Banked Fire: Reclaiming Creativity and Authenticity

There was a time you knew. You knew, and the world felt enchanted—shot through with meaning, purpose, and vitality.

You felt wonder—raw, instinctive, and alive. Childhood drawings, teenage journals, late-night playlists, and improvised dances in your bedroom weren’t just hobbies; they were portals. Expressions of joy and enchantment, yes—but also longing, intuition, and truth. Something flowed through you then, something bigger than words. You could feel the pulse of meaning behind things—how music opened a hidden chamber, how color and symbol carried truths too large for language, and how each act of creation gave shape to something sacred and unseen.

And then—life happened.

School. Success. Partnership. Illness. Children. Burnout. You got good at surviving. At being competent, composed, productive. The slow encroachment of shoulds. As Nietzsche described in his parable of the three metamorphoses, we begin as camels—bearing the heavy burdens of obligation and expectation. We internalize the "thou shalts" of family, culture, and gender. But the camel must become a lion, one who learns to say "no" to external values. Only then can the lion become the child—a being of play, spontaneity, and creation.

“She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 

You didn’t mean to abandon her. You were just trying to stay afloat.

And the intuitive part of you—the one who knew without knowing how—quietly retreated.

But now, something aches. You miss yourself. You miss the dreams, the spark, the presence.

You don’t feel broken—but you feel… blank.

You are not alone.

Why Do So Many Creative Women Go Silent?

In my work with high-functioning, sensitive women, this question comes up again and again—sometimes in words or the quiet confession that “I don’t write, or paint, or dance anymore.”

Here’s what I’ve found: It’s not a lack of discipline. It’s not a lack of talent. It’s not even time.

It’s grief. It’s shame. It’s self-protection. It's the False Self.

Somewhere along the line, you learned that your creativity was too much—or not enough. Too loud, too weird, too impractical. Or maybe you learned that your value came from caretaking, from being the good girl, the achiever, the reliable one. The wildness got folded in.

Visionaries often go into hiding when their creativity is met with criticism or silence, when they learn to equate success with safety, when trauma or chronic illness demands survival over expression, or when no one ever mirrored back to them that they were artists to begin with. As Alice Miller outlines in The Drama of the Gifted Child, many sensitive and intelligent children learn to tune themselves to others’ needs in order to be loved. They become who they must to maintain connection—often at the cost of their authentic, feeling, and creative selves. As children they created the False Self. In adulthood, this survival strategy can become a source of anxiety, emptiness, or creative block—not because the self is gone, but because it was never fully permitted to emerge.

When the Muse Goes Missing, the Body Remembers

The cost of that abandonment? It doesn’t always show up as sadness. It often arrives sideways: anxiety with no clear source, a depression that doesn’t feel like sadness so much as absence. It may emerge as perfectionism so tight it strangles every new idea in its crib, or as numbness, brain fog, or fatigue that doesn’t lift. The body speaks, too: through persistent aches and pains, digestive distress, migraines, or mysterious fatigue that no lab test can explain. There is often a restlessness, a vague spiritual ache: Is this all there is? These are not just mental health symptoms. They are the soul’s SOS.

In Jungian terms, the creative self—the inner artist, dreamer, priestess—is a vital archetype. When denied, she doesn’t die. She goes underground. And there, in the shadows, she becomes symptoms, dreams, compulsions. She waits to be remembered.

Therapy as Creative Recovery (Not Just Symptom Relief)

Here’s the truth: You don’t need to “get back to who you were.”

You’re not returning to a version of yourself. You’re becoming someone new—someone more whole. This process, which Jung called individuation, involves becoming more fully yourself by integrating the parts that were lost, disowned, or forgotten. It’s not self-improvement—it’s self-encounter.

Therapy is not about forcing your creativity to come back. It’s about making space for what was silenced. We listen not only to your words but to your metaphors, your sensations, your stuckness. Together, we explore the roots of your self-censorship. We meet the inner critic—not to silence her, but to understand her. We name the grief for the years you felt disconnected. And we begin to reclaim what was once natural to you: play, desire, sensuality, risk. You learn to create not despite the wound, but from it.

There is no pressure to produce. This is not about performance.

This is about permission.

You Are Not Broken—Reclaiming Creativity

If you’ve stopped painting, writing, dreaming… that doesn’t mean your creative self is gone. It means she’s waiting. She waits—not idly, but attentively, a room without judgment, for a conversation that doesn’t rush past her depths, for someone to ask the right questions and mean it. She waits for you—the present-tense you—to set down the mask, to soften your grip, to open the door with trembling hands and say: I’m ready.

Your creativity is not a luxury. It’s not a hobby. It’s your birthright. It’s the way your psyche speaks.

And when we begin to listen, something sacred stirs.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.”— "Mad Girl’s Love Song," Sylvia Plath

Ready to Begin?

If these words resonate, you might already be hearing her.

That voice you forgot you had. That vision that once thrilled and frightened you.

You don’t have to find your way alone.

I work with creative, thoughtful women who feel they’ve lost touch with themselves—and want to return.

Together, we’ll listen for what’s been silenced. We’ll name the loss. And we’ll open the door.

Because healing isn’t just about relief, it's about reclaiming creativity.