In the year 2000, I gave birth to my second child and decided to take some time away from my profession as a counselor to stay home with my two children. I loved every minute of my time with them and started documenting their young lives through one of my favorite artistic mediums, photography.
We had a darkroom in my home when I was younger, and I loved to watch my older brother as he printed the photographs he had taken. It was magical to me, watching the images come to life right in front of my eyes, and I quickly became interested in having my own camera. When I was eleven years old, my dad gave me a Polaroid camera, et voilà! I was hooked for life. I was a very shy child and photography gave me a safe, creative way to express myself.
While I was a stay-at-home mom, I started my own photography business, taking portraits of friends and family first, then segueing into wedding photography. In 2011 I accepted a job as the photography department coordinator at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art, which put me in a wonderful community of other artists. I was able to see firsthand the healing nature of the arts, watching people in a variety of mediums flourish while creating.
During my time as a wedding photographer, I became a single parent. It was incredibly difficult for me to be photographing people during their most joyful time when I was struggling personally, but I found that the art of photographing others was giving me a purpose. I was not only making a living from my art, but I was healing from it as well.
In 2012, I was once again working as a counselor while still in charge of the photography department at Sawtooth. Knowing how much the arts helped me heal through great losses in my own life, I was eager to share my experiences with others and created the Healing and Wellness Through the Arts program at Sawtooth. The very first class I designed was called Healing Grief and Loss Through Photography and it continues to be my favorite class that I teach. The curative nature of photography in relation to releasing grief is overwhelming: emotional, ugly, and crushing at times while also calming, beautiful, and grounding.
To me the goal of grief counseling has never been to eliminate grief completely but to assimilate it into your life in a way that is healthy instead of devastating. Art promotes this time of integration so well.
I expanded the Healing and Wellness Through the Arts program to offer other classes and include other artistic mediums in addition to photography: writing, painting, mixed media. I firmly believe that art is therapeutic no matter what your skill level. So many people shy away from art because they don’t feel like they would be any good at it. But it’s not about skill or creating something perfect.
Taking a leap and trusting your own creativity can be restorative in the most marvelous ways when you accept that the benefit of art is not tied to your skill level: it is about the beauty of release and personal expression that allows you to use a different part of your brain to aid in moving past personal obstacles to a freer state of mind.
During my time at Sawtooth, I partnered with many different organizations to offer art in recovery, including Novant Health Derrick L. Davis Cancer Institute, Wake Forest Baptist Health, Riverwood Therapeutic Riding Center, and The Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University. With each experience, my faith in the healing power of art grew stronger.
Artistic expression is the cornerstone of my therapeutic process. And I am not alone in this belief, as there are so many studies on the curative benefits of art.
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Amanda Sullivan, Maed, lcmhc 