What Shut My Creativity Down — and What Brought It Back

On nervous systems, critique, and what EMDR and the imagination share

There was a version of me, in my early twenties, who made art constantly. Sketching, building, experimenting — it was simply how I lived. Then I went to art school, and something began to change.

It didn't happen all at once. The critique culture of undergraduate art education is not designed to be cruel, but it landed in my nervous system as something closer to threat than feedback. The response was gradual and quiet: a slow narrowing of what I was willing to make, what I was willing to show, eventually what I was willing to try. By the time I finished my degree, the creative life that had been the center of everything had mostly gone underground. I wasn't blocked in a dramatic sense. I had just stopped.

It would be three years before that changed — and when it did, it happened in a way I hadn't planned and couldn't have designed.

The thing I wasn't trying to do

I was in graduate school at Pacifica Graduate Institute, working on a thesis about Jungian active imagination. Active imagination is a practice from analytical psychology in which you enter a kind of receptive inner state — not directing or controlling what arises, but following it, staying with it, allowing the imagination to move where it needs to go. You create a container for whatever comes, and you witness it without imposing your preferences on it.

I was studying this as a psychological and philosophical phenomenon. I was not trying to recover my creative life. And yet, as I practiced active imagination in order to write about it, something unexpected happened. The making came back. Not loudly, not all at once — but unmistakably. Images arrived that wanted to become things. The impulse to give them form returned.

I did not craft that outcome. It arrived as a byproduct of a process that was aimed at something else entirely. That, I have come to understand, is exactly how depth work operates.

What critique actually does to a creative nervous system

What happened to me in art school was not unusual, even if it took me years to name it clearly. Critique, delivered repeatedly in an environment where your work is your self-expression, teaches the nervous system something. It teaches it to anticipate judgment before anything reaches the surface. To screen, to edit, to preemptively narrow the range of what is offered. The adaptation is intelligent — it protected me from repeated exposure to something painful — and it was completely counterproductive to the actual act of making.

Creative shutdown, in this sense, is not a loss of ability. It is a learned interference. The capacity to imagine, to make, to express — none of that disappeared. What disappeared was the permission to let it out without the nervous system treating that act as dangerous.

This is where EMDR enters the picture.

What EMDR and active imagination share

EMDR therapy and Jungian active imagination look nothing alike from the outside. One involves bilateral stimulation and a structured clinical protocol. The other is a contemplative practice developed a century ago by a Swiss psychiatrist. But at the level of what they actually ask of the person doing them, they are structurally similar in a way that I find remarkable.

Both practices operate on the same principle: you enter your inner experience, you follow rather than direct it, and you do not censor or adjust what comes. You create a container — a held, safe, boundaried space — within which your inner process can move. You do not impose an agenda on that movement. You trust that whatever the imagination or the nervous system is doing has its own organizing intelligence, and that your job is to receive it rather than manage it.

This is precisely the kind of environment in which creative expression was shut down in the first place: an environment defined by judgment, adjustment, and the constant interference of an external standard. EMDR, approached from a depth orientation, is the opposite of that environment. It is, in a real sense, a practice of restoring the trust that critique eroded.

When the nervous system learns, through the EMDR process, that it is safe to let experience surface and move without being judged or overridden — something begins to loosen. This doesn't always announce itself as creative recovery. Often it announces itself more quietly: a greater tolerance for ambiguity, a softening of the internal critic, a renewed capacity to sit with something unfinished without needing to resolve it immediately. But for people whose inner life has always moved through image and form, that loosening tends to find its way into the work.

The creativity doesn't come back because you targeted it. It comes back because you restored the conditions that make it possible.

What I'd tell the artist who is considering this

If your creative life has gone quiet — and especially if you can trace the silence to an experience of judgment, criticism, exposure, or a sustained environment in which your expression was evaluated rather than received — it is worth considering that the quiet is not about the art. It is about what your nervous system learned to do to protect you.

EMDR does not fix creative block. It works at the level where the block was formed: in the body, in the nervous system, in the adaptive patterns that were once protective and are now in the way. What it tends to restore is not a specific skill or output, but something more fundamental — the willingness to let the imagination move, to see what arrives, to trust what the inner process already knows.

I did not go to graduate school to recover my creative life. But that is what happened. I have come to believe that you cannot always craft that kind of outcome — and that is, in its own way, exactly the point.