Inspiration Wall!

In my last post I mentioned having an “Inspiration Wall” in my last studio and present one. It is common for artists to have an area where they pin up little images that they love or which inspire them… In discussing Pinterest and art therapy, I was reminded of my inspiration wall which I could actually “pin” to one of my Pinterest boards!

I have used two sides of a wall in one corner. Here are some photos if the images I used thus far. The Inspiration Wall can be changed and added to as you discover different images…

Do you have an inspiration wall? You don’t need to be an artist to make one…

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Pinterest is Really A Form of Art Therapy!

I only started using the social media Imagery site called “Pinterest” about six months ago. I have not fully immersed myself in it and really participated regularly, but yesterday I was looking on a site and saw a bag I liked and “pinned” it to one of my boards. Then some time later I was still thinking about Pinterest and thought, “Wow, It really is similar to a certain kind of art therapy, how fascinating! I’ve got to blog about this discovery!”

To begin with, here is Wikipedia’s description of the definition and origins of Pinterest. I usually attempt to find other sites to cite on my blog but once in a while I find Wikipedia is best at doing the descrtiption and especially history and origin of some kind of phenomenon… I was surprised to find that in its beginnings the originator was interested in keeping it very “closed” and private and even wanted to talk and meet with its users. That strikes me as really a nice way to start a social media site, and I was quite surprised as right now, June 2013, is about 3.5 years since the development began.

“Pinterest is similar to earlier social image bookmarking systems based on the same principle, such as David Galbraith’s 2005 project Wists.[3] It allows users to save images and categorize them on different boards. They can follow other users’ boards if they have similar tastes. Popular categories are travel, cars, food, film, humor, home design, sports, fashion, and art.
Development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched as a closed beta in March 2010. The site proceeded to operate in invitation-only open beta.
Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site’s first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users.[4]
Nine months after launch the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011.[4]
Early in 2010, the company’s investors and co-founder Ben Silbermann tried to interest a New York-based magazine publishing company in buying Pinterest. The publisher declined to meet with the founders.[5]
The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in a more than expected number of downloads.[5]”

For those of you interested in the future of Pinterest and where it may be going with marketing and trying to get more traffic and interest businesses in it, I found a good link:
http://www.copyblogger.com/pinterest-2013/

I was actually just trying to find out how many users there are currently. As of mid may there were 11.7 million Pinterest users, which was behind of course Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the other big social media sites. The surprise data reported was that people were giving Pinterest and Facebook the same amount of their time when on the sites! Here is that interesting report on this data:
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/social-media-users_b22556

Ok. Moving on now that I’ve explained a lot about it the most common types of investigation of Pinterest, that is, looking it as a social media site and phenomenon and also slightly related to a lot of shopping/fashion social media type sites where people post items of things that consumers can actually buy, as Pinterest is a cross between a kind of personality identity statement and a kind of gathering of consumer generated images, which is probably where they are going in terms of the Pinterest people looking to the future in marketing and development.

My discovery when I was musing about it had to do with the concept of simply “picking out images of anything that you like” which also translates to, in my words: “express yourself in images more than words, by looking at all there is in the known universe and finding what you love to do, look at, want to do in the future, have already done, or images that express an important aspect of who you are, including mostly images of things that are generated by others, either some photographer who put this image on the internet, or some piece of art work by someone else that you like, or your own image of something personal to your life, including, of course, your own art work…” On my own Pinterest, I have not really paid so much attention to what I do and how much I pin as I do not do it often enough, though, just as with Facebook and LinkedIn, and perhaps Twitter. I expect to follow the same pattern of checking out the site and going on the site not too often, going through periods of more interest, and forgetting about it, until the magic moment when I suddenly really “get into” it and start “using” it not just more often but to its fuller capacity and participating in it more than the average user. With Facebook, it meant starting my own Public Artist Page about my Artist career, a few years ago, and just last year, with my launching of my Tribeca Healing Arts Website, I launched my Public Art Therapy page. Along with this, I was visiting Facebook a lot more frequently and joined some art therapy related groups, most recently the “Visual Art Circle” which I will discuss in another post. With LinkedIn it involved posting more, connecting more, and joining about 50 groups, both Artist and Art Therapy related.

So probably like a lot of other people who blog, have a website and Public Facebook pages and participate in LInkedIn and are into social media, Pinterest is sort of an after thought, and given that all this Social Media stuff, whether personal or mostly professional, including blogging, takes up a lot of time, Pinterest was lowest on my time factor and still is.

As I defined Pinterest above, it is based on a very simple principle that is connected to art therapy, which is that people enjoy images and their non verbal power of communicating about themselves and the world, and that images have a lot of power, and that images are enjoyable; nvesting in expressing oneself through imagery is very healing and, here is a very important part of it — it is a great way to connect with other people and sometimes preferable to communicating just non-verbally!

