Looking through a lens provides therapeutic release

She finds her way to the front of the crowd gathered to see the unveiling of a new cenotaph. She’s not really part of the audience here, nor is she an organizer. On this warm summer day in Harrow, camera in hand, she’s blending in with the other photographers.

Shaking hands with veterans and smiling, she snaps a photograph of the Essex mayor tying an elderly woman’s shoe. From the outside, no one would know she’s not a professional photographer. No one would know without photography, she would be dead inside.

So far, she’s taken thousands of photos. These photos are her therapy and taking photos has helped her get through the most unforgettable day of her life: May 28, 2010.

Liz Howse needed to run some errands, her children accompanying her in their blue Caravan. The mother pulled over to the side of an intersection at Walker Road and Paquette Corners.

Her 11-year-old son leaned up against the van. He was waiting for his father to pick him up and take him to the family farm to do chores, while she planned to carry on doing errands with the two other children.

Just as the mother was about to get out of the van to wait with her son, he was gone.

Another van had veered to the side of the road and knocked the boy, Matthew Salter, over 12 metres into the air.

“I saw my son fly like superman and bounce like a rag doll,” said Howse.

The father, David Salter, was close enough to witness the accident and ran to his son. Somehow Howse had the presence of mind to stay with her two young children still in the van. She tried to keep them calm, instinctually knowing that daughters Megan, 10 and Grace, 8, needed their mother too.

Eventually when she reached her son, he wasn’t breathing. With all the force she could gather, she pounded him on the chest. Her son began to breathe. But the force of his body hitting the ground left Matthew in bad shape.

Matthew’s still body was placed into a medically-induced coma and within a few hours of arriving at Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare, he was air-lifted to Children’s Hospital London Health Sciences Centre with a long list of injuries including a lacerated liver, bruised lungs, and two broken legs.

The 11-year-old had three changes in his life during that month in a hospital: a multitude of surgeries, a 12^th birthday and the diagnosis of a brain injury.

Although he went home looking like any normal child on the outside, inside, he was anything but. For six months, he couldn’t walk or formulate sentences properly. He could feed himself, but his brain injury made him unaware of when he was full and he would choke on certain foods. He had, and continues to have, no sense of body temperature awareness. In Howse’s words, he was essentially like a newborn.

As someone who had been taking depression medication since her youngest daughter was a baby, the change in Howse’s son was difficult and weighed on her heavily. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder from the accident. Every time she laid her head to sleep or sat in the driver seat of their family van, the terrifying images quickly resurfaced.

“When I was driving, I could picture Matt standing there,” Howse said. “So you’re focused on driving but you see your son standing by your car and flying…so yes, I stopped driving the van.”

Every waking hour was spent tending to her son. After a year of making her son her top priority, Howse knew one thing was for sure: if she was going to continue being any help to her son, she needed to do something for herself.

“At that time, everything was Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. I went to bed thinking of Matt, I woke up thinking of Matt and I had no life and it gets hard because you want to find some normal but you can’t because you’re focused on something else.” said Howse.

In consulting with her son’s first rehab therapist of her issue, she was introduced to the world of photography and in an instant, she was hooked. It started as a distraction and a way to keep herself balanced.

But a year after her son’s accident, she faced another terrible life event: cancer.

The doctors were supposed to remove a cyst through her belly button. Upon waking up, she examined her stomach and was surprised to see she had been cut from her belly button all the way down. It wasn’t a cyst inside of her—it was a tumor.

When Howse discovered she had cancer, she fell back on her photography to take away the pain and sadness. It was a way of channeling her emotions into something beautiful.

She remembers that moment well, the moment photography truly helped her. It was a rainy morning on May 28, 2013. Howse was nervous about going to the cancer clinic where they would tell her if the tumor was benign or malignant. As the rain cleared, Howse looked out the window into her backyard and saw her irises blooming. There was something about those flowers that caught her attention.

“It was really relaxing that I could focus on something else at that moment…After that it was like holy shit: my world had just changed and I would take pictures. I had the pictures of flowers or I’d go get myself flowers so that’s what I did the first few months after finding out as well.” Howse said.

Howse didn’t know it, but she was taking part in a therapy that has been around for thousands of years—expressive therapy. Expressive therapy began during ancient Egypt times, where Egyptians were said to have encouraged those with mental illnesses to distract their minds through artistic expression. There are many art forms that fall under the umbrella of expressive therapy, including music therapy, drama therapy, poetry therapy and in Howse’s case, arts therapy.

