An Expressive Arts Approach to Healing Loss and Grief: Working Across the Spectrum of Loss with Individuals and Communities

Irene Renzenbrink’s book, An Expressive Arts Approach to Healing Loss and Grief: Working Across the Spectrum of Loss with Individuals and Communities, indeed addresses the deep and wide spectrum of individual and collective grief and the power of the expressive arts for healing. As I sit here writing this review, I think on my current clinical work with teens and adults who are grieving over recent losses; a father, a husband, a son, a daughter, a job, a home, previous social lives, and ideas about how things used to be and “should be still.” The past few years have been a barrage of news and social media outlets reporting on social and political injustices, immigration crises, world conflicts and the global pandemic. These past few years have heightened the awareness of many coming into my office of the untenability of escape from grief and loss. No one is immune. Renzenbrink highlights the disparate types of loss, expanding one’s understanding of grief; “What all these experiences have in common, although in varying degrees, is distress, disruption, and a wounding of body, mind and spirit” (p. 30). Renzenbrink is internationally recognized for her experience and expertise as a social worker, educator, author, and expressive arts therapist working in palliative care and grief and loss counseling and education. The author discovered art therapy at a point in her life when she was processing her own experience of loss and identified through her own studies “a way of working with grief that was nourishing, imaginative, and had a healing power that I had never before experienced” (p. 24). In clear and concise writing, her new book highlights the powerful use of the expressive arts in working through grief and loss, while broadening our understanding of individual and community grief. As Renzenbrink writes, “working through grief helps people to risk investing in new relationships, purposes, and projects” (p. 46). In her first two chapters, Renzenbrink walks readers through an extensive review of historical and theoretical studies on grief and bereavement. She describes the field’s initial emphasis on symptomatology and medical definitions then comprehensively highlights the main models, theories, and people involved in expanding the field. She details “death systems” (p. 30) which encompass the people, places, and times of remembering associated with death and dying. She covers various types of grief and bereavement including disenfranchized grief, and resilience and post traumatic growth after grief and loss have occurred. In chapter one, Renzenbrink introduces the concept of poiesis, a theme that runs throughout the entirety of the book. Renzenbrink defines poiesis as “the idea of shaping ourselves and our world through art making” (p. 56). As Levine writes in the book’s foreword, poiesis is a fundamental principle in Renzenbrink’s work with grief and loss, “she brings the possibility of self-overcoming to all who suffer, not by mastering the pain but precisely by surrendering to it and letting it take a shape that brings us closer to our own experience” (p. 14). Renzenbrink ends chapter two by discussing the impact of the internet on grief and bereavement, and the current research being conducted on grief and loss in the prevailing global pandemic. In doing so, Rezenbrink provides a contemporary and upto-the-minute education for her readers. In chapter three, the author offers another expansive exploration of those involved in developing the field of expressive arts. She dovetails the concept of poiesis with Romanyshyn’s notion of “the third... between material body and mind” (p. 80), an athlete’s “zone” (p. 80), the Celtic perspective of a “thin space” between here and the otherworld (p. 81), Winnicott’s “holding environment” (p. 82), and Eberhart and Knill’s concept of “decentering” (p. 83). As Renzenbrink describes, poiesis “requires a willingness to be open to possibilities, to give up control and the need to know in advance what will happen at the end of the art-making experience” (p. 80). In chapter four, Renzenbrink describes the power of expressive arts in healing. Through personal vignettes of people she has met in workshops, alongside those of other expressive art therapists, she provides multiple perspectives on working with grief and loss. Her personal stories illustrate various expressive art exercises and uses of media: collage, poetry, drawing and painting, dance, performance, and autobiographical writing. I was, however, continually searching for more specific and delineated art directives. Chapters five through ten dive into specific types of grief and the use of expressive arts. The theme of poiesis surfaces again in Renzenbrink’s discussion of poetry,