Most non art therapist do not know that, among the principles of the healing power of art therapy is the idea that just looking at and sorting images as well as picking out images you like is therapeutic and a part of the art therapy process or even can be The Art therapy process which you choose to use to make contact with and engage with patients. With some client populations, certain individuals and also at certain points in the art therapy process, the therapist will use this style of intervention, which may involve showing an individual or groups a few boxes or container or files of “images”, often divided into categories, such as, art by interesting artists, images from nature and landscapes, images of people in various settings and from different ethnicities and cultures, and other such groups of images. The form can be through images the art therapist “pre cut” before the session or group. With the internet now available, the images can be from various magazines or from different websites on the internet, in which case, the art therapist prints out different images to fill these types of categories. In this case where the art therapist did this, what we call “prep work”, the art therapy intervention that is similar to the Pinterest process would be, “Look through these images, maybe pick categories that are appealing to you, look through and pick out images you like, or just images that intrigue you, and this can include images you don’t like or images that disturb you.” (By the way, this last part just made me think of adding a category to my personal Pinterest called “Ugly Images” which would be images I find disgusting, ugly, repelling, gross, unappealing…) Only that last idea does not seem to be what Pinterest aims at.

Usually most users approach Pinterest as a way to express their individual identity through images they love, like, are interested in, and positive about. I don’t imagine most users think to post images of things they find negative and disgusting, but in art therapy, actually, the “Ugly” image or art work can often yield a lot more discovery and information about the Self than what we are pulled towards. Whenever someone makes something they really don’t like, I take extra time to investigate with them its power and what it means to the person and why they hate it so much. In fact the “Ugly Art: Make something with colors you hate and try to make it as ugly and unappealing to you as possible” is a directive I am interested in trying out with people. (yet another post topic).

Anyway, Pinterest involves having “Boards” which are like bulletin boards that you “virtually” take a push pin and stick images on, but you have an unlimited number of these boards and can use suggested categories or invent your own categories. Until I wrote this post, my boards were in this order called:
“My Style, Favorite Spaces and Places, Stuff, Books Worth Reading, People I Admire, Cool Stuff, Bunnies, Art and Artists I Love”. You can have as many boards and thus categories as you want, I think! I have about 118 pins. I have now gone back on Pinterest and added the boards “My Art Work” and “My Past Artwork” and rearranged the order of the boards…

The reason I cited that info about my participation in Pinterest is that I did not think much about what boards I made up and wasn’t really invested in thinking of my own Pinterest as being an expression of where I find the most meaning in life. If I had approached it that way instead of casually, it would be the way it is now…This is to show that I approached this like other social media, attitude being “Looks interesting, why is everyone so into this, I will try it out but I don’t really have time to do it really, its not super important or meaningful, so I will just jump in without giving it a lot of time and energy”, then building up to, “Wow, I didn’t realize all the potential in this social media site, I’m going to give it more time and energy and shape it more to be useful to me and/or an expression of who I am.”

And so, I am going to try to invest a little more time and interest in my Pinterest, as I have not fully explored the potential of this particular social media. What makes Pinterest social, and thus a bit like a very large art therapy group, is that like with other social media, you can “follow” people whose images you like. Also, you can find “pins” (images to pin) which you like and decide to “repin” them from some other person you randomly found on Pinterest by looking up a particular subject. Also of interest about Pinterest, is that you can find images on other sites and often now have the option of clicking on the Pinterest logo to “pin” anything on the internet to your personal boards. You can find a lot of cool images on Pinterest itself by searching for a subject you like. Also, I receive weekly emails from Pinterest with suggestions of boards and pins to investigate. So the social part is “sharing” images with people and also “liking” them, similar to liking on Facebook.

I find the name “Pinterest” is itself interesting and inviting. The idea of a “virtual” online kind of bulletin board or group of boards that are unlimited in size for “pinning” images on is cool in the way that people sometimes find ways the virtual world can imitate the real world. If I had the time and space I would love to get pushpins and pin cool images on a bunch of boards, but it would of course not allow for unlimited images or the amount of sharing that takes place on Pinterest.

In fact, I actually do have a kind of “Board”, my Inspiration Wall in my new studio. I had one in my old studio too. I put up postcards of art by artists that I admire as well as some of my own images, and my new studio’s Inspiration Wall is actually on two little walls and for the first time includes an image I made with an artist friend,another form of art therapy, combining the studio visit with another artist with making art together…

I have not fully explored all the possibilities and scope of Pinterest yet, but I really do enjoy the connection with art therapy and the healing power of looking at images you like and feeling inspired or comforted or excited by them!

