Artist Kate Shepherd interviews psychologist Cheryl Arutt in this brief excerpt from an episode of the Creative Genius podcast. See link to the full episode in the Show Notes.
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Kate Shepherd: Hello there. Welcome to Creative Genius, the podcast. I am really excited to bring you this episode today. It's been a long time coming.
Some of you might remember a while back, I asked what would you ask a clinical and forensic psychologist who specialized in creativity and you sent in your questions to me. And I asked them to our guest today.
Our guest is Dr. Cheryl Arutt. She is a clinical and forensic psychologist who cohosts and is a regular member of the behavior bureau on HLN's panel show Dr. Drew on Call.
She often appears as a psychological expert on ABC Fox news, H L N, and True TV's In Session.
As a creative person herself for many years, Cheryl was a commercial, print and television actress. Cheryl's work as a psychologist often centers around creativity and the importance of healthy creative expression.
She tells us how she left acting to pursue a psychology and thought she left the world of creativity behind only to find that it followed her to her practice.
And I feel like our, our collective definition of creativity is so narrow and it's so limiting, you know, we think it's art and it's in the visual arts, especially, you know, like a lot of the stereotypes are on creativity and, and I really wanna help to redefine creativity so that more people can find it and find it in themselves.
But I really was excited to talk to you from sort of a brain science perspective. Like, what is your definition through that lens of what creativity is?
Cheryl Arutt: Creativity is being able to act out in a way that's constructive.
We think so much about acting out as bad. But people who are creative, they create something that didn't previously exist and they do that using their creativity. And we can use that in all kinds of constructive ways. We can use it in ways that aren't as constructive.
And from a brain science perspective, creativity is the opposite of rigidity, and of being locked down. You have access to yourself. And it operates very often in a very unconscious way.
When I see people, when we're talking about the things that we generally think about as conventionally creative, because you, you also made a really good point that actually, I think I wan't to talk to first...
I had a conversation just last week with a friend of mine who was saying, oh, I'm not creative. I'm not creative like you and these other friends of ours.
And I said, wait a minute, you are. Somebody who has just completely reenvisioned your department, where you work and reorganized everybody's job description that actually works better for their lives and made things more beautiful and functional.
And what I love about her is she's a minimalist. She can, you know, carry this little teeny bag on vacation and she can see, you know, what's essential and what isn't and her creative problem solving.
It's something that she never thought about as being creativity, but it's so creative and it's something I've always really valued about her.
So, that's just one example of ways that people are creative.
Kate Shepherd: Why do we do that? This is something I wanted to, to get to may as well. Just jump to it right now. What is it that we are doing as a culture, as a group to so readily believe that story, "Oh, I'm not creative." - cuz it is everywhere and it's so obviously not true.
But so many people are so quick to believe that and embrace that idea and almost hide behind it. Like, what are we scared of? Or why do we believe that?
Cheryl Arutt: I think that a lot of what makes us pull back from that when we get older than kindergarten is perfectionism and our inner critic.
I think that we can put so much pressure on ourselves and feeling like, oh, I'm not good at this, or I'm not good enough, or as good as this other person is.
And if you have your inner critic on your shoulder the whole time, you're creating something, it's very difficult to hear yourself think.
And it's very difficult to really let what comes out, come out. And so a lot of what I think makes people grounded and have a good experience with their creativity is being able to identify that inner critic and get it to shut up.
Or kind of get your inner bouncer to boot it out of there and leave you alone. So you can do your thing.
Kate Shepherd: Do you have strategies? I think that you work with people to do that. Cause I think, I mean, that's, it's, it's so bang it's so bang on like, that is exactly what you need to do.
I had another guest on who talks about her committee and how she would, she would say, I rebuke you. You have to go sit over there, like in the studio, like she'll actually sometimes out loud say to the inner committee, "You can't be here."
But so when you're working with somebody, who's really just... because it can be paralyzing right, to be dealing with that? Yeah. I've always called it my board of directors, my inner board...They can really be paralyzing.
And so do you have strategies that you give people to work with to help to shut those guys up?
Cheryl Arutt: Well, the people that you're talking to seem to have a whole posse of these people at once, like a Greek chorus all on your case at once.
You know, I think that one of the things that can be really helpful is to really recognize it as an other, that this is something that is not the truth about you or how the world works.
This is coming from a very specific, very biased point of view, and it basically has one job. And that one job is to make you feel terrible about yourself, and it will lie to you.
It will use any kind of trick in order to tell you you're not enough or you shouldn't or whatever you did is wrong, and it should be something else. If you can recognize that.
Not identify with it. I love what the, what the person you were speaking to said about, you know, I rebuke you and, and sending it away.
I find it can be actually really helpful to not even get into a, you know, a death match with it because, you know, you're kind of fighting on its turf in that way, but to be able to turn the volume down. To be able to also really cultivate, what do I want instead of this? What do I wanna think about myself instead?
What do I wanna feel instead? And what am, what am I calling in? Because it it's a lot easier to say, oh, I don't wanna do that. Or that was terrible. Or growing up, I felt like this.
And you know, maybe it's the opposite. Maybe that's what I should be doing. But the opposite. Is just as much determined by the bad thing as having to do the same thing. You're nodding...
Kate Shepherd: Well, it's a house of mirrors once you get in there. I remember the day that I realized, oh my God, that thing that I've been thinking was the good voice in there is actually just a shape shifted version of the other inner critic.
Like it'll do whatever it can to get my attention and to keep drawing me in. And I feel like sometimes it's grabbing at my ankles. I don't understand why that's, why does it do that? What is the purpose of that?
Cheryl Arutt: That's wisdom right there - the day you figured that out. I just wanna reflect that back to you.
It really does like to establish itself as if it's the truth, or "You need me, you would be so mediocre if I wasn't running the show and telling you all the things you're doing wrong."
I call it the saboteur - and the saboteur is there to really undermine you while posing as the protector. The one who keeps you excellent.
I've never seen anybody really, really thrive because they beat themselves up harder and faster and more preemptively than anybody else, you know?
There's so much unnecessary suffering that happens. And so I think first just getting the idea that it's lying to you, and that you don't have to listen to it and you can say, "Yeah, yeah, I hear you, but we tried your way and that didn't work for me."
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