Becoming True

What if the thing that was taken from you in childhood was also the thing that could heal you now?

Becoming True is both a map and a memoir. It is the story of one woman's journey from a childhood of overflowing aliveness that the world couldn't hold, through the long years of diminishment and loss, through the survival-stage marks made in private darkness, all the way to the painting that found its church and the farm being slowly restored to carry what her grandmother always knew.
It is also a rigorously researched account of why creative practice heals — drawing on neuroscience, somatic psychology, Polyvagal theory, art therapy, and the ancient cross-cultural wisdom that understood long before modern science that human beings make things as naturally as they breathe, and that when the making is taken from them something essential goes with it.
Ninety-eight percent of children test as creative geniuses. By adulthood that number has fallen to two percent. This is not a natural developmental trajectory. It is a wound — one that most people carry without having a name for what is missing. And it is a wound that can be healed.
Becoming True maps the full arc of that healing — from the smallest survival-stage mark made without hope or plan, through the processing that gives the invisible somewhere to go, through the growing that reclaims the permission to exist fully, to the discovery that what was made in the dark carries light for someone else.
Written by Michelle Tiffany — graduate student in integrative psychology, creative practitioner, and someone who made the entire journey herself — this book does not ask you to believe it will work before you begin. It only asks you to make one mark.
The permission was always yours. The making will show you how.