[See Part 2]

“Sometimes you’ve got to let everything go – purge yourself. If you are unhappy with anything…whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you’ll find that when you’re free, your true creativity, your true self comes out.”

Tina Turner

Helping ourselves get as free as possible to create can take many forms, of course. Including, for Tina Turner and many other people, getting out of a destructive relationship.

Psychologist Cheryl Arutt believes “the best way to protect the art is to protect the artist.

“Learning how to regulate internal states, how and when to use self-soothing techniques, and how to know when we are actually safe — these are key to emotional well-being for anyone, but for artists, they are especially useful.”

She adds, “The ability to self-regulate provides an all-access pass for traveling the internal world, allowing the artist to mine for the gems that can be found there… without losing touch with the light of day.”

“I would burst from all of the emotion inside.”

How do you work with your strong emotions? Creative people experience a wide range and depth of intense emotions, and use that wealth of feeling to create artwork and performances.

The idea of overseeing or regulating emotions is not necessarily about suppressing or stifling, but about staying aware and in control of our feelings, to live with a higher level of well-being, and be more creative.

The quote above is from Gloria Reuben, who said: “The thing I love most about acting is that while I am doing a scene, I am allotted all of the freedom to feel. Sometimes, actually I find that most times in life, one is not able to fully express what one feels.

“And I am the kind of person that feels so much that if I didn’t have acting (and music), I would burst from all of the emotion inside!”

[From officialgloriareuben.com; photo from "Lincoln"]

In addition to all the destructive consequences that may follow traumatic experience, some people say it also has power to encourage creative expression.

The photo is of the late actor Charles Durning (1923–2012) who reportedly appeared in over 200 movies, television shows and plays.

In World War II, he was severely wounded by shrapnel, and also engaged a very young German soldier in hand-to-hand combat.

After killing the boy, Durning said in an article, he “held him in his arms and wept. He said the memories never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else.”

Can this kind of trauma, which often leads to PTSD, have any positive impact on creative imagination and expression?

In her provocatively titled post Does Trauma Increase Creativity?, Laura K Kerr reports on a study that, she notes, “suggests there may be a connection between creativity and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Both naturalistic and out of the ordinary sensory experiences have inspired artistic creation since our cave painting days.

In the Introduction to his book on the topic, neurologist Oliver Sacks notes that in the early sixteenth century, the term hallucination meant simply “a wandering mind.”

He explains that “in general, hallucinations are quite unlike dreams. Hallucinations often seem to have the creativity of imagination, dreams, or fantasy — or the vivid detail and externality of perception.

“But hallucination is none of these, though it may share some neurophysiological mechanisms with them.”

He says his favorite definition is that given by early psychologist William James: “An hallucination is a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. The object happens to be not there, that is all.”

Our inner experience as talented, creative people could be called “teeming” – as in the title of a book by Jane Piirto, PhD: My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers.

She notes the title comes from a Keats sonnet with the lines “When I have fears that I may cease to be / before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain…”

[From her article Themes in the Lives of Successful U.S. Adult Creative Writers.]

Creative people may be driven to create more and more, to keep fueling a teeming mind.

But that may also sometimes impede creative thinking and creative expression.

“I think I’ve spent my adult life dealing with the sense of low self-esteem that sort of implanted in me. Somehow I felt not worthy.”

Halle Berry was commenting in an interview about what motivates her to support and work with an organization that helps women who escape violent homes.

She recalls being terrified that her violent father, who physically abused her mother, would turn on her.

One of the consequences for many people who suffer abuse and trauma is a corrosion of their self esteem. Recovering can be a long, even ongoing process.

Berry explained, “Before I’m ‘Halle Berry,’ I’m little Halle…a little girl growing in this environment that damaged me…I’ve spent my adult life trying to really heal from that.”

“Sometimes, we place too rigid or high expectations on ourselves. For instance, some creative professionals have this idea that success means creativity would come easy for them, when in reality, creativity is an ebb and flow process.”

Creativity coach Lisa Riley – from post Self-care and Creative Achievement.

In her book The Gifted Adult, Mary-Elaine Jacobsen writes that author and Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes “illuminates creativity’s natural cycles” in her book The Creative Fire, and “describes the creative process, which is analogous to the fulfillment of potential, as a ‘loss and restoration’ pattern of slowing down, descent, underground gathering, quickening, and a burst of intensity.

“This ebb and flow is the reality of the creative life and that we must expect and accept.”

For many creative and gifted people, who place demanding expectations on themselves, and operate with high sensitivity, intensity and imaginational excitability, it may be a real challenge to allow this slowing and turning inward.

Lucid dreaming is the experience of being aware that you are dreaming, and even being able to control the dream.

In her post Inception’s Dream Science: Fact or Fiction? dream researcher Deirdre Barrett writes about Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film and some of its premises about dreams.

Barrett says “It is possible to influence your dreams by a technique psychologists call ‘dream incubation.’ Breakthrough dreams – where a writer dreams the plot of a novel or a scientist dreams a formula or someone just has a major insight about their personal life – these can happen spontaneously, but you greatly increase their probability by specific requests of your dreaming mind.”

She describes dream incubation in detail in her book “The Committee of Sleep”, and summarizes the technique: “If you want to dream about a particular person, or topic or problem, you should think about the topic once you are in bed, and form an image of that topic–because dreams are so very visual–and let it be the last thing in your mind before falling asleep.”

The movie “Inception” does not really show the behavior of experienced lucid dreamers in her research, she says; for example, characters in the movie “continued to laboriously climb a cliff with a rope even once they knew it was a dream.”

Do we need to invest exceptional levels of time and attention in becoming experts before we can make significant creative contributions?

One of the key ideas of author Malcolm Gladwell is that “outliers” on the upper end of intelligence, ability and achievement have engaged in about 10,000 concentrated hours of practice and study in a specific knowledge area.

From my post Outliers and developing exceptional abilities.

Malcolm Gladwell is author of Outliers: The Story of Success.

But a new article by entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain, the founder of World Innovation Institute (among other credits) writes that while this may be “an interesting thesis” and perhaps true earlier, it may not apply “in today’s world of growing exponential technologies.”

Do you ever find yourself waylaid or compromised in your creative work on account of disrupting trains of thought and anxieties?

It happens to most of us.

Author and journalist Daniel Smith notes in an interview about his new book “Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety” that he has been writing professionally for more than a decade but has “always found the process to be singularly painful.”

He added, “Writing this book had its crappy moments, too (there are always crappy moments with writing), but overall I had a great deal of fun.”

[From Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Jeff Glor, CBS News.]

In his interview for NPR, Smith makes an interesting distinction that fear “is an appraisal of danger, whereas anxiety is a feeling state that’s evoked when fear is stimulated.