Why Creative Practices aren’t just an "Add-on" for Therapists
Engaging in creative activities isn't a wellness luxury. For many communities, it's always been a means of survival. A reflection on what this means for helping professionals.
In this post, I'm exploring why imagination and creative expression are fundamental human needs, and what this means for the profession.
Dominant frameworks position creativity as something we “add on” to our day, once our basic needs are met, and everything else has been checked off our to-do list. Often, especially in marginalised communities, however, creativity is a means of survival. This distinction changes how we understand creative practice in the helping professions.
Of course, creativity flourishes when we are safe and feel connected to our community, when our survival isn’t threatened. But it also helps us in times of threat.
We don't always have the option to separate imagination from survival, because often survival requires imagination. When your culture is being erased, storytelling preserves knowledge across generations. When your body is being dehumanised, making art insists on your humanity. When systems try to isolate you, gathering to sing, dance, or witness one another maintains connection. When language is being taken, creating becomes how you communicate what cannot be spoken. Audre Lorde knew this all too well.
"Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence." — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, and many indigenous peoples around the world, have experienced the oppression of language, ceremony, dance, and creative practice as a sustained colonial project.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional Wellbeing (SEWB) framework, developed by and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and validated through the voices of community members, has always understood connection to culture, ceremony, and creative practice as foundational to health and wellbeing. Here is the full citation if you would like to read it (and haven’t previously come across it), which I highly recommend doing:
Gee, G., Dudgeon, P., Schultz, C., Hart, A., & Kelly, K. (2014). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing. In P. Dudgeon, H. Milroy, & R. Walker (Eds.), Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principles and Practice (2nd ed., pp. 55–68). Canberra: Commonwealth Government of Australia.
This is the most comprehensive framework for holistic wellbeing available. It says what Western psychology is only beginning to approximate. The SEWB model does not position creativity as a contributor to wellbeing. It understands creative and ceremonial practices as a foundational domain of health itself, inseparable from connection to Country, community, and culture.
This is not only true at the level of culture and community, but we also see it at the individual level. For example, when children are living through trauma, making things, drawing, writing, playing music, or dancing can give them a way to process their experience that does not require words, and can help them build a sense of self that exists beyond their circumstances.
When we say, "I don't have time for creativity"
When we say, "I don't have time for creativity," we are speaking from a position of privilege. One that never had to rely on our creative inner resources to survive.
If we understand creative expression as a means of survival, we recognise it as essential. Something that becomes more important when conditions are harsh. Something we prioritise when resources are scarce. We practise what keeps us whole and connected while we're enduring unspeakable conditions and fighting for safety.
This is why I don’t frame creative practice as a self-care "treat" or wellness luxury. Because that erases where it comes from. What’s more, protecting your creative brain is one of the most rebellious acts available to us right now.
Bringing creativity back into our work
Creativity has been stripped from so much of helping work. But creativity is about imagining something different.
When we make art, write, move, sing, or garden, we're practising something the system cannot control. We're insisting on a self that is deeper and richer than our usefulness. We're accessing embodied, relational, and ancestral ways of knowing that colonialism worked hard to erase. And we're reconnecting with practices that communities have always used to sustain ourselves and each other, long before wellness became an industry.
This is why bringing creativity back into our work is one way we can decolonise our practice. Not by borrowing Indigenous frameworks without accountability or acknowledgement, but by taking seriously what those frameworks have always known: that health is relational, collective, and constituted in connection to culture, community, and Country. That the self capable of caring for others is always already held within community. That making things together is not a supplement to healing, it is one of its oldest forms.
Creativity has many important effects that are essential for survival and systemic change. Here are just a few:
Creative engagement helps make the brain flexible. It builds neural connections that help us cope with change we cannot predict or control. And in the current landscape of our work, where the pressures are structural, the uncertainty is chronic, and the ground keeps shifting, that flexibility is essential.
Creativity activates imagination. The basis of all creative thinking is the question: what if things could be different? When we are running on autopilot, and most of us are, most of the time, we never get to ask it. But that question is also the beginning of every systemic change worth making.
Creativity helps give us agency. When we make something, we are expressing something that is uniquely ours. In a system that consistently asks us to shrink, to absorb, to give without accounting for what is taken, reclaiming creative expression is not small. It is, I'd argue, one of the most political things we can do.
Creative practice, done in community, gives us access to our aliveness and our inner knowing. It connects us with our unpredictable, relational selves. And it reminds us why we came to this work in the first place.
When we create together, we access embodied, relational, and ancestral ways of knowing. We insist, collectively, that we are more than our utility and our productivity. We build something the system cannot easily control or commodify. And we model, in practice, the relational conditions of care that our clients and communities need.
This is what The Flourishing Way is built on. If you are curious about what it looks like to bring creative practice into your professional life in a sustained, evidence-informed, and politically grounded way, I would love for you to explore it with me.
Coming together for creative engagement is how we build something different, don’t you think?
A note on positionality: I live and work in Naarm/Melbourne on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. I engage with First Nations frameworks as an ally and learner, with gratitude and accountability, and not as an authority. I am committed to following the lead of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, communities, and scholars in this work.
Ready to explore more ways to flourish in work and life?
Waitlist for The Flourishing Way is currently open! This is our transformative program that brings together psychological and mindfulness-based approaches with hands-on creative exploration. It's designed to help you reconnect with the vibrant, playful parts of yourself and flourish in work and life. Learn more here.
Or if you’d like to explore further ways to nurture your creativity, experience more creative flow and build a flourishing life, you can learn more about my services here.
Is this post the kind of thing you love exploring? I'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me on Instagram @the_flourishing_space or on LinkedIn.