Burial Rituals

I have been periodically blogging about interesting cultural rituals some of us are less likely to be familiar with. The idea behind it besides learning cool, weird and interesting and often wonderful things that people from other cultures do and observe, is the idea that it is important to learn more about other humans and what they do to promote more tolerance, acceptance, respect and interest in others’ ways of observing the rituals we all tend to partake in, such as birth, death, coming of age, different important ages, marriage and other love partnership type rituals.

I posted a bit about some interesting types of funerals. Here is a link to some ways of burying the dead that you may or may not be familiar with. Besides cremation and burial in a coffin in the cemetery, there are many other ways of dealing with the physical aspect of death — the physical body of the dead loved one… I looked at this website, and frankly didn’t find enough new information, however it does provide alternate solutions during different time frames of human existence…

http://www.health24.com/Lifestyle/Man/Your-life/8-weird-burial-customs-20130326

Here is another website post about different burial rituals. Be forewarned that the blogger/writer of this post tries to inject some humor into it, which I’m not sure about…These were a little more interesting, and I was quite shocked by the idea of the ring (last one on the post) but it made me think I’d like my remains to be turned into a diamond ring. It also describes in more detail how some people in India do elaborate rituals around cremating the body…

http://simplymulticultural.com/2012/11/funeral-rituals-around-the-world/

Not only dead bodies are buried, but the opposite of death, the birth– placenta burial rituals are common around the world. Often they involve doing some kind of cleansing of the placenta and burying it in a special place or with certain things. In one culture it is the father who does it. Here is a description of placenta burial rituals around the world, told in a rather neutral fashion, which I tend to prefer:

http://www.birthtoearth.com/FAQs/Placenta+Traditions.html

Sexual Fantasies and the Theory of the “Sex Script”

Warning: Do not read this if you are uncomfortable with topics about sex, fantasies, sexuality, also sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape, etc.

I want to start a conversation about sexual fantasies and the shame people feel about them. This is a huge topic, like most of the continuing topics I start and sometimes do not finish. (I intend to post more about the stigma of mental illness and the controversy around mental illness and violence, etc. but I’m taking a break from that topic to write about this very different one…)

In this post, which will probably be longer than intended, I would like to introduce the idea of the “sex script” in connection with people’s sexual fantasies. The information I got about this was reading posts on the internet summarizing this book:The Sex Script Hypothesis:
Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Human Sexuality, by James Park 

Here is the link to the website where you can read more about it:

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~parkx032/syn-sex.html

In reading this material, I noticed that I did not agree with some of the conclusions Park makes about people’s sexuality and even about the content of one’s sexual preoccupations. For example, he makes a big blanket statement about men and breasts:

“ Female breasts frequently appear in male sex-scripts on all levels: 
Men find women’s breasts of intense sexual interest. 
Some men become sexually aroused when viewing or thinking about breasts. 
And breasts may appear as a strong fantasy object in some men’s orgasms.”

One could read this and get lead on a detour as he is assuming a lot of things that are not for sure true. It is true that for most humans, the breast was the first “preoccupation” we had. It was where we got food and comfort, etc., but women may have just as strong a preoccupation with breasts as men, whatever their sexual orientation, and some men have no interest in breasts or fantasize about other things more often. These blanket statements are annoying, but I still think Park is on to something with his main theory.

The basic idea is that society may create our “sexual scripts” (what is considered stereotypically appropriate for men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, to engage in when they have sex or when they masturbate. The “sexual script” in our society is pretty limited, as you can see by watching sex scenes in most mainstream movies. There is not even a societal “sexual script” (which is a kind of narrative, by the way, and why we can discern society’s limited stories about sex from the mainstream media) for bisexual and transgendered and questioning individuals, as society does not really know what the story might be for such people. 

Anyway his point in talking about “sexual scripts” versus the concept of the “sex script” is to point out the difference. Many people do mostly have fantasies that conform to these limited “sex scenes”, however, I would wager that the majority of individuals who engage in sexual fantasy at any age tend to stray from these limited scripts into their own personal “sex script”. The sex script as I understand it is something that kind of gets “imprinted” into the human brain in the first moments of discovering sexuality and/or engaging in sexual contact with others or with oneself. Basically the majority of people’s sex script is formed during puberty, although some people exposed to sex and sexuality at younger ages, have sex scripts that begin at that time. Thus people who have been molested and abused at very young ages, from infancy up to about age 12, may have very disturbing sex scripts or may have sex scripts that mostly contain the things that they find disturbing and not arousing at all. Thus, some people may eliminate certain sexual activity from their fantasies and sex lives as they find they are repulsed by it. On the other hand, even people who experienced sexual abuse at very early ages may, without their control, notice that they are aroused by all kinds of varieties of disturbing fantasies, some of which involve coercion and/or rape or other events they remember from the abuse.

Basically around childhood all the way to age 20, the human brain is still forming, and there are young ages during which the sex script will get imprinted. So men who identify as heterosexual and report no fantasies about homosexual contact, may still fantasies about looking at other men naked, or masturbating with other men, if they were exposed to this in reality or through pornography that they experienced around the time they were aware of having wet dreams and/or masturbating.

