"Why get therapy when I can just get a tattoo?"
More and more research suggests that tattoos hold a therapeutic significance. As a trauma therapist and prison health researcher whose work, in part, maps the differences and similarities in emotional and physical 'healing arcs', this makes sense to me.
While tattooing and therapy, to me, are not interchangeable experiences, they do share two basic ingredients: process and meaning.
The tattoo process involves physical pain. Tattooing is consensual physical trauma to the body. There is an element of control — 'I have chosen to get barbed wire wrapped around my bicep and I will choose to say 'stop' when I need a break from the pain.'
The therapeutic process often involves emotional pain. Emotional pain is different. In fact, a primary reason emotional pain becomes trauma to begin with is due to a lack of control.
However, the way our bodies respond to physical pain — the release of endorphins — also helps relieve emotional pain.
So, while the tattoo process cannot replace the therapeutic process in that it is not addressing the core of the emotional pain, it can (and does) act as a coping mechanism for some people — many of whom report that tattooing helps them feel that they are reclaiming themselves and their bodies.
Tattoo and therapy are also about meaning.
In therapy, after we go through a process — like feeling our way through emotional pain — we reflect on that process, which can help our brain make meaning.
(And if this meaning is significant enough, maybe it becomes tattoo worthy.)
Though, in my prison tattoo research, I've found myself to be less interested in the fresh tats that people want to get as representations of who they are today, and more interested in the old, faded tattoos that used to hold meaning but now exist as reminders of growth – and, occasionally, as justification for tattoo removal services.
