a natural drift

Let’s start with the stories.

A panel of four veterans ended Day One of the Creative Forces Summit by telling part of their story. Staff Sergeant Cory Sandoval, First Sergeant David Griego, Sergeant Curt Bean, and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Ernst shared their experience coming home and reintegrating back into the civilian life following their combat duty.

“Whatever you come back with has no cure,” LT. Col. Ernst told the approximately 200 attendees at the Summit. “It’s part of the culture of combat. You don’t come home the same (as when you went in).”

The others told parts of their stories – because the stories are all unique to the veteran yet common themes run through – that echoed those sentiments. “I deal with a lot of guilt each day,” SSgt Sandoval reflected. They also commented on the “15 Things Veterans Want You to Know” which was really informative for a civilian like me to hear.

The Summit, part of the network of Creative Forces initiatives happening throughout the country, was the launch of the community efforts to help veterans heal from the trauma of their combat experiences. The Colorado Springs region – with its military presence here – is one of eleven sites in the NEA Military Healing Arts Network.

The Network brings together the 3 Cs for creative arts therapies to foster the healing process: Clinical (Medical Research, Creative Arts Therapies, and Telehealth services), Community (State, Regional, and Local Arts Organizations, Veterans Networks), and Capacity Building (Training & Education, Digital Resource Centers, and Medical Research). These three components put creative arts therapies at the core of patient-centered care.

Held at the beautiful ENT Center for the Arts on the UCCS campus, the Summit brought various local arts organizations together with military representatives to hear the clinical support veterans receive and to hear the work of the arts organizations that currently provide community support for our veterans. The Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region (COPPeR) in conjunction with the Colorado Creative Industries will serve as the administrative lead for our community’s local Creative Forces initiative with support from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, Americans for the Arts, and Fort Carson to spearhead these efforts.

A panel of local arts organizations presented on their efforts to provide art therapies to veterans. We heard reports from the following local arts organizations:

• Bemis School of Art
• Concrete Couch
• Poetry Heals
• Pikes Peak Community College: Expressive Arts Project
• UCCS: HomeFront Theatre Project (consider attending their performance of “Ajax: A Warriors Tale of Heroism and Loss) on March 18 at 4:00 pm.

The creative arts therapies allow veterans to tap into ways to “identify, name, and process their trauma.” That trauma may manifest itself in Traumatic Brain Injury, PTSD, or chronic and debilitating pain. The creative arts therapies give them multiple ways “in” that other therapies may not tap into. Through music, visual arts, movement, or writing, veterans are able to use the resources they might learn in their clinical sessions – tools like mindfulness, socialization strategies, expressing feelings, ways to enhance reasoning and thinking skills. The combination of clinical approaches and the community arts organizations allow veterans to treat the wounds of war and come home whole.

The invisible wounds of war, wounds that have a physical, emotional, and economic impact on the veterans, are healed through connection (engaging the veteran), communication (controlling their own narrative), and creativity (veterans want to help and serve and the creative arts allow them to tap into what they can create).

The keynote speaker on Day Two for the culmination of the Summit was a presentation by Stacy Pearsall. Pearsall, combat disabled and retired from military service, served as a military photojournalist during three combat tours in the Middle East. She is the founder of the Veterans Portrait Project which arose out of her desire to turn her photography into art and capture the portraits of veterans to honor their service. You can view Pearsall’s work on the Veterans Portrait Project website.

Attending the Creative Forces Summit was a very humbling experience. To hear the veterans’ stories, to move toward understanding the process of healing their combat trauma, and to hear their own perspective on their experience was completely enlightening. More than one of them said that they didn’t want pity or sympathy from their community, and they encouraged us to think of those soldiers who lost their lives as the real “heroes.” What I heard from them was that they want to heal the wounds that we cannot see and that we might barely be able to understand.

And it is through the arts that makes that healing possible.

This entry was posted on February 19, 2018 at 1:26 am and is filed under Arts and Creativity, Healing and Recovery, People, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.