Creative Trauma

What It Is & How to Deal with It

When I was in high school,

in a Hail Mary for any possibility of social acceptance, I attempted to start a rock band. Well, the sound wasn’t so much “rock” per se as it was a Dave Matthews meets Dashboard Confessional cluster of emotions and acoustic overstrumming but fronted by a voice whose experience with the female anatomy thus far could best be described as “Biology Textbook forward.” No, my lyrics didn’t possess that herbal-induced nonsensical whimsey that Mr. Matthews’ had. They stood up strong, managing to pass as nonsensical squarely on their own.  What can I say? It was the early 2000s. I was a sheltered kid with a conservative religious upbringing, and judging from the mix CDs I had burned around that time, my early taste and youthful instincts were, as music critic Pierre De Pardieu would say, “not good.” 

Nevertheless, I moved forward with said “band,” practicing…posing…posing as if I were practicing. It all had led to a moment I was convinced would elevate me from common geek to swoon-initiating god—The Goshen High School Battle of the Bands. 

There, due to some glorious cosmic alignment, every girl I believed I might have a chance from the various different communities I found myself (church, school, neighborhood, etc.) would be there, watching…Listening…Swoon-curious. 

Half-way through the program, after the Metallica and Radiohead cover bands took the stage, it was finally our turn. I looked for somewhere to plug in my Ibanez acoustic guitar. You’ll never believe this. Every other band who had signed up had only brought their ELECTRIC guitars! There was nowhere for an instrument as fine and delicate as my Lady Ibanez to plug in! 

"The show must go on.” I told myself. “I’ll just play ‘unplugged.’”  

My younger brother hopped on the drums, crossed his sticks together, and counted us in. We were off. Briefly. Three beats into our first song, he hit the crash cymbal…which then immediately proceeded to misunderstand its calling by falling over and crashing to the floor.

That was before I accidentally tripped over my microphone cable, cutting its audio and putting everyone who was still listening out of their misery. 

It was a nightmare from start to finish. Any possibility of “swoon” was thoroughly eclipsed by its polar opposite; Cringe. 

Though it’s mostly funny to me now, even while writing about it more than twenty years later, I can still feel a bit of that cringe crawling up my spine slowly transforming my shoulders into shame buckets.

That’s the thing about trauma. It never fully leaves you. It becomes a permanent character in your story. How you choose to interact with it, dance with it, mess around with it, and keep it in check is the work we all get to learn and practice throughout our lifetime. 

{Creative Trauma: the uneasy and hesitant feeling induced after a negative creative experience.}

The Zeitgeist of self-help culture and pop psychology is full of conversations surrounding various types of trauma these days. There’s acute trauma, chronic trauma, complex trauma, and so on.

Something you rarely ever hear about though is the idea of creative trauma. If you’ve ever stuck your neck out there with a bold idea or a project you felt compelled to complete, and it didn’t end up the way you were hoping, chances are you developed some creative trauma around that experience. 

I mention creative trauma because I think those who consider themselves an aspiring storychanger, whether they’re a design thinker, non-profit leader, business owner, passionate side hustler or some other type of creative professional, carry this kind of “character” around with them the most. Depending on one’s personality, the character can end up manifesting in several different ways, creating its own unique mischief. 

For me it initiates a stuckness, a sort of hiding, an unwillingness to try “that thing” again for fear that it will lead to the same results. The result can be crippling immobility. 

(Cut to my Ibanez guitar now hanging in a pawn shop) 

Here’s the tricky part. I believe some amount of immobility is actually a good thing here. When we’re faced with a result that didn’t go as we expected, the next best thing we can do is press pause, take a step back, reflect, and conscientiously mine ourselves for clues to what went wrong. 

The alternative, however, is that we turn our trauma character into a prison guard who never lets us out of our own introspection. 

To avoid the latter, here are a few reminders that have been helpful to me, especially lately as the volume of creative work I’m tasked with is about as loud as the voices of characters swirling around in my head. 

Embrace Iteration or Garden Thinking.