In arts therapy, a therapist will allow their clients to express themselves through images. Through colouring, painting or whichever art medium they so choose, the client is able to release tensions and learn more about themselves without having to be asked probing and potentially uncomfortable questions.

“It’s a very gentle process and its non-verbal so you can go and discover the inner landscape within a format and looking at it with a light that’s very positive and very human…you can get to know the spectrum of who we are as a human being but also a spiritual being and also an instinctual being like the animal part of us too,” said Danah Beaulieu, an expressive arts practitioner who owns a company called Art Indeed. “Particularly when dealing with trauma too, a lot of recovery can happen in the process and rediscovery and repair can happen and we don’t have to analyze it.”

Beaulieu’s Windsor-based company began 10 years ago, working with non-profit organizations like at hospice, the Alzheimer’s society, nursing homes and an addiction rehabilitation centre for women. She would load up what she called her “art cart” and bring them where she was needed most.

Today, she has other workers who go to specific locations and she has her own studio where clients come to her and spend up to three hours dabbing paint and sprinkling glitter as a way of getting out their inner struggles, pain or grief.

Although Beaulieu doesn’t use photography as a medium for her practice, there is an entire practice using photo-based therapeutic interventions that can be used by any kind of therapist. These innovations are known as PhotoTherapy Techniques.

The techniques were created in the mid-1970s by three people. Vancouver psychologist Judy Weiser began her work using PhotoTherapy Techniques to delve into the minds of deaf Native children. Although Weiser could communicate fluently in sign language, “talking” just wasn’t working. So she would have them take photos to show her what they just couldn’t say.

Her work was published in a British Columbia magazine in 1975 and her article was the first to use “PhotoTherapy” in its title. Later on, news spread about her work and she was invited to a conference where she met 30 or so people who also thought they had created PhotoTherapy Techniques. In the end, it was she, psychiatrist Joel Walker from Toronto and psychologist David Krauss from Ohio who became known as the founders of PhotoTherapy Techniques.

Weiser hasn’t practiced for 15 years. Instead, she travels the world teaching other therapists how to use PhotoTherapy Techniques in their practice, speaking as the world authority on the techniques of PhotoTherapy, therapeutic photography, photo-art-therapy, videotherapy and other related techniques.

Although Howse uses photography as therapy for the stressors in her life, according to Weiser, anyone, really, can benefit from therapeutic photography for a wide variety of personal problems.

“It literally can help any kind of person with any kind of problem unless their problem is a result of a neurological collapse or something where it’s biologically based but even then, it helps them deal with it,” Weiser said. “This works with every kind of presenting problem a therapist would ever have, everything from children with Asperger’s or autism all the way up to elderly people dying of cancer, depression, anxiety, anything.”

Even now, taking photos continues to change Howse into a much different person than she was before her son’s accident. Naturally prone to anxiety and fits of anger, Howse found taking photos not only helped her cope with her son’s accident and her cancer, it also helped her deal with her own mental issues.

Although she once took medications for depression, not long after taking up photography, she found she did not need them anymore.

“I really feel too that with the camera and what I could see happening personally and professionally is you have control of something and you have it in your hands and you decide,” said Beaulieu reflecting on Howse’s situation. “When there’s loss that you’re dealing with or everything seems out of control, this is that moment just for that person and we need that, people need that to feel balanced, to feel happy, to remember who they are, to discover that truth of who they are.”

Her husband, David Salter, has noticed a difference in her too. She is more confident now than she ever has been.

“I think with taking photos, she’s changed where she’s more interactive with people,” said David. “(She is) able to talk about the camera (and) talk about the picture more (rather) than just being blank with fear or not knowing how to act type thing.”

Remarkably, their son will be graduating from high school in June. While Howse knows Matthew will never be the same man he would have been without the accident, she chooses to find ways every day to see a positive.

Every time she sees a sunset now, it’s not just the signal that the day is ending—it’s something beautiful that she and her son have the privilege to see.

So, should someone dealing with a traumatic event consider taking up photography? According to Howse, that is a definite yes.

“Anyone with anxiety issues, stress, grab a camera, take a course or look at something on YouTube, figure out how to use your camera,” said Howse. “Our cameras can do magnificent things and see things, help us see things differently. I would recommend it to anybody for a relaxing thing to do.”