I appreciated reading your blog. As a corporate consultant on the effects of DV, the best component of what I do is creating organizational culture change where victims or offenders of every level in company have the empowerment to talk opening so that they get the help they need. You voiced many of the same sentiments.

Dear Cathy, I really appreciate the visuals that go along with this article. They say what needs to be said. And of course your commentary is helpful and articulate as usual. Phyllis Klein LCSW

Telling is crucial in recovery. There are studies which show that writing and talking about our traumatic experience (in this case DV) is far more effective in the healing process than "thinking" about it. I suppose that art is a form parallel to writing, it is creative production and can exorcise demons in a similar fashion.

Today was the day that I stood up and talked about "Domestic Violence" in front of my colleagues at school. This was the theme of the Art Therapy Conference I attended a few weeks ago. I had changed my mind on how to present it many times and decided to create an "art therapy" session for the staff. I began by showing the website for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and explained that I wanted them to know about the site and the HOTLINE but that I couldn't go any further into the topic because it was too difficult for me to talk about. Then I went straight into the topic of Art Therapy and how I am seeing more disturbing things in my room as our school population is exposed to violence. I showed a short little documentary of a pediatrician who went to Darfur to help the children and just happened to bring crayons and paper, and the children drew in great detail what they had witnessed at the hands of the Sudanese government and these VERY drawings were used as evidence in the international courts!!

I had handed out some colorful clay at the beginning and asked that we "break clay together" and share the colors with each other. It was eraser clay....so after telling them that I do quite a few "therapy-type" lessons on things that scare children at this time of year, I asked them to create an eraser monster so they could help "erase" these problems for children.

I could feel my heart racing, my voice was craking and my hands shaking while I was zipping through the presentation and at the end, my Principal asked me to share some of the statistics and that's when I had to stop and catch my breath (& tears).
I told them that we are loosing on average 80 soldiers in Iraq each month and we are loosing 120 children (most of them under age 4) in the war zone of domestic violence each month in America. And my closing remarks were to let the teachers know that we are on the front line in the public schools and if we see or suspect anything that we need to speak up and tell someone!!

I cannot tell you how much I have learned and have processed in my mind during and since that conference, as I had prepared for this presentation to the staff. I believe I am beginning to heal~

thank you NC Art Therapy Institute and Cathy~

sw

On October 31, 2008; I called the cops on my verbally, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically abusive former boyfriend. He was arrested and jailed and I went to court and obtained a no-contact protective order for one year that he has already violated. Art is a wonderful recovery tool for a survivor of DV because it allows you to get past your mental processing and the emotions like guilt, fear, shame, and self-hatred or the inner critic keeps dammed up so you can survive. Now that you are free to let it out and it is critical that a dumping of emotions takes place, how can a connection to all of the emotions like fear, doubt, terror, and anxiety take place with out a massive, out of control experience? Art is a flow and the flow from your head to hand is much slower and in smaller increments than when you speak and the censuring seems to be far less. Expressing oneself through art is a far better method to discharge than head to mouth where censoring can happen and not allow the full expression to come out. Getting all those things from my insides to the outside after stiffling them for so long I believe is critical to releasing myself from the abuse. But yes, the problem with DV is that you minimize their actions and the damage or pain you suffer. From repressing the emotions and walking on eggshells, I disconnected from myself and now sometimes when I talk about it, it seems almost like it either was a dream or I'm telling about someone else rather than what I lived through. The abuser has discounted and refused all responsibility for their actions, so why tell anyone including yourself what happened to you and how that made you feel? Usually, it is your mouth that got you in trouble with the abuser anyway, so you try not to say much. If you do talk and make a connection with feelings, you may release a monumental flood of emotions and that would be horrible to feel so out of control since the abuser usually controlled everything about your life. Art is a way to connect, comfort, control, and cleanse DV from my mind, body and spirit.

Just like with most pieces on domestic violence, the art you mentioned is incredibly biased, one-sided and actually perpetuates the thing its "supposed" to solve. All of it as I can see links to "violence against women" projects.

Domestic violence is a cycle. One person hits the other, the other hits the first... etc.

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A summary of studies showing the gender bias and repressed incovenient truth about women-to-men DV
http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/V70%20version%20N3.pdf
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However, most of these people who pretend to be "solving DV", are only ever talking about women, and are really "violence against women" programs. Which is nothing but man-hating, misandry programs.

You can't possibly convince me you want DV to stop, but you ONLY ever talk about half of the cycle. As we know from most cycles we've discovered in psychology, if you leave half the cycle in, it just regenerates.

We're making all these art programs that help women express their "victimhood", again reaffirming the notion that women are "victims" and men "demonic offenders"