The Art of Unsaying: When Your Hands Know What Your Mouth Cannot Say

There’s a peculiar thing that happens in the human brain when confronted with certain situations, rather like what happens to a computer when you ask it to divide by zero. The system simply refuses to compute.

Words—those normally reliable servants of expression—stage a kind of linguistic strike, leaving you standing there with your mouth open and absolutely nothing coming out except perhaps a vague sensation of drowning in air.

That happened to me a lot as a child… and maybe it’s why I became an artist. Countless hours drawing with crayons at our dining room table on stacks of paper my dad brought home from his teaching job. (Perhaps that was my first foray into magic.)

Words abandoned me whenever I was confronted with strangers, adults—even my parents—or any unfamiliar situation.

Apparently there had been serious trauma. I’ve never been able to remember it, though it still lives in my nervous system all these decades later.

Why Trauma Lives Outside Language

The remarkable thing about trauma—and I use “remarkable” the way one might describe a persistent case of hiccups—is that it doesn’t store itself neatly in the filing cabinets of verbal memory. Instead, it takes up residence in what neuroscientists call the limbic system, which is rather like the basement of your brain: dark, cluttered, and full of things you’d forgotten you ever put there.

This is why a whiff of old tobacco can make you feel six years old again, or a particular song can leave you inexplicably furious at a dust mop. The body remembers, even when the mind would prefer to move house and leave no forwarding address.

The Limits of Talking It Through

Traditional talk therapy, helpful as it may be, assumes that if you can just find the right words, you can organize those basement boxes and perhaps even throw a few out. But what if the boxes are locked? What if the labels have rubbed off? What if some experiences simply don’t have words—having occurred before you learned language, or during moments when your verbal brain quite sensibly shut itself down to focus on not dying?

Not everything wants to be spoken. Some things want to be drawn, painted, sculpted, danced, sung or written in poetry.

Art Therapy as a Side Door to the Soul

This is where art therapy enters the picture—though calling it “therapy” makes it sound far more clinical than it actually is, as if someone in a white coat might prescribe three watercolors and tell you to call in the morning. In truth, it’s less about therapy in the traditional sense and more about giving your insides a different door to exit through, one that doesn’t require the customs inspection of language.

When you draw a feeling, you bypass the mental relay race of translating emotion into vocabulary and back again. You allow the thing to exist on its own terms: a red slash here, a tangled spiral there, perhaps an unsettling amount of black in the corner that you’re not quite ready to look at yet.

When Your Hands Know Before Your Head Does

I once spent an entire afternoon covering a canvas with increasingly intense shades of red. When I finished, I realized I’d been painting my anger at a long-forgotten childhood playmate who’d locked me in a rabbit cage. I hadn’t planned it. I hadn’t thought, “Right, now I shall express my resentment through the medium of scarlet hues.” My hands simply knew before my head did—much like a dog understanding it’s time for a walk before you’ve consciously reached for the leash.

Your Nervous System Loves Creative Play

The science behind this is genuinely fascinating, though I’ll spare you the full neurological tour.

Creative expression activates parts of the brain that trauma often shuts down—regions associated with play, curiosity, and the radical notion that the future might contain something other than more of the past.

On a nervous-system level, making art says, “Look—we’re safe enough to create something that serves no immediate survival purpose.” That message alone can begin to loosen old knots.

You Don’t Have to Be Good at This

The beauty of it is that you don’t need to be good at art. In fact, being quite bad at it can be wonderfully liberating. There’s no inner critic insisting your trauma should be better composed or your healing more aesthetically pleasing. A child’s scribble can carry as much truth as a Renaissance masterpiece—possibly more—because it isn’t trying to be anything other than what it is.

Let Your Hands Lead You Home

So if you’re holding something that refuses to fit into sentences, consider giving it some paper and seeing what it draws.

Your hands might surprise you. They often know the way home long before your head admits you’ve been lost.

And who knows, you might even discover a new career direction unfolding from somewhere deep in your psyche.

A Place Where Creativity and Magic Meet

If this exploration of “unsaying” stirred something in you, you might enjoy wandering through my WulfWorks website—a creative sanctuary filled with visionary art, healing tools, Celtic magic, and gentle invitations to listen beyond words. It’s a place for curiosity, play, and reconnecting with the deeper currents that move beneath everyday life.

You can explore more at WulfWorks.com and see what calls to you.