Sometimes, there are no words. That’s OK. Allyson Norwood Bush knows what to do. Since 2007, the Flathead’s only registered art therapist has taught people in the valley to express themselves without words.
“When I got breast cancer, words became too jumbled. It didn’t seem like they meant much,” says Kelly Thum, who was diagnosed in November 2014 and has been a regular at Allyson’s Cancer Survivor Support and Art Therapy Workshops.
For most of her life, the person Thum saw in the mirror was a young woman with flowing chestnut brown hair and lush eyelashes. During treatment, she says, “my whole body was transforming. It was heartbreaking. I was really trying to find myself in the mirror because I no longer looked like myself. I hated what I was seeing. I was seeing scars.”
To begin one workshop, Bush handed out profile outlines of the women in the group. They were to decorate themselves however they wanted. Thum says she made a “half and half. Before, with my long hair and eyelashes, and the other side was bald, without, and with tears. It was like my transformation, before and after.”
The opportunity to “put [feelings] into art form” alongside women who understood Thum’s experience was “a life-changing experience … I needed to be around people who could understand the transformation a person goes through.”
Many people fighting or recovering from cancer turn to support groups, books, or traditional therapists, all outlets where the medium of expression is often storytelling.
But as Bush says, it’s easy to get “mired down in verbal story, and the cancer story is so depleting. But making art is not depleting.”
It’s transformational. “As an artist, pain is purposeful,” she says. “It takes you to places you don’t want to go. You make sense of it and you weave it into your own story, which becomes a warrior story.”
Bush, an artist who has long found comfort in drawing and solace in expression through creativity, first discovered art therapy in her 20s.
“When I found that there was a way to use art to help others heal, I was floored,” she says. The notation made perfect sense. She’d long observed how her art helped her process and understand her experience in a way words couldn’t articulate. “Art comes from a deeper place that bypasses verbal sensors. Art is not linear. One word does not follow the next.”
Her office, where she sees private clients of all ages, is a little box of color near downtown Kalispell. Paintings and drawings decorate her walls, sculptures are spread out to dry, and other little art objects sit on the countertops.
During workshops, Bush will often provide open-ended prompts at the beginning of the session, especially with the cancer support group, where attendees are working through similar expressions. She usually lets private clients take the lead.
“I’m there to support their creative goals,” says Bush. “I provide the materials and a safe space so they can feel free … My role is to help people feel the power of creativity, the latent, gurgling creativity that may lay dormant.”
Bush has materials available to paint, color, sketch, build, or sew. Many people like to work with clay, which Bush says feels grounding because clients can pound it, move it, and physically act out their emotions into it. No matter the project, there’s never pressure to create anything of museum quality. That’s not the point.
“It might look childlike and it might look primitive,” says Thumm, who threw out the first piece she made at a workshop. “It’s something that you’re trying to express.”
Ultimately, “it’s a reprieve from life,” says Bush, “It’s a source of comfort to create a symbol or a stand-in for my experience. I’m not unique in that. We all create, whether it’s art or doing your hair or making a swirl in a cup of coffee.”
Bush’s job is to coax out that inner creator when words fail. That, and to provide the paintbrushes.