ROLE MODEL

HANDS-ON healer

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Nicola with participants from a recent workshop YOU DON’T HAVE to be good at art to do art therapy. That’s the fi rst thing Nambour art therapist Nicola Turschwell tells her clients. With more than 20 years as a gestalt therapist and 12 years as an art therapist, she has seen the powerful healing effects of this profound therapy and says the art materials are simply a conduit through which the body can move, express and release stored trauma.

“I do sensorimotor art therapy, so it’s very rhythmic and defi nitely less about art,” she says.

“It’s more like a martial art, really. I have got a lot of my own healing from it; it really fi lled the gaps for me where I couldn’t put words to what I was feeling, but I knew I felt better afterwards.

“We might use a crayon in each hand or sticks in the dirt. It’s really about the expression of what’s going on in the body. It’s almost like tai chi, like a movement therapy as much as it is about art.”

Nicola was accepted into Sunshine Coast creative entrepreneurial program The Refi nery in 2019 and now runs a business that combines art therapy with workshops and clinical supervision in Nambour. However, her aim is to balance her busy practice with regular trips to remote Indigenous communities.

In June, she packed her crayons and paper into her four-wheel-drive and embarked on an epic fi ve-day road trip into the outback. Her goal was to take her art therapy to remote Indigenous communities in Western Australia in order to help people who had been affected by intergenerational trauma. It was a deeply moving experience and one she hopes to repeat on a yearly basis, if not more often.

“The country I was working on was Miriwoong Gajerrong country in the Kununurra area and Yawuru Country in the Broome area,” she says. “I co-facilitated with an Indigenous woman who is also an art therapist, Devinia Wainwright.

“My workshops are primarily trauma informed, so it’s about working with traumatised people,” she says. “It’s a really gentle way to work with trauma; not going into the trauma stories, but giving options to calm and soothe through art.

“Trauma is really body based. Since I fi rst studied art therapy, a lot of research has come out about how it’s not necessarily storytelling that heals trauma. Trauma happens to the body, so we need to use the body to be part of healing

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the trauma. They call it embodied healing. Often it’s using really rhythmic movement to soothe, the way you’d rock a baby. You can do that by movements on the page for an adult. Parts of their brain get soothed; we call it a felt sense. They are then less in that fi ght or fl ight state.”

At 58, Nicola radiates a calm joy, her beaming smile lighting up any space she enters. But this is the face of a woman who has survived traumas of her own and emerged with a stronger sense of self. In 2017, she left a 30-year marriage, her Sunshine Coast home of 28 years and quit her job. She fl ed to a new job as a drug and alcohol counsellor with WA Health, working in the Kimberley, where she spent two years and subsequently fell in love with the place. She describes it as an “astounding” spiritual transformation.

“Driving back out there this time, I had spontaneous tears rolling down my face. I love the pace, the country, the people, the big open spaces, the skies from horizon to horizon, the storms in wet season, the stars at night. It’s so beautiful. The red rocks and red earth. It’s healing country, in every sense of the word for me.”

A fi ve-day drive into the outback might be daunting for some people, but Nicola took it in her stride. She travelled with her sister on the way there, returning alone and driving for fi ve days straight.

“I camped at night, sometimes in free camps if I could fi nd one where I felt really safe and comfortable. Or I stayed in road houses. I felt safe doing the drive on my own. I was really watching for the kangaroos at dusk, which is a trickier time to drive. But I felt so safe and comfortable. I have a hiking tent and a self-infl ating mat. I’m connected to the earth and I do ask for country to take care of me like the Indigenous people do – that’s what I’ve learnt from them.”

On her recent trip, Nicola primarily worked with health workers she’d made connections with on her fi rst WA stint, highlighting the importance of relationships in Indigenous communities.

“Devinia has done the same form of art therapy as me, and she and I collaborated together out there. She’s an Indigenous woman, so that was really valuable and it really makes a big difference to have a local person facilitating, not just fl ying in and saying, ‘I’ve got this great skill for you’.

Drug and alcohol abuse, along with domestic violence, are some of the areas Nicola is trained to work in. When she works with a client, she watches their breath, their body, all of their nonverbal cues.

“I respect the client will take themselves where they need to go,” she says. “Even if someone says, ‘no, I’m not doing that’. We sit down and talk. We won’t even touch the crayons. People choosing to reject the crayons is a valuable part of the session. With kids in the Kimberley, one girl said, ‘I’ve got kids who screw up the pictures all the time’. I said, ‘let’s all do that and see how it feels’. We were all scrunching up the paper and it felt really good. We thought, no wonder they do it! It’s following the motor impulse to scrunch something or punch something, so we do it in a more controlled situation for them.

“I was defi nitely guided by them,” she adds. “Using ochres is not okay; you need permission to use ochres. I took clay with me and I said, ‘is this clay okay for me to work with?’ I asked the questions and I really humbled myself. The clay was fi ne, but they said we couldn’t use ochres. Also, it’s not okay to pick up rocks without permission, because you’re moving country. It’s really important.

“During one workshop we did in Broome, we wanted to use natural materials.” Nicola says there is a red sand called pindan that she wanted to incorporate. “We got permission to use that from the elders, along with sand from the beach and any of the grasses.”

Nicola believes the art therapy was well received in the communities she visited – although there was a bittersweet element to it.

“I heard people say, ‘we need a full-time therapist out here for our kids’. I said, ‘it’s so tough isn’t it, we come and we go, I know that. I’m part of that.’ People would say, ‘so how long are YOU here for?’ I say to them, ‘while I’m here, I’m fully present’.

“I do think it’s important to follow up. It’s really important for me to go back out there. I think a lot of the community out there say, ‘you come into town and then you leave’. I’ve made a commitment to follow up and go back.”