There is an entire feature-length documentary dedicated to how long it took Leonard Cohen to write “Hallelujah” (Spoiler: five years, conservatively). Bono is still changing words to some of U2’s most popular songs. Paul Simon recently recorded an entire album of tracks he wished did better in his younger days. 

As I mention in my upcoming book, one of the disadvantages of deciding to industrialize the Internet is that we ended up overlaying a 20th Century printing press mentality to an inherently iterative technology.  We instinctively design articles, websites, and personalities to be permanent, much like a print magazine or markings etched in stone. The irony is that for the very first time in history, we now have mechanisms that allow us to change the story, edit the insight, reassess the premise in real time. What are we doing with that technology instead? Creating robots that synthesize and regurgitate the stockpile of stuff already out there. No wonder ChatGPT gets it wrong sometimes.  

The best artists see their work as a perpetual garden: growing, pruning, curating, and experimenting with new ideas, harvesting the good ones and sharing the bounty, iterating on the bad ones without scuttling them out of embarrassment, all while constantly cross-pollinating and connecting previous ideas with new ones.

Don’t compete with yourself, reconcile with your work. 

The natural inclination when we fail creatively is to power up on our trauma and prove it wrong. However, “I’ll show ‘em” is rarely a sexy muse.

In many ways this is old-school Hero’s Journey thinking, bifurcating ourself and assigning cliche roles to our complex inner world. We turn our trauma into a cartoon villain and our present self into a hero with a lofty quest. 

In collective journey stories (Think ensemble narratives like Ted Lasso, Encanto, and Schitt’s Creek), a community of flawed but lovable characters reconcile with themselves and each other to collaboratively resolve the main conflict which often manifests as an idea rather than a person. They learn, wrestle, and reconcile. 

Similarly, when faced with creative trauma, we can treat the character it manifests into as someone our job it is to reconcile with rather than compete against. That shift changes the purpose and motivation of whatever work we decide to do next. 

Practice the art of non-forcing.

The Tao would call this “Wu Wei” which is most commonly translated as “non-action.” 

“But CJ, didn’t you say earlier that a state of permanent immobility is what we’re trying to AVOID?”

Yes! Which is why I think Alan Watts, the 1960s mystical provocateur, transcribed Wu Wei best when he said it means the art of “non-forcing.” 

“When we watch any performance of an artist,” Watts explained, “we know immediately when the performance is forced. We say, ‘It doesn’t ring true. It’s too artificial. It doesn’t seem to be natural.’”

Watts went on to say that Wu Wei isn’t a posture of laziness or simply lying around and doing nothing. It’s about learning to leverage your muscle at the right moment rather than flexing it constantly in hopes that it will force the outcome you hope for.  This is similar to what Jean François Billeter said when he described Wu-Wei as a "state of perfect knowledge of the reality of the situation.” 

When it comes to my own creative journey, learning to dance between petrified stagnation on one end and rabidly spinning my wheels on the other, to not to force whatever outcome I desire, but to save my muscle for when it counts, has become a sort of soul-saving “true north” practice.  I’ve been methodically learning to move with the wind and the tide rather than show up to the creative process with a gas guzzling motorboat…which often leads to inauthentic performance over genuine creativity. 

As Watts would say, “The art of not-forcing is the art of sailing."

While not often named or written about or even spoken of, creative trauma is as real as the mammoth chasm of dating options available to me shortly after the 2002 Goshen High School Battle of the Bands. Recognizing it for what it is and realizing that it isn’t something to be beaten, enslaved to, and most importantly, wasted is the opportunity its inevitable presence graces us with. 

And who knows? Maybe one day you may find that one of your most embarrassing high school moments has made for a pretty decent essay opener. 

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Inspiring Discoveries

• Books/Poetry: Carl Sandberg, Selected Poems (Knew the name but never dove in till now.)

• Music: Cleo Sol, Mother (God bless everything that comes from The UK)

• TV: Barry and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are two d*mn near perfect shows both in their last season.

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