The theory of the sex script is useful in that it explains why some couples are mystified by hearing what the other person gets “turned on” by or fantasizes about. In some cases, a person’s regular sex life, whether with one partner or more, may have nothing to do with their sex script. An obvious and common example involves gender and sexual orientation. Some people notice that they prefer to fantasize about being with the same gender though they have never been attracted to someone of the same gender and only have had sexual experiences with the opposite gender. The same can be true of homosexual men and women who may experience heterosexual sex only in their fantasy life. 

I think the main important take away about this, while I want to post about many sub topics, is that the theory of the sex script is most useful for people who have not been able to talk to their partners about their sexual fantasies due to feelings of shame or fears of disgust and rejection by the partner(s). Realizing that your sex script was formed years before you met this person or persons you may be married to or committed can be liberating for this group of people and form a bridge for how to start talking about their fantasies with their partners and sharing. 

It is well documented that people who share their sexual fantasies with each other and have interest in each other’s fantasies tend to have a freer more open and perhaps satisfying sex life with their partner(s). It is never too late to start sharing these “dark secrets” with the people you are sexually intimate with. It needs to be done in an atmosphere of acceptance. The sex script provides the help for such discussions. Knowing that one’s partner may have had sexual experiences with others before one met the person is very different from accepting that one’s partner’s brain was exposed to certain aspects of sexuality in the actual reality of a “strange” sexual experience or exposed to watching or seeing some kinds of sex that are foreign to the other partner. There is some kind of strange assumption people sometimes have that their fantasies are probably similar to their partner’s, or an assumption by people who don’t really engage in fantasy, that their partner is not that preoccupied with it either. There is a lot of misplaced jealousy going on about sexual fantasy and erotica and pornography. There is a great scene in the movie “The Kids Are alright” where one of the kids finds their mothers’ stash of gay male porn and is shocked and freaked out. It may have been a scene where the kid walked in on their parents watching it; I can’t remember. What was great about it was the explanation one or both of the moms gave which was quite brief but pretty groundbreaking for a lot of people who did not know this. Basically she said “Just because we are lesbians doesn’t mean we only like watching women together in our choice of porn..” Anyway, it introduced the idea that sexual orientation and erotica, pornography, and fantasy and even couple’s engaging in watching something together, may have nothing to do with the sexual orientation or gender of the people having these experiences.

There is documentation that  “rape” fantasies are very common. What is interesting about these studies done on women with such fantasies, is that women who fantasize about being raped are actually quite healthy in their sex lives with others and also, that they tend to have a wide variety of fantasies, of which the rape fantasy is only one. So people’s assumptions that rape fantasies are unhealthy are unfounded. It must be emphasized of course that fantasy and reality are extremely different. When a patient tells me about what they consider a taboo fantasy (incest, for example, or random stuff like rubbing up against people in the subway), these are part of their sex script, not their real life. A person may fantasize about all these taboo topics, as well as violent sex and anything else that comes to mind that one might be uncomfortable with oneself. “Why am I aroused by this stuff that is illegal or bad?” Because it is part of your sex script, which you have little control over. When you can understand that fantasy is really a place where “anything goes”, you can be accepting that your partner likes to think about other people, objects, situations etc. that have absolutely nothing to do wtih you or your sex life with your partner, you really have reached an understanding of the concept of the sex script. Healthy couples not only like to share their fantasies, sometimes act them out, or even masturbate together while sharing them, or watch erotica that their partner likes to watch even if it isn’t their “cup of tea”, but also enjoy that their partner shares their sex script with them. Perhaps this is an even more intimate experience than sex itself. It is common for people to notice that they have to ask their partner to do specific things to turn them on or give them an orgasm; most people are not mind readers or body readers, and some people report the best sex to have been with the same person they had bad or mediocre sex with. The difference was the level of openness and communication about what they liked from their partner but also about showing their partner what they like to imagiine, watch or read when they are alone and aroused. It is true that most of “sex” is in the brain, so it makes sense that talking about or showing one’s partner about one’s “sex script” will be helpful. It may be difficult to hear that your partner imagines having sex with specific other people or strangers or having the kind of sex you do not have together, but this has nothing to do with possibiilites of “affairs”. A person can be extremely faithful to their chosen partner or partner(s) and have fantasies that involve behavior that violates whatever “contract” they have about their sex life. And again, this is because we do not have a lot of control over some things that make us sexually excited, and images that we watch or that just enter our brains in adulthood, but we always have control oer our behaviors in reality.

Perhaps the next post on this topic needs to be about pornography and relationships, as this is a big  deal with a lot of couples, and a lot of hurt and pain could be avoided, if people were more educated about the concept of the “sex script”…