Why Creative Practices aren’t just an "Add-on" for Therapists
Engaging in creative activities isn't a wellness luxury. For many communities, it's always been a means of survival. A reflection on what this means for helping professionals.
In this post, I'm exploring why imagination and creative expression are fundamental human needs, and what this means for the profession.
Dominant frameworks position creativity as something we “add on” to our day, once our basic needs are met, and everything else has been checked off our to-do list. Often, especially in marginalised communities, however, creativity is a means of survival. This distinction matters, and it completely changes how we understand creative practice in the helping professions.
We don't always have the option to separate imagination from survival, because survival requires imagination. This is what I mean when I say creativity matters: I mean it in the survival sense. It is what keeps us alive.
When your culture is being erased, storytelling preserves knowledge across generations. When your body is being dehumanised, making art insists on your humanity. When systems try to isolate you, gathering to sing, dance, or witness one another maintains connection. When language is being taken, creating becomes how you communicate what cannot be spoken. Audre Lorde knew this all too well.
"Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence." — Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, and many indigenous peoples around the world, have experienced the oppression of language, ceremony, dance, and creative practice as a sustained colonial project.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional Wellbeing (SEWB) framework, developed by and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and validated through the voices of community members, has always understood connection to culture, ceremony, and creative practice as foundational to health and wellbeing. Here is the full citation if you would like to read it (or haven’t come across this previously), which I highly recommend doing:
Gee, G., Dudgeon, P., Schultz, C., Hart, A., & Kelly, K. (2014). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social and emotional wellbeing. In P. Dudgeon, H. Milroy, & R. Walker (Eds.), Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principles and Practice (2nd ed., pp. 55–68). Canberra: Commonwealth Government of Australia.
This is the most comprehensive framework for holistic wellbeing available. It says what Western psychology is only beginning to approximate. Writers and thinkers, including Pat Dudgeon and her colleagues, have articulated this with depth and rigour that deserves direct engagement. The SEWB model does not position creativity as a contributor to wellbeing. It understands creative and ceremonial practices as a foundational domain of health itself, inseparable from connection to Country, community, and culture.
When helping professionals say, "I don't have time for creativity"
When, as helping professionals, we say, "I don't have time for creativity," we are speaking from a position of privilege. One that never had to rely on our creative inner resources to survive.
If we understand creative expression as a means of survival, we recognise it as essential. Something that becomes more important when conditions are harsh. Something we prioritise when resources are scarce. We practise what keeps us whole and connected while we're fighting for safety.
This is why I don’t frame creative practice as a self-care "treat" or wellness luxury. Because that erases where it comes from.
Bringing creativity back into our work
Creativity has been stripped from so much of helping work. But creativity is about imagining something different.
When we make art, write, move, sing, or garden, we're practising something the system cannot control. We're insisting on a self that is deeper and richer than our usefulness. We're accessing embodied, relational, and ancestral ways of knowing that colonialism worked hard to erase. And we're reconnecting with practices that communities have always used to sustain themselves and each other, long before wellness became an industry.
This is why bringing creativity back into our work is one way we can decolonise our practice. Not by borrowing Indigenous frameworks without accountability or acknowledgement, but by taking seriously what those frameworks have always known: that health is relational, collective, and constituted in connection to culture, community, and Country. That the self capable of caring for others is always already held within community. That making things together is not a supplement to healing, it is one of its oldest forms.
When we create together, we are:
Accessing embodied, relational, and ancestral ways of knowing
Insisting we are more than our utility and our productivity
Building something the system cannot easily control or commodify
Modelling the relational conditions of care that our clients and communities deserve
Creative practice, done in community, gives us access to our aliveness and our inner knowing. It connects us with our wild, unpredictable, relational selves. And it reminds us why we came to this work in the first place. This is what The Flourishing Way is built on.
If you are curious about what it looks like to bring creative practice into your professional life in a sustained, evidence-informed, and politically grounded way, I would love for you to explore it with me.
Coming together for creative engagement is how we build something different, don’t you think?
A note on positionality: I am a white settler psychologist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. I engage with First Nations frameworks as a learner, with gratitude and accountability, and not as an authority. I am committed to following the lead of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, communities, and scholars in this work.
Ready to explore more ways to flourish in work and life?
Waitlist for The Flourishing Way is currently open! This is our transformative program that brings together psychological and mindfulness-based approaches with hands-on creative exploration. It's designed to help you reconnect with the vibrant, playful parts of yourself and flourish in work and life. Learn more here.
Or if you’d like to explore further ways to nurture your creativity, experience more creative flow and build a flourishing life, you can learn more about my services here.
Is this post the kind of thing you love exploring? I'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me on Instagram @the_flourishing_space or on LinkedIn.
