Neuroscience-Informed Creative Group Therapy for Processing Trauma and Developing Resilience During Wartime

TL;DR

This paper explores how group creative arts therapies can help process trauma and build resilience during wartime by engaging the brain and body in meaningful, aesthetic ways.

Contribution

The paper introduces a neuroscience-informed conceptual framework for using creative arts therapies in group settings during wartime to address trauma and foster resilience.

Findings

Creative arts therapies support trauma recovery by enhancing interoceptive awareness and emotional processing.

Aesthetic group interventions modulate brain networks linked to self-awareness and memory reconsolidation.

Shared creative engagement promotes brain and body synchronization, aiding interpersonal healing.

Abstract

Traumatic experiences can disrupt one’s sense of safety, self-efficacy, and relationships. Prolonged stress may lead to anxiety, depression, and diminished agency. The embodied, subjective manifestations of trauma call for personalized therapeutic approaches that address symptoms and foster resilience. Group Creative Arts Therapies (CATs) offer relational aesthetic interventions that promote resilience and trauma recovery. Incorporating body-based methods, movement, materials and visual expression, CATs support interoceptive awareness, multisensory integration, embodiment, and emotional–cognitive processing. This article presents a review and conceptual framework of group CAT interventions during wartime, focusing on challenges related to body awareness, self-efficacy, and autobiographical memory. It examines how creative aesthetic approaches help process trauma and strengthen resilience. Drawing on predictive processing accounts of brain function, the article explores the neuropsychological impact of trauma and how creative group work may modulate related brain mechanisms. Creative techniques can foster bodily anchored self-awareness, self-efficacy and processes of traumatic memory reconsolidation. Aesthetic experiences are associated with changes in brain activation and connectivity through processes of embodiment, externalization, and meaning making. On an intrapersonal level, converging evidence highlights the role of sensory and sensorimotor processing, along with the dynamic interplay between Default Mode, Executive Control, and Salience networks, as conceptualized in the Triple Network Model. On an interpersonal level, the literature points to the dynamics of brain and body synchronization, as emerging phenomena during shared creative engagement. These neurodynamics provide a coherent framework for understanding how creative arts-based psychotherapeutic group work can support trauma processing and the cultivation of resilience.