Art Therapy, Neuroscience and the Paradox of Healing

The Wild Terra Incognita

Trauma as a Wordless Event

Isley has described trauma as a “wordless event.” When something overwhelming happens, the body’s balance, its homeostasis, is disrupted. The sympathetic nervous system, endocrine system and brain structures shift into survival mode creating changes across the cardiovascular, respiratory and muscular systems.

These responses are natural but they often leave lasting imprints. In clinical practice, this dysregulation shows up as fragmented experience: memories that resist integration, feelings that cannot be put into words and bodies carrying the weight of what happened without a clear story to tell.

This is where art therapy becomes so vital. Through image, symbol and creative process, clients can begin to give shape to what is otherwise unspeakable. Long before language returns, creativity offers a way to regulate, to make meaning and to reconnect.

Why Begin with the Brain?

Juliet L. King opens her book on art therapy and neuroscience with a story about mathematician Andrew Wiles, who said: “Always try the problem that matters most to you.”

It feels ironic that I am beginning here, with neurobiology. When Margot Sunderland first introduced this material in my training, I found it daunting, all the parts of the brain, the complex systems, the names. Yet, I believe in this work deeply. Not because I can hold every structure in my head but because I have seen and felt its impact. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be offering it to others.

Reading The Phantom Tollbooth recently, I came across the princesses Rhyme and Reason, banished because they refused to take sides. That image stayed with me. It reminded me of Wiles’ advice and of my own task, to hold rhyme and reason together. For me, the work that matters most lies here: bringing together creativity and science, imagination and neurobiology.

Mystery Beneath the Surface

Juliet King makes an important point: human responses to traumatic experiences of any kind are natural, subjective, informed by the processes of evolution and have a biological basis all of which are fundamental in contemporary trauma treatment.

Oliver Sacks takes this further, reminding us that beneath science’s rational surface lies “its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic and myth… medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would we not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?”

For me, this is where art therapy sits most comfortably: at the meeting place of what is measurable and what is mysterious. Neuroscience may give us maps, but art keeps us open to what can’t be reduced to diagrams.

The Medicines of Art

Shaun McNiff (2004) writes that the medicines of art “are not confined within fixed borders.” Creativity resists neat categories. Carl Jung, too, described the unconscious as the place where new capacities are born a realm beyond conscious control, yet full of life.

So much of what shapes us, memory, perception, judgement, feeling, motivation is not fully conscious. Art therapy opens a doorway into this terrain. It allows what words can’t reach to find form in image, symbol, gesture. Neuroscience can help us understand some of what happens here, but it also reminds us how much remains unknown and emergent.

The Wild Terrain of Creativity

Research supports this sense of mystery. Dietrich (2004) shows that creativity involves several interconnected brain systems, memory, sustained attention, judgement, and cognitive flexibility. Belkofer (2012) adds that artistic production is not confined to one area of the brain but activates regions all over.

This complexity makes creativity hard to pin down. Instead, it points us toward a wild terra incognita, an unexplored territory where art therapy continues to venture. In practice, it often feels just like this: the image carries us somewhere we could never have predicted but that feels undeniably true.

A Gallery of Thinkers

• Bessel van der Kolk shows how trauma is stored in the body, often bypassing language. Art provides a non-verbal route to process these experiences and restore safety.

• Allan Schore highlights the role of right-brain processes in emotional regulation and attachment. Creative, relational work strengthens these networks and supports resilience.

• Klorer, Gantt & Tripp, Lusebrink & Hinz demonstrate how early childhood and preverbal traumas can damage attachment and how art therapy can reform relational patterns through clinical neuroscience.

• Noah Hass-Cohen synthesises research on trauma, autobiographical memory and creativity. He links molecular and cellular processes with lived experience, showing how art therapy fosters resilience.

• Juliet L. King outlines three tenets: creativity as inherently healing; materials as shaping self-expression and regulation; and art-making as central to treatment, especially when trauma is a “wordless event.”

• Norman Doidge introduces neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to change its own structure through experience. For art therapy, this is profoundly hopeful: each act of creation rewires the brain toward healing.

A Magic Synthesis

Eric Kandel acknowledges that “we do not yet have an intellectually satisfying biological understanding of any complex mental processes.”  Yet, as Belkofer and Nolan (2016) note, leaders across neurobiology, psychiatry, and psychology have redefined our understanding of psychotherapy, creating a “magic synthesis” of science and relationship.

This is where art therapy finds its home: in the integration of neuroscience and lived experience, in the weaving of biology with creativity.

Sitting with the Paradox

Juliet King concludes with the paradox that trauma and recovery, cannot be fully defined.

To work with trauma is to sit with what resists language, to hold both the rupture in an individual’s psyche and the larger questions it raises about meaning and purpose.

Irvin Yalom reminds us: “It’s the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals — my professional rosary.” Research echoes this. Shedler (2010) found that the most effective therapists are those who can embody this truth, holding science and presence together.

For me, neuroscience gives art therapy a language to explain why our work matters at such a fundamental level. However art therapy gives neuroscience something back: a way to embody these principles in real, human relationships.

If neuroscience is the clay, art therapy is the hand that shapes it. Together, in the liminal space between science and art, rhyme and reason, something larger can emerge: a movement toward wholeness.

If you are curious about art therapy or integrative psychotherapy, I offer sessions in my private practice in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, as well as online. You don’t need any experience of art, just a willingness to explore. If you’d like to know more, please get in touch to arrange an initial conversation.