Four Fundamental Truths

For me, photography has always been a form of expression. Growing up, I expressed creativity in many ways: playing the violin, drawing, acting, writing poetry, journaling, and participating in teen art programs. Each was a way of translating feeling into form, long before I had language for what I was trying to express.

As the years passed and I accumulated more life experience, that expression deepened. I became more aware, in some ways, of how emotion, memory, and experience move through the body and eventually into art. Sometimes that process is challenging, especially when it involves trauma. And it can be even harder when that trauma no longer has a clear face, when it hides itself in layered behaviors, patterns, and choices. Although, I created art in all these different time periods, I was bottled up and running on fuel from passed behaviors that have since disguised themselves only to be revealed later in life.

I bring this up because I’ve been thinking about how trauma held and trauma revealed shape the way we create. It wasn’t until recently that I was able to face some long-buried experiences of my own. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t making emotional art before, but now the art knows the emotion. It can recognize it, name it, sit closer to it, and create deeper connections with the community.

Reading The Body Keeps the Score helped me understand how deeply experience shapes decision-making, perception, and expression. It’s remarkable how many layers we build around ourselves in response to harm, and how long those layers can remain invisible.

There’s a passage from the book that I’ve been sitting with, one that feels especially relevant to both healing and art:

“Four fundamental truths: (1) Our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.”

Change is possible. We don’t have to be afraid. We can heal. When we take these steps, imagine the kind of art we can produce.

More quotes from the book can be found here: https://robertbraggs.com/reading-research/blog/the-body-keeps-the-score