Dr. Sandie Morgan is joined by Dr. Harriet Hill as the two discuss the power of art as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma.

Dr. Harriet Hill

Dr. Harriet Hill was born to Dutch parents in Los Angeles. Her art is a unique fusion of her Dutch Heritage and Africa’s vibrant colors, where she lived for 18 years. For over 20 years, she has worked globally with survivors of war and violence, using the power of art to unblock emotions and facilitate healing. Those who experience her art are brought joy. Now, Dr. Harriet Hill advocates creativity as a tool to enhance perosnal flourishing.

Key Points

• Art serves as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma, particularly in communities affected by war and violence as it has the ability to help individuals express emotions that may be difficult to articulate verbally.


• It is important that ordinary people have access to trauma healing exercises and resources, especially in communities with limited mental health professionals. Dr. Harriet Hill’s work includes development of materials that allow non-professionals to facilitate healing through art.


• Dr. Harriet Hill emphasizes that experiencing beauty, especially in nature or art, is essential for mental health and nourishment of the soul. Engaging with beauty is not a luxury but a necessary part of self-care and overall well-being.


• While individuals have different cultural backgrounds, the experience of suffering and the need for expression through art are universal. Art transcends language barriers, allowing for shared healing experiences across cultures.

Resources

• 325: The Cost of Burnout, with Dr. Alexis Kennedy


• Healing Invisible Wounds by Richard F. Mollica


• www.harrietspaintings.com

Transcript

Sandra Morgan 0:14

You’re listening to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. This is episode #328: The Intersection of Art and Healing in the Brain, with Dr. Harriet Hill. Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. My name is Dr. Sandie Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Our guest today is Dr. Harriet Hill. Dr. Hill’s art is a unique fusion of her Dutch heritage and Africa’s vibrant colors, it brings joy to those who experience it. For over 20 years, she has worked globally with survivors of war and violence, using the power of art to unblock emotions and facilitate healing. She now advocates creativity as a tool to enhance personal flourishing. Welcome to the podcast, Harriet,

Dr. Harriet Hill 1:36

Thank you, Sandie. Thank you.

Sandra Morgan 1:38

When I first met you, Harriet, you were introducing me to materials on trauma that were designed to use with children, with families, with people outside the clinical arena. I was so impressed with how accessible you made brain healing to every person, and it wasn’t just something locked away in a clinical textbook that you could use for weightlifting. Tell us a little bit about your current work.

Dr. Harriet Hill 2:23

Okay, my current work. I have been working full time as an artist, painting for the last four years now. I had always painted a bit and used art in life, and in the trauma healing work I was involved in. But in the last four years, I’ve been painting full time and having a ball. I worked in minority languages for most of my career, in verbal communication, how we get an idea from one person to the other, through words. I’m very interested and excited to have time to explore how we communicate through visual images, because there’s similarities and differences, and I’m liking it a lot.

Sandra Morgan 3:13

Well, just for our listeners, I subscribe to Harriet’s newsletter and it pops up in my inbox, and I open it, and there is a blaze of color, and I can feel my response lifting. The more I thought about that, I thought, ‘I need to have her come on the podcast.’ A couple of weeks ago, we talked about burnout, and we talked about ways to avoid it, and why it’s so important. But how do we start building in practices that maybe we haven’t used before? Instead of being cautionary about things, ‘don’t do this, don’t do that,’ how can we build in positivity and maybe even a newsletter from Harriet Hill once in a while? Harriet, one of the things that I want to understand better is how your focus on the intersection of art and mental health can be used as a therapeutic tool to aid in healing the brain. Talk to us about that.

Speaker 1 4:35

Yeah. I lived for 18 years in Africa, and then was in and out of Africa for another 15 or so, and came in contact with people traumatized by war. I was actually working in language development, in Bible translation, but whole communities were rendered dysfunctional by the violence of war and the trauma they’d experienced. With some other colleagues and mental health professionals, we put together some materials that could be used by ordinary people in communities to at least help with mental health, because in many places in the world, there’s very few or no mental health professionals. So in countries that have war and trauma, there may be one or two psychiatrists in the entire country, at the time, this was in the 90s and early 2000s. We developed materials to help people with trauma, and then about four or five years in, we decided to try an art exercise, and I was appointed as the one to introduce it. I was with a room full of men, primarily men, some women, but primarily men in Ghana, and I was to ask them to do an art exercise, to express their pain through their drawing. We had clay, and markers, and paper. So I first did it myself to see what it would be like, and shared it with the staff, like what happens? How does this work? And then I shared it with the room, and I had never seen men in Africa, I’d lived in Africa a long time by that time, and I’ve never seen them really drawing, that was something kids did. It was with a bit of fear and trembling that we introduced this exercise to these people straight out of war zones. They took to it like it was their native language. We were very cautious about would you want to share this? You can, if you would like to share it with your small groups. They did it in small groups, and then they had some time to draw or do stuff with clay, and then if they wanted to, they could share it. They all wanted to share. They shared so long they missed dinner. We were at a conference center, and they helped one another to see what was going on and talk about what they had experienced. Because sometimes when we’ve experienced trauma, your brain goes offline, and your frontal lobe, your ‘thinking brain’ goes offline, and that’s the part that has the language. This emotional impact goes in and you don’t even have words for it. You can’t express it in words, it didn’t go in in words, your thinking brain was offline. Sometimes, your ‘feeling brain’ can let that out through art, and then you can look at it and say, “Oh, that’s how I feel. I didn’t know.” Being able to see it and put it into words, and talk about it, gives you a sense of control, a sense of agency, a sense of ‘I can handle this.’ It’s not just this vague, icky feeling, it’s sadness, it’s anger, it’s bitterness, it’s whatever feeling you might have expressed. That’s where I got started with it. I am not a psychologist. I love working with psychologists and psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, but what we did was especially for ordinary people in communities, whether they be churches or other communities, we worked a lot with churches, just what ordinary people can do to heal from trauma. It was amazing. That, I was involved in for about 20 years, and that ministry continues. I just got a message from a colleague in Australia, in Darwin, who is working with women, Aboriginal women who are incarcerated, and they’re doing art with clay and with drawing, and finding the same experience. I mean, it is so basic, it’s amazing how helpful it can be and how universal it is. Because these men in Africa, grown men, took to it like it was their natural language, found it extremely helpful. Because sometimes words fail us.

Sandra Morgan 8:56

Words fail us. Let’s go back to what you said about why they didn’t have language to express. We really promote talk therapy a lot, and often realize that there are no words to express. Explain that a little bit more, how that process happens with the prefrontal cortex.

Dr. Harriet Hill 9:29

I just did a skit with adults and with kids here in Pennsylvania, on our brain. It was sort of like that movie Inside Out, where you don’t see the main character, you see inside his brain. We had a thinking brain, we’re just using ordinary language. You could call it prefrontal lobe, etc., but we just call it our thinking brain, our feeling brain, and our reflex brain. The thinking brain is analytical and it uses