From July 20 to 24, within Healing Arts Lviv, we hosted the School on Trauma-Informed Art Practices. The program opened with an inspiring talk by Christopher Bailey, Arts & Health Lead at the World Health Organization and Co-Founder of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab.
We are sharing the full text of Christopher’s speech, as we find it deeply valuable for understanding how art can become a powerful tool for healing and support — both individually and collectively.
Hear your mother’s heartbeat. I want you to hear the regular pattern of her breathing. This will be the rhythm of your speech, of your walk, of your pace throughout your life.
Occasionally, you will hear this muffled sound, like a melody above the bass line. That is the sound of your mother’s voice. And it’s been shown that the sound of the cello is the same tonal registry that a baby hears through the womb of its mother’s voice.
All your needs are met. You are warm. You are nourished.
And then, one day, against your will, you are expelled from this perfect environment. Suddenly, you are thrust into a world of noise and bright light and strange smells and rough textures and cold, and you don’t want to be there.
You are forcibly ejected. And in your rage and fear and frustration and anger and confusion and terror, what do you do? With your entire body, you let out a primordial scream. That scream has a positive effect because it is that scream that jumpstarts your heart and your cardiopulmonary system.
It actually brings life to you. That trauma serves a purpose. Not all trauma is a liability.
Some trauma brings you to that next state of being. The next thing that happens to you is you are placed in your mother’s arms, frightened, disconnected. And suddenly you feel something soft and warm in your cheek.
It’s your mother’s breast, and the rooting instinct takes over, and your lips turn.
And you find the nipple of your mother’s breast, and you have your first moment of nourishment. And in that moment, as your eyes are beginning to focus, the only focal length that you can see is about that long.
Everything else is a blur. But it happens to be the exact focal length between your face and your mother’s face. So the only thing that you can possibly see is your mother’s loving, adoring expression.
And that love in her eyes sparks a change — a neurological change in your midbrain. And you develop the ability for mirror neurones to feel what someone else is feeling. For the first time in your brief existence, you are not alone.
And you can feel what someone else feels. We know that if that moment is interrupted, that child is statistically more likely to become sociopathic later in life. It’s an incredibly important moment, which is one of the reasons why it has to remain undisturbed.
And it’s this foundation that begins your journey of connecting to other people, defining yourself, and thriving in the external environment. In the days to come, your mother tries to communicate with you, and how she does it is actually through sing-song.
The first sounds that we hear from our mother are not necessarily language, because we can’t understand it — it’s tonal variation. Our first experience in communicating is singing.
And evolutionary biologists believe that singing and music actually came before language. We know this also in terms of traumatic injury. If Braque’s area of the brain, the speech centre, has been damaged through injury or through stroke, it turns out we can still sing.
And that’s often used in rehabilitation. The patient who’s lost the ability to speak learns how to sing what they want, and slowly the brain reroutes itself from the damaged area to healthy areas that then take on this new function.
The mother then begins to touch your tiny feet and tiny hands as part of a play game. This is all intuitive — every mother does it.
They don’t know why they do it; it’s just cute and fun. And you get a facial reward from the pleasure reaction of the expression of the baby.
But what they’re doing, unbeknownst to them, is triggering their sense of proprioception — that sense in the brain that maps to your body, to other people, to the world around you, and gives you a sense of connection and ownership to the world. When you’re a toddler and you begin to experience the world together with your mother, you’ll notice that the toddler in the stroller might point to a squirrel or a painting and then look up for validation in this moment of shared attention to the mother and look for the expression and see, are you as surprised as I am by what I’ve just discovered? And the mother, in an exaggerated way, will say, yes, isn’t that wonderful?
And through that moment of shared attention, you begin the process of forming family and community. When you discover something and it’s amplified by someone else discovering it with you, you get a shot of oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone, that helps create a sense of community and shared identity. These are all rooted in very early childhood practices and continue to grow and expand throughout the life course.
In the early development of human beings, when hunter-gatherers would come back from the wilderness to explain to the tribe, the clan, what food they had seen, what threats were out there, they would gather around the campfire and, in a similar exchange, would tell stories through song and dance to literally map out the world, to make sense of it — just as other mammals do call and response, whether they’re wolves or birds — to make a map of the world around them, of their connection to each other. That song and dance and storytelling fundamentally are not about just exchanging information; they’re about engaging the world and making sense of it and developing a sense of belonging.
At the end of the day, when we talk about arts and health, art has many health-related benefits that I could go into detail on, but the primary one is that the arts evolved expressly to support our individual and collective need for meaning and a sense of belonging.
