Psychologist Cheryl Arutt on Emotional Health and Creative People

“Creating art has always been a way to channel emotional intensity…” Psychologist Cheryl Arutt

Dr. Arutt thinks that actors and other artists who are willing, in their creative work, to delve into the really “messy” feelings of being human (shame, devastations, disappointments, betrayals, traumas and more), probably have a relationship with those feelings.

But, as she notes on her site, “You don’t have to be in pain to do great work as an artist.”

In our interview, she talks about actors and actresses with “bad boy” or “troubled” images, or problems with issues of anger and acting out.

She also comments about being an actor or other artist, and being aware of our Shadow Self.

See more in article Psychologist Cheryl Arutt on Emotional Health and Creative People

Also listen to related episode: Psychologist Cheryl Arutt on Brain Science of Creativity.

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Transcript

Hello, this is Douglas Eby. My guest today is Dr. Cheryl Arutt, a clinical psychologist, specializing in recovery from trauma and creative artist issues.

Hello, Dr. Arutt.

Cheryl Arutt: Hi, thanks for having me on.

Douglas Eby: Oh, sure. One of the statements on your site that I really appreciate is, quote, "One area of focus is working with creative artists and entertainment industry professionals to increase confidence in the access to creative expression while identifying and modifying any self-destructive patterns inhibiting creative achievement"

I think that's a great statement about your work and some of the kinds of topics we're going to be covering today.

There are some specific issues that you probably address in therapy, and one of them being. angry or aggressive tendencies.

There are a number of actors like Christian Bale and Shia Labeouf is another, who's had a "quote" bad boy image. Do some of those actors, with those kind of qualities, come to see you, and how can you help them respond constructively

Cheryl Arutt: Douglas, I need to respond to this one in sort of a general way because, as you know, I can't say who I'm working with and who I'm not working with.

The question you're asking is interesting because of the multiple levels to it. I think that the particular type of kind of bad boy image phenomenon is something that happens with men and boys more frequently.

A lot of the time the male actors have struggles with directing their anger, with making perhaps high-risk and self-destructive choices, but they don't have people following them around looking for an opportunity to say, okay, this is a self-absorbed, not nice guy.

And so there are two pieces to it.

One is the, whatever the symptomatic behavior is, which is a problem, whether they're well-known or not.

And then the other is the phenomenon of fame.

And for the actors who have broken through, I think a lot of them feel very betrayed because whatever unfinished business they may have had internally, they kind of figured that once they were successful and doing what they had always wanted to do, that everything would just kind of be fine and they'd feel good enough at that point.

And what a lot of actors find - for a number of reasons, one is that the pressures don't go away, they just change into something else - is that they continue to have this less than solid foundation to stand on at their core, unless they've done that work ahead of time.

And now they're in this machine and this system that loves to build people up and then gets envious of them and attacks them and tears them down.

And so they go through this rollercoaster cycle. It's something that I think you see with a lot of the publicity, the negative publicity about actors who act out and get photographed and written about, because once they're famous, every person who meets them, that snippet of behavior becomes their impression for life of who that person is.

Douglas Eby:  Sure. Well, and this obviously applies to two women as well. There's some prominent names we don't need to mention that regularly show up in the media who are acting out in various ways.

Cheryl Arutt: And those tend to for women...they just manifest differently, you know, the B Word gets attached, or the misogyny and sexualization comes out where things get depicted through that lens.

It's not a, oh, wow. There's a bad boy image, which is, I think, loved as much as hated for the guys, and for the women, there's a different type of tearing the women down.

And yet any of those people who are out there acting in these really unpleasant ways - I'm not saying it's okay to act that way, but they're not doing it because they're having a great time.

Douglas Eby:  Well, that really gets into the whole quality of self-destructive behavior.

And the fact that behaviors we engage in are oftentimes not just conscious and rational and out of our frontal lobes, but really out of a long history of difficulty or even abuse.

Which, which reminds me of a really provocative quote by actor William H Macy that I really liked. He once said, quote, "Nobody became an actor because he had a good childhood."

Cheryl Arutt: Oh, that's a good one.

Douglas Eby:  It's hyperbole, I mean, it's pretty extreme and may not be literally true. I've read a number of actors who talk about having a really benign childhood, and happy growing up.

But still, how, how common is trauma or difficulty in childhood an issue for creative people that you see?

Cheryl Arutt: Well, I think that while it's true, as you say that that is not something that can be said of everybody, it would be a generalization, there's certainly a variation among actors.

People who go into a field where they really roll up their sleeves and get into the nitty gritty of the painful aspects of being a human being - shame and betrayal, and disappointment, devastation, all of these things that are sort of in the muck of humanity - people don't tend to delve and want to delve into those really messy feelings, unless they have some relationship with those messy feelings.

Someone who's kind of, "Let's just be happy and have everything be just fine" isn't going to be drawn to something like acting most likely.

I think that's one aspect of it.

And the other is that I think that, as I've said, I think that the act of being creative allows people to take those deep, messy human feelings and act out in a way that is constructive.

Channel that into something that says something, enriches people and moves people and allows others to say, yes, that's me too, to make a human connection.

Douglas Eby:  Well, and, and doesn't that apply also to other forms of creative expression writing in particular, it's not just acting or performing. Right? A lot of, a lot of writers talk about accessing their shadow self to put it in Jungian terminology, as a way to help bring to light those, uh, potentially destructive or difficult aspects of being human.

Cheryl Arutt: Jung really knew something about all this. The notion that Jung had that we need to meet the shadow, we need to get to know the shadow parts of ourselves or else it will rule us. 

Yeah. I think that was a really important thing, that we allow the parts of ourselves that we want to say, "Oh no, no, that's not me at all. No, I'm, I'm a hundred percent good and everything is fine."

Those people have a shadow also, but it flies under the radar and they're not able to monitor it and they're not able to choose how they act and react as well as someone who is able to look at the whole self and say, well, I'm not so crazy about this part of me, or this impulse that I'm having, but it's there and I need to keep an eye on it.

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