A SEQUENCE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY
September 2026
by Lindsay Edwards
I know that everyone is innately creative. We must be; adaptation requires it. But, still, plenty of our clients don't believe they are, especially when life stressors and mental health symptoms flare.
Since I'm hearing "I don't consider myself creative" despite building a business on restoring health through creative therapeutic practice, I had to reflect on how and why people would engage in Arts in Counseling (AiC).
I realized that what matters is that we, as AiC providers, are enlivened in our own creativity so that we can help steer you back to yours. You should feel us as energetically and imaginatively ALIVE in the room with you. This let's you off the hook for needing to be creative or artistic during sessions when you're not up for it. Instead, you can heal vicariously through ours.
We're able to do this with you because our team, as therapists and artists, are disciplined about cultivating the creative practices that enliven us. With this fuel, we are able to bring that vitality, presence and rigor to discovering ways to uniquely move you toward the change you seek.
In this profession, it is our ethical responsibility to remain clear-minded, responsive and pliable for client work. To maintain that capacity, I often return to Bartenieff Fundamentals movement language as a guide for macro and micro living: preparation, action, recuperation, and reorganize in order to continually move between stability and mobility.
Too often, we skip recuperation. It has such a bad rap in a hyperproductive culture. We treat it as time away from meaningful action rather than part of the process itself. But when we skip recuperation, we lose more than rest. I think we lose some of our capacity for creative reorganization.
Reorganization is the opportunity to reflect, assess, rearrange, and make sense of what just happened. It gives the body and mind time to integrate an experience and ask: Given what I know now, how might I organize myself differently for what comes next?
When we move constantly from one action to another (produce, respond, solve, caretake, perform), we may never create the conditions for that reorganization to occur. Instead of incorporating what an experience taught us, we simply repeat our familiar patterns whether they work or not.
Recuperation, on the other hand, gives us space to notice what the action revealed. Then creativity asks: What else could I do with this?
My former college dance professor, Dr. Lynda Davis, always always said "deepen where you are before moving to the next". When she literally meant that while I was in a 45 second lunge somewhere in the middle of her choreography, I resented the sentiment. ;) But metaphorically, she was teaching me something that I understand much better now. To deepen, I first had to prepare. Then I had to juice the action for all it was worth. That depth of effort eventually demanded recuperation. And in recuperating, my body and mind naturally reorganized themselves to support what I was asking them to do, and eventually to do it again.
Something happens. We take it in. Our existing organization (the way we respond) meets the new information. We assess, consciously or unconsciously, what still works and what doesn't. Then we rearrange what is available to us: our thinking, movement, behavior, relationships, environment, language, expectations, or sense of ourselves. And that produces a new possibility.
Preparation → Action → Recuperation → Reorganization → New Possibility (not necessarily linear or sequential)
To distill it down, I think creativity is our capacity to reorganize in response to experience. To take what is, imagine what else might be possible, and make a move toward it. And, if you're struggling with that process once a "problem" occurs, we are ready to help you.
