When Art Becomes Healing Through the Dark Night of the Soul

My first painting

My very first painting, Journey to the Lighthouse: Dark Night of the Soul tells the story of a woman alone at sea, navigating a dark, stormy night and choppy waters toward a distant lighthouse. I painted it in the hours of deep heartbreak, when sleep would not come, and when I could no longer reach God.

Using palette knives and acrylic paint, I built heavy impasto waves instinctively, without instruction or strategy. When the piece was finished, I experienced something I could not explain intellectually. I had created something meaningful, symbolic, deep, and complete without knowing how I knew what to do.

I do not create alone

I do not experience creativity as something I generate alone.

Each time I complete an artwork, I am often left in quiet astonishment, wondering how something so whole and resolved, something that feels like a finished masterpiece, could have come through my hands at all.

I first recognized this sensation while creating Journey to the Lighthouse: Dark Night of the Soul.

The finished work frequently feels larger than conscious planning or technical intention.

My mind is surprised by what emerges, but my soul is not. My soul always knew why. This understanding began with that first painting.

The beginning: loss, trauma, and dark night of the soul

In 2011, during one of the darkest periods of my life, I picked up art supplies I had received from my son and painted Journey to the Lighthouse: Dark Night of the Soul. I was grieving the sudden death of my eldest brother in a fatal motorcycle accident, an event that triggered delayed-onset PTSD.

What became clear over time was that his death did not exist in isolation. It activated unresolved trauma from childhood and domestic abuse experiences my brother and I endured growing up. The loss did not only take him from my life. It removed a psychological anchor, reopening wounds my nervous system had learned to survive but never fully integrate.

At the time, I did not yet have language for what was happening internally. I was experiencing insomnia, intrusive flashbacks, recurring nightmares, hypervigilance, emotional numbing, and periods of social withdrawal. My body was reliving what my conscious mind had learned long ago to compartmentalize. The diagnosis of delayed-onset PTSD came later, but the experience was already shaping every moment.

I did not paint with a plan.
I painted because sleep was elusive, and when it came, it brought nightmares with it. Something within me needed to move, to speak, and to stay alive.

That moment marked the beginning of my Dark Night of the Soul.

Not as a poetic phrase, but as a lived reality. A time when meaning collapsed, certainty dissolved, and familiar frameworks no longer held. What remained was sensation, intuition, and the quiet intelligence of the body and soul.

That moment revealed a truth that has guided every work since.

Creativity, for me, is not invention.
It is collaboration. A spiritual union.

Creativity as spiritual collaboration

In 2015, when I encountered Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, her words articulated something I had already experienced firsthand while painting Journey to the Lighthouse during my Dark Night of the Soul, and later throughout the rest of my work:

“The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity. Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as the creator but seldom see creator as the literal term for artist. I am suggesting you take the term creator quite literally. You are seeking to forge a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator. Accepting this concept can greatly expand your creative possibilities.”

What she named as theory, I recognized not as memory or recollection, but as a living presence, an experience of divine union that I had already encountered and continue to feel, most clearly when I stand before the ocean waves or when I am creating or painting something of meaning. These remain my most consistent ways of reconnecting with my Great Creator.

During my Dark Night of the Soul, I lost my sense of connection to Christianity. The old beliefs, language, institutional structure, and certainty that once held meaning no longer did. Yet my experience of artmaking continued to feel like a spiritual connection, one that did not rely on doctrine, but on deep presence, attention, and engagement with God.

I show up with my feet planted on the ground and my heart open. I feel and listen. I act and respond. What unfolds feels less like effort and more like collaboration, a kind of play between my Inner Artist Child and the Great Creator.

Especially during my Dark Night of the Soul, creativity became the place where meaning could still move when belief systems fell apart.

Why I create

Each artwork becomes a deep connection, a mystical union found in the details, and a spiritual collaboration with my Great Creator. In texture. In the sensation of grit beneath my fingers as I sand away dried paint. In the sound and resistance of a rusted nail being hammered into an encaustic wax canvas. Stroke by stroke. Heartbeat by heartbeat, as I create.

Making art became how my nervous system learned safety and deep love again. How trauma found freedom. How experience became integrated rather than avoided.

Julia Cameron writes:

“As artists, we experience the fact that ‘God is in the details.’ Making our art, we make artful lives. Making our art, we meet firsthand the hand of our Creator.”

Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play

I embrace the paradox that serious art is born from serious play. Discipline and surrender coexist in my process. Precision lives alongside curiosity. I allow room for curiosity, joy, and playfulness when dripping and splattering paint on top of what looks like an already finished masterpiece, each paint drip and splatter landing in the perfect spot within the artwork. This has always been the evidence that I am not working alone.

Audacity, discernment, and innate creativity have shaped my path. Choosing to act on what my soul already knows before my mind feels ready has been a way of surviving uncertainty. Again and again, when I commit to my truest intuition, I am met more than halfway. What some call coincidence, I have experienced as healing, congruence, and alignment. What some call luck, I recognize as transcendence activated through creative action.

Why I share this

I share this because many people living with delayed-onset PTSD, ADHD, depression, or heartbreak do not realize why their world collapses after a loss. They think they are broken, weak, or regressing. They are not.

Sometimes a later event simply opens what was never given the space or safety to be felt before. Like a hidden blessing.

Art does not erase trauma.
But it can give it healing, somewhere to rest, and life.

Legacy

My artworks hold evidence of a lived relationship between intuition, courage, trauma, and form. They are the result of listening deeply and allowing creation to move through me, especially when words were not yet possible.

To create is to feel, see, and listen.
To look back in wonder is to recognize that I was never creating alone.

When we open ourselves to our creativity, we open ourselves to the Creator's creativity within us and our lives.