of paper in front of you, look at the line on the paper and add a new line that represents the road of recovery required to remedy that specific addiction
• Hand the paper to the person to your left. With the new piece of paper in front of you, reflect on the two lines and then add colors that emphasize the emotions you see in the lines
• Hand the paper to the left. With the new piece of paper, add a new color to the page that represents challenges that could prevent long-term recovery
• Hand the paper to the left. Look at the paper you received. Something is missing from it. What is that missing thing? Add it.
• Hand the paper to the left one more time. Look at the new piece of paper and add a title to the image, one that fits the color, shapes, and lines you see on the page

The slideshow shows the results of the activity. I placed the artworks on the floor and asked clients the following questions: What if these artworks were the only things we had to guide us through recovery? What if there were no 12-step programs, no evidence-based practices, no research on addiction? What if you had to figure out how to live your life according to these images alone? How would you go about healing yourself?

Of the many take-aways from this activity, here's a vital one. The first line drawn on the page may be someone's unique expression of their struggle with addiction. But the path forward from that point will not transpire in isolation. Others will necessarily add to that first "line." As such, we benefit from working together to produce an artful way of moving from the first line to the caption we'd like to include beneath the finished product of our recovery journey. 

Works cited:
Freedman, J., Combs, G. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. New York : W. W. Norton.

​White, M., Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York : W. W. Norton.

Every Monday at 9am, I lead a group therapy session called "Arts and Sciences." The rationale for the group topic and title is twofold. First, scholars have demonstrated the benefit for artistic therapeutic modalities in substance use treatment settings for numerous reasons. Dingle et al. (2009) have shown how music therapy in this setting compels clients to pair their efforts in recovery with the parts of themselves that derive motivation from music. Heiderscheit (2009) explains how music therapy engages the individual and the group at the same time, thereby making it ideal for substance use treatment centers where most of the day is dedicated to group therapy. Anggawijayanto et al. (2024) and Breslin et al. (2003), though in different ways, identify the process of "finding one's voice" as crucial for increased self-esteem, which, in turn, can fuel long-term recovery. As such, narrative-based art therapies (e.g., poetry or manifesto writing) can provide useful containers into which clients can place strong values and beliefs. Wadeson (1980) explained “that what is more desirable than isolated descriptions of [arts therapy] techniques is a theoretical framework from which to select appropriate materials and methods” (cit. in Hinz 2009, 20).

​Whichever artistic medium one may choose, the process of thinking artistically gives clients access to parts of themselves that have likely been turned off by drug addiction and alcoholism, parts that were active during childhood but deemed "useless" or tangential to the "true" purpose of life (ostensibly, getting work, contributing to the world, making a difference). And while scholarship is important, my own personal experience leading art therapy groups in the treatment setting has validated my long-held belief that art is transformative and that the therapeutic journey requires more art and less science, especially in treatment settings. 

My second rationale for leading an "Arts and Sciences" group is that, while the evidence is compelling, clients often have a bias against art, claiming that it is unserious or superfluous in a setting where each group emphasizes the life and death stakes of treatment. Equally as common is the belief in clients that "I'm not a good artist," which is often a narrative they acquired from authority figures who judged or invalidated their artistic expressions against certain ideals or norms. As such, given these biases, I've found it necessary to explain the brain science and cultural studies-like social science behind artistic expression. I'll point, for example, to the work advertising is able to do upon the brain to persuade people of needs they didn't know they had, or to the culture jamming (a la Situationist International) projects that have been capable of challenging and shifting epistemic frameworks that shape how one sees anything at all. Taken together, then, "Arts and Sciences" is a group topic that enables clinicians to play creatively with interventions not typically taught in textbooks of addictions treatment and that enables clients to tap into parts of themselves that store strong emotions that haven't been validated in years or sometimes decades. 

One of these Arts and Sciences groups asks clients to make three types of flyers that I promise to hang in public spaces. 1 flyer must be a serious or genuine ad for going to treatment. 1 flyer must use irreverence to solicit authentic interest in substance use treatment by utilizing "dark" humor or direct speech to compel attention. 1 flyer must be for "meaning in life," and I leave it open-ended so as to see what clients make of that invitation. The role of irreverence in this activity is important for many reasons. One, the ability to laugh at oneself and at others like you is, generally, an ability to truly see yourself in the world. As Simon Critchley writes in On Humor (2002), “The object of laughter is the subject who laughs” (14). He goes on to say, “A true joke, a comedian’s joke, suddenly and explosively lets us see the familiar defamiliarized, the ordinary made extraordinary and the real rendered surreal, and we laugh in a physiological squeal of transient delight, like an infant playing peek-a-boo....Thus, jokes are a play upon form, where what is played with are the accepted practices of a given society” (10). One may not immediately think of a client in treatment as a "comedian," but there is no doubt that clients in treatment are in the best position to help society challenge the accepted stigma against addicts and shine light on the ostrich-head-in-the-sand behavior that leaves substance use treatment in the category of "Things we just don't talk about." As such,  by using humor capable of breaking through the wall of silence around addiction in society, clients become powerful change agents. If clients are comedians, per se, then they certainly ought to be empowered to engage in comedy during a time in their life beset by mirthlessness and feelings of failure. 

Here's an example of one of the flyers made by a client at Nova Transformations where I work. 

If we take a moment to analyze this, we see the arts and sciences at work. First, note the handmade appearance of the flyer. Compared to the AI-generated group of people engaged in serious conversation in a group setting that one is likely to see on treatment websites, this flyer feels quite human. More than that, it feels childlike. In a public forum like the public library or a grocery store bulletin board, a handmade aesthetic like this will catch people's eyes. Second, the childlike, handmade aesthetic clashes with the large "Free Drugs" that pops into our vision first. Third, the clash produces an incongruence that compels further inspection. If, fourth, the inspector is a person who uses drugs, then the words "Free Drugs" will entice them even more, but, fifth, the "sale" of free drugs is undercut by the smaller print that reveals the entire pitch: "be free from drugs." The spectator is then forced to act: stay and think or recoil.

Talking about this particular flyer in the group, each client recognized the habitual, anti-authoritarian response to such appeals that still lives in them even as they sit in treatment. "Don't tell me I need help!" That adolescent defiance is a hallmark of in-built defense mechanisms that, far from actually protecting people, often lead them into commerce with "the devil they know." All the clients in this group know this defiance because I always chip away at it, ask them to perform it, and ask them to over-emphasize it thereby drawing it out into the light where it withers upon inspection. The clients know that spectators of this sign will elicit strong responses, and that's precisely why this client chose to design the flyer in this way. It's a provocation. It is irreverent. It effectively winks at those who know and then gets real to say, no, really, come join us. Come to treatment.