How To Unlock Your Creativity By Healing Your Creative Wound

Creative wounds are experiences that cause you to severely doubt your creative talent, skills, potential, or projects. A creative wound can shut down or limit your desire and ability to create.

Creativity isn’t just about a fine artist filling in a canvas. As a human, you’re naturally creative and have an innate desire to create in the world.

Creativity can be expressed traditionally, like becoming a professional writer, or you might develop a creativity hobby, like playing a musical instrument.

The most common type of creative wound is rejection, whether it’s getting a negative review online about the independent film you directed or a negative review from a superior about your work performance at a nine-to-five job.

Although, rejection doesn’t have to be as straightforward as that.

It might look like making a big meal for a family holiday gathering, and even though everyone seems to appreciate your effort and enjoy the food, some of the dishes didn’t turn out as you’d hoped, or certain details about the table setting weren’t to your satisfaction. Even when it appears that a creative endeavor was a success, we still may reject it internally because it didn’t live up to our expectations.

Any type of negative criticism, even if it’s offered kindly and turns out to be helpful, can sting. And, of course, we’ve all had experiences when someone gave us blunt, scathing criticism with no regard for our feelings. This can leave us sensing that it’s too risky to be creative.

Part of the medicine for any type of wound you experience is nurturing yourself. Usually when you give yourself comforting support, it’s followed by a boost of energy, enthusiasm, empowerment, determination, or peace. These states will fuel all your creative dreams.

Don’t feel like you have to totally “fix” a creative wound to be a creator in the world. We all have big wounds, which we integrate. These big wounds can increase our empathy for those who are suffering and even inspire us to help lessen suffering on the planet.

When a wound from the past gets activated in the present, like having an abandonment wound from childhood, becomes activated when your manager initiates a tense talk about how you chose to creatively problem-solve an issue, remind yourself this is an ideal moment to offer yourself more, or maybe new, healing.

That could be as simple as calling someone caring and supportive for a pep talk, or even reading about inner child healing to learn new tools to support yourself whenever this old wound comes up.

Don’t take everyone’s opinion about your work or life to heart, have a healthy sense of humor about yourself, and remember that putting yourself out there to be criticized is part of being creative—so a thick, protective skin is valuable.

If the way you raise your child is more creative than your parents’ approach, you may roll your eyes when they call to offer you childcare advice. Having a healthy callus means knowing that not everyone will get, or approve of, your creative style.

Therefore, you don’t take in all criticism. However, a callus should be somewhat permeable so that if you receive insightful negative criticism that resonates, you can incorporate it into your approach.

Creative wounds are traumatic, and part of healing from trauma is finding a way to move forward. Be gentle with yourself if you feel frozen because of a wound, like having to close a restaurant you founded because of an economic downturn.

Take measured steps toward moving forward, like selling off equipment, researching a pivot to food trucks, or turning your creative genius to managing someone else’s restaurant.

If sales of the first online course you offered were tepid, start creating your next class. When learning to ride a bike as a child, every time you fell off you were often told to “get back on the bike.” Doing something again and again is the only way we learn how to master anything, including creativity.

Tell yourself that things not working out to plan is normal. Pause long enough to rest and reevaluate, and then press on with a new creative endeavor.

Creative hobbies—like cooking, gardening, dancing, coloring, or knitting—are wonderful ways to retreat from the world and repair your nervous system after a painful experience. I call this "cocooning."

Creativity itself is very healing, so get lost in a creative activity that’s just for fun or for your own fulfillment. If you’re a professional songwriter, take up painting as a hobby. If you do a lot of visual design work for your day job, take up creative writing as a hobby.

Being creative is how we co-create and are of service to the collective. If you’re a new yoga instructor and still finding your footing, concentrate less on any fumbles in your flow and more on the smiling faces of students who share that they get so much out of your classes.

When you make your creative process less about you and more about how it can positively affect others, you’re in the right frame of mind.

Sometimes a wound we experience can birth our wounded healer, inspiring us to find medicine to heal our wound and then sharing that same medicine with others.

Wounds around having to navigate a traditional medical, educational, or social system may inspire you to form your own—more creative—style within those systems as a healer, teacher, or social activist.

Or perhaps you moved around a lot as a teenager and had to creatively adapt to different environments, which is why you train corporate employees working at international posts how to help their families adapt to new cultures.