Psychotherapy to Unleash Creativity

Many people have flashes of creative insight. Not as many sustain the innovative process from insight to completion. People who achieve excellence in their life work are often creative, whether in art, science, or human relations.

I offer psychotherapy services to enhance and support your creativity. A variety of people consult me for creativity, including students, artists, writers, and professionals — essentially anyone who wants to find their voice for self-expression. The approach we take is tailored to your individual needs. These may include:

Stages of Creativity

Creativity is a process, one that can repeat as you refine some aspect of problem-solving. If you recognize where you are in this cycle — in what stage, you'll know what to do to engage your creativity with minimal stress. I particularly like a paper written by James Vargiu [1] that describes the process and envisions it unfolding in these stages:

1. Preparation: You engage in the creative process, gathering information and attempting solutions. This stage alone may not yield an original result.

2. Frustration: After much effort and thinking, if you're not coming up with an elegant solution, you find yourself increasingly frustrated until you find it harder to concentrate. This is a good time to put the problem aside. Vargiu that at this point if you just relax your mind, you may realize an elegant, original solution, skipping to step 4 in this process.

3. Incubation: Setting the problem aside allows it to incubate. Vargiu likens this to letting iron filings organize themselves into a pattern that has been magnetized by an invisible energy field. I think of the field having been being energized by your concentrated efforts so that each thought has an emotional charge. Leave the thoughts alone, and they will attract, repel or influence each other. If you've made sufficient effort in the preparation stage, this should yield creative illumination.

4. Illumination: Here, you arrive at an elegant solution that may seem obvious in afterthought. In Vargiu's metaphor, the iron filings have shifted into a new and unified pattern. It's likely to be a more innovative solution because it synthesizes the many aspects you considered in the preparation and frustration stages.

If you've given a solution sufficient time to incubate and you're still not coming up with an inspiring solution, it may be time to go back to the preparation stage, gathering more information and making more effort before letting your efforts incubate again.

5. Elaboration: You've realized the overall shape of your solution. Now you take time to create it in a useful and elaborated or detailed form. For example, I knew I wanted to describe the stages of creativity. To elaborate them is to describe them in enough detail that you, the reader, can relate them to your experience.

Process Issues

• Facing a very challenging creative project, perhaps larger than previously experienced
• Not knowing when to try harder or gather more information versus letting ideas incubate (see creativity stages to the right)
• Extreme pressure to produce, whether external, internal, or both
• Difficulties with self-discipline and follow-through

Psychological Challenges

Individuation — growth toward more authentic self-expression and identity, something often seen when facing a new life stage

Performance anxiety / stage fright

Lack of confidence

Low self-esteem

Problems regulating emotions, anxiety, substance abuse, impulsivity

Coping with mental illness (such as depression, Bipolar Disorder, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)

Situational Factors

Life turmoil in situations like divorce, work stress, or financial limitations

Physical health problems

Spiritual issues or transformation (for more, see my spirituality page)

Coaching for Creative and Writer's Block

Often people become creatively blocked because they don't understand the stages of the creative cycle. I may take the role of coach or mentor to teach you the stages of creativity and help you navigate these. I can also help you think through project management issues, such as estimating time and budget or creating a project plan with timetables and deliverables.

For writers, I draw from my own experience and can teach the mechanics of researching source material, generating creative ideas and forming them into finished text. More specifically, we might address the following writing challenges:

Getting started

Organizing your ideas

Writing in English as a second language

Believing the first draft must be a finished product

Feeling comfortable with intuitive knowing but having a hard time putting that into language. Sometimes it's a matter of writing descriptions of inner images and feelings, and letting this start the flow of words

Other issues, unique to you

Teaching Computer Research Skills

Writing that is rich in content and descriptively colorful flows from a wealth of knowledge. One of the secrets of excellent writing is thorough research, and this is so easily done now on the Internet! Computers are also excellent tools for quickly accessing vocabulary and one's personal knowledge library. For this reason, when mentoring writers, I sometimes teach computer research skills, including:

How to quickly find information on your computer or the Internet, so the information search doesn't interrupt creative thinking

Using an electronic dictionary to quickly understand difficult material

Quickly finding just the right word, using an electronic thesaurus

Using spreadsheet software to sort and categorize complex information

The list of issues on this page is by no means complete. If yours is one I haven't covered, call me at 415.271.2350 to discuss its possible treatment.

My Creative Background

Before I became a psychologist, I enjoyed an award-winning career as a marketing writer, editor and communications consultant. In this role, I often collaborated with other creative professionals, including graphic designers, video producers and webmasters. In undergraduate school, I was a fine arts minor, something I thoroughly enjoyed, along with teaching myself to play guitar. I've taught classes in proposal writing and have coached students in writing their doctoral dissertations, where the most important objective is to get it done!

To ask about a low-cost first appointment, please select this link.

Footnotes

1. Vargiu, J. (1977). Creativity. In Synthesis, 3-4, 17-53. Redwood City, CA: Synthesis Press.