Arts Based Research
"The techniques involved are not some esoteric branch of witchcraft that must be reserved for those with PhD degrees in psychology. When the ideas are made sufficiently concrete and explicit, the scientific foundations of psychology can be grasped by sixth-grade children."
(Miller, 1969, on accessibility of phenomenology)
While this week has not been entirely about accessibility, this is an issue that has been brought up time and again. What should people have access to? What can they understand? Is there potential danger involved in making "Everything" accessible to the masses in terms of psychology or, in Miller's case, phenomenology?
The truth is, everything has room to be dangerous. Fizzy drinks, warm blankets, walks outside... These are not weapons but people manage to hurt or even kill themselves with them every day. We can't pack people up in cotton wool and expect things to go well. I feel like the same thing needs to be said about phenomenology... psychology... and such a number of other things and that is: knowledge is power. "The more you know," we've been saying my entire life.
We need to educate people and we need to do so by making research (knowledge) accessible. - And art, it turns out, is a great way to do that. People who might not be inclined to read a 50-page paper on statistics about drunk driving are the same people who watched commericals and saw ads about exactly that topic back in the 80s and 90s and it changed how a lot of the adults (and thus the next generation) treated and thought about alcohol consumption. Just because you've never been able to understand all the jargon about RF and that kind of thing doesn't mean that you ought to just go through life irradiated.- People have taken time to break down exactly the risks you're taking on certain occasions and turned that info into quick videos, many of them entertaining even.
The same can be said for psychological research. If we take the time to do research, to write it up using language that only other psychology professionals are likely to understand, and then we publish it, we're doing a great disservice to our neighbors.
I've stated before that, personally, I have a great deal of trauma that I am not prepared to discuss during a therapy session. I am not prepared to talk about the things that have happened in my life. - And I imagine that that keeps a lot of other people from participating in that particular genre of therapy: the discomfort of being expected to talk about things that have happened. But art? Different story. Maybe it feels less vulnerable because you're not crying too hard to be understood? Maybe it feels more impactful because you're finally able to express emotions that you've sat with so long they seem petrified?
This week, we placed focus on creating a class-built (our data) phenomenological (arts-based, of course) study over the lived experience of guilt. Initially, I fought against this because guilt feels so commonplace to me. I'm a Jew, after all. (IYKYK)
It took me a while to come up with a story of guilt to share. I didn't want it to be too dark but I didn't want it to be too light, either.- Like how I feel guilty every morning when I have to leave my dog at home and she gives me That Face. I needed to come up with an authentic story about guilt without it being one that was so interspersed with shame that I wouldn't be comfortable sharing it.
I talked about a sort of spat I had with my grandmother before she died. - How she "apologized" for being a shite parent to me and how I never got the chance to properly address it, to tell her to her face that she had never been anything but the world's best Mum. Even now, almost a decade later, I tear up thinking that maybe she died thinking she hadn't been everything to me. Best friend, confidant, shopping buddy, first national bank: didn't matter. That woman was my entire world outside of my kids so the idea that we had fought and never properly reconciled before her passing eats at me still.
We didn't all share aloud our stories but we sat together and figured out what our common themes were, what the heart of the phenomenon was. - And created five reoccurring themes that seemed to really get at the essence of what it was like to live with guilt. - The next step will be to build a short movie using these themes. - It's research that we're doing now, exploring the sensation of guilt, but then we make it... accessible.
I don't want to say we make it fun or entertaining because let's be real, we're talking about guilt. But we are making the experience accessible to others who might not ever sit down and read a research paper about what it's like to live with guilt. Maybe our film will touch others, make their feelings seem more appropriate, more normalized. I think, in terms of guilt, that normalization is probably a great step for us to be taking especially because it does often seem to tie in with shame.
I hope our video shows viewers that this thing, this guilt, is something we all experience but that it isn't something that we have to be bogged down with. We don't have to get stuck.- And the fact that we're moving to normalize it should make it easier to talk about, theoretically.
Does seeing others "share" their experience of guilt make me feel like I could share mine, actually say the words? I'm not sure if it's changed that for me as of this writing. But I will say that seeing others suggest words that seem too strong for my feelings shows me that I'm not the only one who has Big Feelings in this regard and that's really nice. I don't have to share what happened to still feel... supported.
And that's why accessibility matters. We have the light, over here, but we're shielding it to "protect it" rather than placing a mirror up to it so that it can illuminate the entire world.
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