Cultivating creative moments of healing for yourself.

Family Dynamics & Boundaries • June 26, 2022

What does cultivating creative moments of healing mean?

I first learned about the concept of deliberately creating healing moments from the late, incredible Gestalt psychotherapist Mariah Fenton Gladis.

I was privileged to attend one of her workshops at Esalen. She crafted “moments of exact healing” for workshop participants (myself included) who were wrestling with pains and deep griefs. 

It was beautiful to witness her work: to see how she would physically arrange group participants in ways that mirrored family of origin dynamics for the person in the “hot seat” and to have them say out loud the very thing that a person most longed to hear and what would happen emotionally after this occurred. 

These exact moments of healing took place in a controlled setting under the guidance of a licensed, skilled professional. And they were profound.

But these exact moments of healing don’t have to just happen in group therapy or one-on-one therapy settings.

As I’ve come to understand and define them, cultivating creative moments of healing can also look like noticing, seeking out, and intentionally making happen the literal actions, tasks, opportunities, and experiences that provide some of what we may not have received in childhood.

These experiences of creative moments of healing can be big or small. 

They can happen when you’re alone or with others.

Shift and change or remain the same for years.

Take effort, time, and money, or nearly none at all.

And there are as many ideas and possibilities for creative moments of healing as there are people on the planet. 

But to help catalyze your thinking about what cultivating creative moments of healing could look like for you, some ideas might include the following:

• Maybe you were never provided a calming, regular, and reliable bedtime routine and evening tuck-in as a child. A reparative experience for you now as an adult in your healing journey coming from a relational trauma background could look like: Giving this to yourself! Create a calming, regular bedtime routine. (Maybe with a lovie and mug of hot milk.) And literally tucking yourself into bed. (Or having your partner do this for you if you feel comfortable with them doing this).

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• Maybe you grew up in poverty and were never taught how to manage, budget, and plan for your financial future. A reparative experience for you now as an adult in your healing journey coming from a relational trauma background could look like: Subscribing to an amazing budgeting software and taking their financial education courses to help you get a handle on your money. And then working diligently to logistically and financially protect yourself as an adult.
• Maybe you were never given the opportunity to feel safe, secure, and protected in your home and neighborhood. A reparative experience for you now as an adult in your healing journey coming from a relational trauma background could look like: Taking a self-defense course. Or installing additional deadbolts on your home doors. Or even befriending your local neighborhood police officers.
• Maybe you never got to experience the fierce, wise, strong protection of a parent. A reparative experience for you now as an adult in your healing journey coming from a relational trauma background could look like: paying for re-fathering that can give you the experience of this protection in some ways, or assigning yourself specific TV shows and movies where protective, wise, loving fathers defend their children against all odds. And allowing this external modeling to touch you and inspire your own inner fathering.
• Maybe you never got the experience of spacious, open-ended joyful play that is every child’s right. A reparative experience for you now as an adult in your healing journey coming from a relational trauma background could look like: Getting curious about what brings you joy, what lights up your body. And then deliberately seeking out play and fun – solo, with friends, or even parallel play with your child.
• Maybe your family was never financially stable enough to get you what you dearly wanted for Christmas one year (or all of the years of your youth). A reparative experience for you now as an adult in your healing journey coming from a relational trauma background could look like: literally buying that very thing for yourself now. (Side note: I did this this past Christmas for my daughter when I bought her a dreamy, heirloom-quality hardwood dollhouse. She and I have played with it every day since. And I can’t tell you how healing and fun this feels for me!)

And this list of creative moments of healing is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg!

Integrating Creative Healing Moments in Trauma Therapy

When you bring your experiments with creative healing moments into therapy—sharing how you finally bought yourself that chemistry set or created an elaborate bedtime ritual—you’re not reporting childish indulgences but profound reparative work, discovering that learning how to remother yourself happens through both professional guidance and daily creative interventions.

Your trauma-informed therapist helps you identify which developmental gaps need attention by tracking patterns: the rage when seeing children comforted points to missing soothing, the tears during father-protection scenes reveal absent safety, the jealousy of others’ financial literacy exposes educational neglect. Together, you design specific healing experiments—not random self-care but targeted reparative experiences addressing precise developmental deficits.

The therapeutic process involves processing both the healing and the grief these moments evoke—because tucking yourself in tonight simultaneously soothes current you and breaks the heart of child-you who went to bed alone and afraid. Your therapist holds space for this complexity, helping you understand that tears while playing with your child’s dollhouse aren’t regression but integration, that taking self-defense classes isn’t paranoia but creating bodily safety never provided. Through discussing your experiments, you refine what works: maybe financial planning courses feel empowering while bedtime routines feel forced, leading to customized approaches that honor your unique history.

Most powerfully, therapy helps you recognize that these creative moments aren’t consolation prizes for a stolen childhood but active construction of internal resources—each reparative experience literally builds neural pathways of safety, care, and worth that weren’t laid down developmentally.

