Making messes is vital to learning and growing as a child: So too for adults in therapy
In the context of therapy, a mess is not a problem to be fixed or avoided. Instead, messes in therapy can be incredibly fruitful for self-exploration and growth, allowing you to delve into parts of your history, relationships, and feelings that are difficult, complicated, and contradictory. In fact, you ought to be using your therapy to make a productive mess.
When you’re young, you make messes—drawing on the walls of the living room, building a sandcastle and demolishing it, concocting potions from all the leaves, dirt, and rainwater in the yard, mixing all the spices in the spice cabinet—the list goes on! These acts, big and small, are vital to the process of learning and growing. They represent the discovery of feelings, ideas, consequences, and relationships that are integral to making sense of the world and yourself.
Even as an adult, your need to build and flex these muscles never goes away. Yet when most adults imagine a mess, they relate it to disarray, turmoil, or the absence of control. It’s a notion that suggests things are not in their predictable or preferred state, and that damage control may be necessary. This can conjure negative associations. Most people want to avoid making a mess in their lives or relationships (for a good reason).
Not just any mess—a productive mess
The key word here is productive. With mess-making in therapy, productivity doesn’t mean seeking to immediately attain order and simplicity. Productive messes are a way of expressing and exploring the “messy” materials of your life—those conflicting and knotted past and present thoughts, feelings, and experiences—with the goal of helping you expand understanding, emotional processing, and transformation. This encompasses looking deeply at inner tumult or uncertainty—all the clutter, dirtiness, and disarray—without restraints, with the purpose of nurturing growth.
In contrast, an unproductive mess is one that is stuck, unable to budge, and unhelpful for any type of constructive progress. In therapy, this is often dependent on both the patient’s emotional state and, more importantly, the therapeutic relationship. A therapist plays a critical role in helping a mess go from unproductive to productive, building the trust and safety necessary for individuals to lean into the free-fall uncertainty of making a mess in the presence of someone else. A productive mess might bring up some really challenging emotions and experiences, but this mess should be contained safely within the space and context of therapy.
In therapy, a productive mess can take many forms, including a literal mess with artmaking
A productive mess can take on many shapes and sizes—artistic, emotional, and metaphorical. One of the most obvious forms that can entail getting quite messy at times is through art therapy. Whether making slime from scratch, splattering paint, destroying a creation, or incorporating smeary materials like soft pastels or clay, art therapy contains an intrinsic offer to make a mess. This mess can evolve into a transformative channel for self-expression and voicing intricate emotions through alternative means.
To paint, draw, or create presents a contained chaos that parallels emotional experiences. This representative (and sometimes literal) mess functions as a conduit between conscious and subconscious thought, allowing you to convey your inner world visually. Take, for instance, a patient who feels overwhelmed by conflicting feelings emerging from a loss. They begin splattering paint onto a canvas without any direction, allowing emotions to intuitively pilot their gestures. As they continue, patterns emerge in the seemingly unruly marks, mirroring the intricacies of their grief. Through this process and with the collaborative curiosity of a therapist, an individual can develop novel understandings of their emotions and memories, fostering meaningful insight and acceptance of grief. By welcoming the untidiness of their experience and creative expression, they can delve into their internal state, furthering integration.
Productive mess-making also means sitting with conflicting emotions without jumping to fix them
Making a productive mess in therapy can also happen through discussing and looking at difficult-to-tolerate and seemingly contradictory emotions, creating room for uncertainty and nuance without moving to sort through these feelings in a neat way. As a therapist supports a patient to dig deeper into at-odds parts of themselves, the dialogue becomes messy and complicated, reflecting an individual’s internal turbulence. Instead of jumping to “fix” the issues, the therapist invites people to look at the confusion tangled in their wishes, values, and fears without the need to control them.
Take the patient struggling with grief. Alongside artmaking, they may also be supported to communicate their knotted jumble of emotions around the loss, including sadness, guilt, resentment, anger, and confusion. As they contend with these complex layers of grief, they may find primary beliefs and fears, such as feeling responsible for the loss. While grief cannot be erased or taken away, by leaning into the messiness of it, the patient develops understanding and a meaningful relationship to their loss.
Productive messes help people work through earlier experiences that continue to affect their lives and relationships
Sometimes mess-making in therapy also offers a channel for individuals to revisit and work through earlier stages of their emotional and physical development. This reintroduction to previous ways of thinking, feeling, and acting enables you to discover unresolved issues, unmet needs, and causes of pain that might stem from earlier experiences. For instance, a patient’s fear of abandonment and rejection in relationships can be traced back to early and unresolved experiences of neglect. In therapy, the patient and therapist can reexamine the mess of feelings from their childhood—feeling unseen by caregivers, enduring unsatisfied needs, and living with a sense of worthlessness and grief. By getting closer to these underlying sources of pain, people can better understand and change their existing experiences and relational dynamics.
Ultimately, the act of making a productive mess proposes that you dive into the unmapped landscape of your emotions while recognizing and accepting the many-sided qualities of these experiences. Mess-making in therapy is about learning to be vulnerable, tolerating and working through uncertainty, and appreciating that the therapeutic process is rarely ever linear or tidy. The mess evolves into a container for growth and change, emphasizing that within chaos and disorder rests the budding promise of deep learning and healing.