When we talk about the trials that we face in life — the conflicts, the struggles — if we are brought up in that kind of connected, loving environment, if we are brought up with the tools of creative expression, with movement, with dance, with storytelling, with pictorial representation, it is not only a piece of entertainment; it is a toolkit of resiliency, of how we might not only cope with what we might face, but also how to thrive — to not merely survive, but to thrive, to experience and celebrate and acknowledge moments of joy.
One of the things that I experienced when I was with you in Ukraine was so many techniques that I saw in so many different settings that took advantage of those natural processes to help process what people were going through then and there. I remember going to a community centre and seeing displaced children from the eastern front, and without any instruction, without any choreography, Ukrainian music was being played. And the only instruction was for these young people who visibly had symptoms of traumatic experience — dark circles under their eyes, a disconnected look, some of them with hair loss — the only instruction was to listen to the music and match the speed and movement of a person next to them, and what resulted was this flocking behaviour where they began to pay attention, and then this pattern emerged without any choreography of this group dance, and smiles began to emerge, and connection began to emerge, and laughter began to fill the room.
It was an incredible experience and an example of a trauma-informed arts practice that could be of direct benefit to people who have experienced an extreme adverse event, even without diving into a deep therapeutic experience. Another example was the work that I had observed in the Unbroken Project in the Lviv Hospital, where former prisoners of war who were in a deep psychotic state from the violence that had happened to them during their time in prison had no brain activity in the frontal cortex. Traditional approaches were ineffective.
Talk therapy inevitably led back to a flashback of that moment of violence and a violent state. Medication, anti-psychotic medication, opiates, antidepressants would calm the patient but do nothing to regenerate the brain activity in the frontal cortex. The only thing that worked was art therapy, and within six weeks brain activity returned to within a normal range.
These were the kinds of innovations and beautiful work that I saw over and over again in Ukraine and thought, this is something that needs to be captured and shared with the world. To that end, there are a group of us — and I think some of them are in the room with you now — who are looking at developing a major study to see not only the science behind this, but how this can be scaled, not just across Ukraine, but in similar situations around the world.
I’m a co-director of the Jamil Arts and Health Lab, and during the Los Angeles fires earlier in the year, we developed a guidance toolkit for artists working in humanitarian settings of not only how to involve the arts in extreme situations in a safe way, but also how to protect yourself when you’re in that situation, as self-care is also of paramount importance. We are now, as a gift to the Ukrainian people, translating that guidance document into Ukrainian, and I hope that when I am allowed to travel to Ukraine again, I can come in person and perhaps do some seminars with you and your colleagues to put this to practise and see if it’s of use to you and the people that you’re trying to serve.
I think perhaps the last thing that I’ll say before opening it up to conversation is to give a personal example of how the arts helped me find an authentic meaning in an extreme adverse event.
As you may be aware, I can’t see. I have terminal glaucoma. I’ve lost most of my vision, and when that happened, I felt expelled from the world.
I felt exiled. I felt that the primary way that I enjoy the world had been taken away from me. I learned to adapt and cope with the white cane, with the tinted glasses, with — I even developed echolocation, where my visual cortex began to adapt and use sound to create a sense of the physical environment around me through a remarkable example of neuroplasticity, which every person who loses their sight develops, interestingly enough, but that did nothing to change my feeling of exile and exclusion from the world.
One day, I was asked to give a presentation performance at the Welcome Trust in London. This was before the pandemic, and I did what I often do before I perform: I wanted to go to a concert, and there was one playing at St. Martin-in-the-Fields off Trafalgar Square in London. As I was crossing Trafalgar Square in this dense crowd, I began to be buffeted about, and in my blind state I became disoriented, and as I was pushed around in the sea of humanity my heart began to race, my breathing became laboured, and I began to sweat.
I was having an anxiety attack, and finally, when I was disgorged from this storm of humanity, I found myself washed ashore on the wrong side of the square. Instead of being in front of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, I was in front of the National Gallery, and my heart sank because I had been avoiding museums for years — they used to give me such pleasure, and now, with the distorted, polluted state of my vision, all I could see of these paintings was blurred, corrupt darkness.
But I went in anyway to escape the crowd, and I found myself in this gallery of paintings by the British artist Turner, and I was looking at them and perceiving these monumental seascapes of storm and clouds and waves and mist and fog and ships in storms. At a certain point, I began to taste salt on my cheek, and I thought, is this salt water from the storm in the painting? No — it was tears streaming down my cheek. In that triangulation of that long-dead artist, the object he produced, and my own experience, I saw the way Turner painted and saw the world was identical to the way I see the world through the dirty veil of my glaucoma. And for the first time I could imagine that the way I see the world could be conceived of as beautiful.
Just as you willingly close your eyes to better savour a glass of red wine, just as you willingly close your eyes to better embody a beautiful piece of music, just as you willingly close your eyes to trace the gentle slope of a lover’s forearm, so too I now embrace the closing of my eyes to better share this moment with you. Thank you.