Your therapist celebrates as you report sleeping better after establishing bedtime rituals, feeling safer after self-defense training, experiencing joy through play, understanding that you’re not just healing the past but actively becoming the good enough parent to yourself that you always deserved, one creative moment at a time.

The Clinical Picture: What the Research Actually Shows

The clinical and research literature on this topic has expanded significantly over the past two decades, and the findings consistently point in the same direction: what happens in early relational environments shapes the nervous system, the self-concept, and the capacity for intimacy in ways that persist into adulthood — and that respond meaningfully to targeted therapeutic work.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University School of Medicine, author of The Body Keeps the Score, has spent decades documenting how relational trauma is stored in the body and processed by the brain differently from ordinary memory. His neuroimaging research has shown that trauma memories are held in subcortical, pre-verbal brain regions — which is why “just talking about it” is often insufficient, and why somatic and body-based modalities are frequently essential components of effective treatment.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma scholar at Harvard Medical School, author of Trauma and Recovery, identifies three stages of trauma recovery that remain the clinical gold standard: establishing safety, processing mourning and grief, and reconnecting with ordinary life. (PMID: 22729977) Each stage has its own requirements and its own timeline. Trying to skip stages — going straight to processing without first establishing safety — is one of the most common reasons trauma work stalls or becomes destabilizing.

What I want driven, ambitious women to understand is that the science is on your side. The healing of relational wounds is not a matter of willpower or character. It’s a matter of finding the right approaches, the right relationships, and the right pace — and staying with the process long enough for actual neurological and relational change to occur. That’s not a quick process. But it’s a real one, and it’s available to you. If you’re ready to explore what that support might look like, I’d invite you to connect with me.

Mira is a 35-year-old architect who began keeping a sketchbook during a difficult period of depression. She wasn’t trying to produce anything — she just started drawing the view from her window each morning, five minutes before she opened her laptop. What she noticed, after several weeks, was that the five minutes had started to expand: she was arriving at her desk feeling slightly more present, slightly less like she was bracing for a day she had to survive. The creative practice wasn’t fixing her depression. But it was giving her a daily evidence point that she was still capable of making something, of choosing something, of being someone with preferences and an interior life beyond the demands of her work. That matters. Small, consistent moments of creative engagement can become the thread that holds a fragile period together — not dramatically, but quietly, reliably. (Name and details have been changed.)

Both/And also means holding this: healing can be happening even when it doesn’t feel like it is. Progress in trauma recovery is frequently invisible from the inside — the nervous system integrates experiences, the window of tolerance expands, old patterns loosen their grip — all without announcing themselves. The creative healing practice is both a contributor to this process and, sometimes, the only evidence that the process is still running. When you can make something — even something small, even imperfectly — you are demonstrating to your nervous system that you are safe, that there is space, that something beyond survival is possible. That is genuinely therapeutic, even when it doesn’t feel dramatic.

Both/And: Healing Can Be Slow and Still Be Working

Driven women often approach healing the way they approach everything else: with goals, timelines, and measurable benchmarks. They want to know how long therapy will take, what “done” looks like, and whether they’re doing it right. I understand the impulse — it’s the same competence that built their careers. But healing from relational trauma doesn’t follow a project management timeline, and treating it like one can become its own form of avoidance.

Kira is a corporate attorney who, after eight months of therapy, told me she was frustrated with her progress. “I still got triggered last week,” she said, as though a single difficult moment erased months of genuine change. What Kira hadn’t noticed — because she was measuring against perfection — was that the trigger resolved in hours instead of days, that she reached out for support instead of isolating, and that she could name what happened in her body instead of just pushing through.

Both/And means Kira can be making real, measurable progress and still have moments where the old patterns surface. It means healing isn’t a straight line, and a setback doesn’t erase the foundation she’s built. For driven women, this is perhaps the most radical reframe: that effectiveness in recovery isn’t about eliminating hard days. It’s about changing your relationship to them when they come.

The Systemic Lens: Why Trauma Recovery Shouldn’t Be a Privilege

When we tell driven women to “get help” for their trauma, we often fail to acknowledge what getting help actually requires: financial resources for quality therapy, schedule flexibility for consistent appointments, a workplace culture that doesn’t penalize prioritizing mental health, and a social environment where vulnerability is safe. These aren’t universally available. For many women, they aren’t available at all.

Even driven women with financial means face systemic obstacles. The pressure to be constantly productive means therapy often gets scheduled in margins that don’t allow for the emotional processing the work requires. The cultural expectation that women should “handle things” quietly means many driven women hide their therapeutic work from colleagues, friends, even partners — adding the burden of secrecy to the already demanding work of healing. The medicalization of trauma into neat diagnostic categories often fails to capture the complexity of what relational trauma actually looks like in an accomplished life.

In my work, I try to hold the systemic reality alongside the individual journey. You are doing courageous, difficult work. And the world around you was not built to support that work. Both things matter. Understanding the structural constraints isn’t an excuse to stop — it’s a reason to be more compassionate with yourself about the pace, and more outraged at a system that makes healing harder than it has to be.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

The cultural water that ambitious women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind” — judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone — it’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer