The Art of Inner Tension

Source: original artwork by Ralph Verano used with permission

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” — Duke Ellington

Psychologists have routinely linked creativity and stress and the list of people whose lives were filled with challenges includes Vincent Van Gogh, Issac Newton, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Beethoven. While the debate over whether these geniuses created because of their inner tension or in spite of it continues, what is certain is that the rest of us can turn things around by bringing creativity into how we manage stress. By becoming artists whose muse is none other than life’s frustrations, worries, and anxieties we can create masterpieces of peace-filled lives or simply doodles of not overreacting to life’s difficulties.

I think of stress as the felt tension arising from a misalignment between our expectations and experiences. Eckhard Tolle put it more simply: “Stress is having this but wanting that.”

It's often a hard sell to suggest to people that they are the creators of their inner tension but with just a few examples, most will have the “aha” moment of realization that it's their interpretations of the happenings in their lives that bring it to life. When the self-blame factor is removed by demonstrating that, in most cases, this response was reflexive and habitual, taking ownership allows for new creative methods for coping with what some refer to as “the silent killer.”

The traditional approach to stress management that encourages getting quality sleep, healthy eating, exercise and relaxation leaves most of the clients I work with feeling like they are failing in their efforts to feel better. They point out that it is the very stress they are experiencing that makes the items on that list feel more like a Bucket List than a prescription for a more relaxed life.

I’ve learned that encouraging an artistic view of how one both experiences and expresses the stressors in one’s life taps into a deeply innate desire for imaginative endeavors—to stand back and proudly state, “Look what I’ve done.”

Thoreau wrote, “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” In this sense, everyone is engaged in an artistic undertaking, although the “quality” of that expressionism is colored by troublesome thoughts and emotions. Stress is a picture that paints itself in the absence of our conscious presence. It’s no wonder many clients look quizzically at me and ask, who did this?

In her book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron states, “Creativity requires activity… and most of us hate to do something when we can obsess about something else instead.” This idea of obsessing-over-doing came to me as I was heading to a stress-management training. I was pondering why intelligent adults would continue to wallow in their worries rather than do something about them. It occurred to me, and I later shared my epiphany with the group I was leading, that it’s because many people think that “stressing out” is managing their stress.

To direct clients back toward “doing” mode, I offer these tips for unleashing the artist within:

1. Add some color. Too often, when stressed, the world appears only as black and white. One is either up or down, happy or sad. The pictures these clients paint of their current situations are dark and heavy. Using the therapeutic tool of challenging irrational beliefs, clients can draw from the Crayola box of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors to challenge the notion that life is simply dull shades of grey.
2. Switch media. Many people I work with are only able to list four or five coping skills, with at least two of them no longer working. I counter this by handing them the “Pleasant Events List," created by Marsha Linehan, which includes 225 activities one can engage in to emotionally regulate, and asking them to pick at least three to broaden their palette.
3. Ignore the critics. People are often discouraged from new endeavors by the opinions of others, some of whom use criticism as their own coping skill. Artists from across the creative spectrum have faced criticism of their works. Georgia O’Keefe wrote, “I have already settled it for myself, so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”
4. Be a surrealist. Surrealism seeks to challenge reality and there is no better stress-busting technique than to take conventional thinking head-on. Liberating oneself from old ideas gives way to what the psychologist Kelly McGonical refers to as “the upside of stress.”
5. Reframe it. Many people box themselves in by assuming that they are limited in their abilities to cope with the strains of modern life. They have firm boundaries regarding what is acceptable and anything outside of those limits leads to stress. Many people adopt a paint-by-numbers approach which boxes them in and stifles creativity. Reframing, in the artistic sense, is to work outside the lines of these limitations—to experience true freedom. Psychological reframing is simply seeing things in a new way—turning a negative on its head to find its opposite of positivity.

The beauty of the art of inner tension is that one does not need to be Mozart, Picasso, or Hemingway to benefit from redirecting their reactive energy toward a creative process.