Intro: Why I See Healing in Color
As children, we learn early that colors carry feelings. Red is anger or danger. Blue is sad or calm. Yellow is happy. Green might be disgust or peace. Long before we have words for what is happening inside us, we reach for colors to describe it.
That may be why art has always made sense to me, the colors evoke a feeling. I’m a terrible painter and an even worse drawer, but I’ve always loved music, painting, photography, and architecture. They are all ways of showing what is going on inside without needing words. The art I appreciate most, though, is the human psyche, which I feel like everyone carries different colors in their minds and now I get to see it up close in my work, and I’m still fascinated by it.
How do colors, art, and human connect? My own brain is a perfect example of how these worlds collide. It naturally connects things that don’t seem related. Some days it feels like there is a messy, vibrant palette of colors going on inside me, and some days there are fewer. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to make sense of that internal palette.
In college, I studied philosophy of human nature which comprised of discussing questions about right and wrong, justice, and free will. It was a search for meaning. Later, as I began studying the field of psychology as an interest area, I realized how deeply those old philosophical questions overlap with how we think today. Take the philosopher Nietzsche. He once wrote that a thought comes when it wants to, not when we choose to think it, believing our conscious mind is just a surface for a massive, shifting world of hidden drives. In my mind, I always pictured those hidden drives as colors swirling just beneath our awareness. Years later, I found the psychological equivalent in the work of Beck, who discovered that "automatic thoughts" constantly run in the background of our minds, shaping how we feel without us even noticing. When I first connected those two ideas, I thought about the colors I kept experiencing in myself. Maybe they weren't random, they were my mind’s way of pointing to those hidden, automatic thoughts before I had the words for them. A color shows up first—a raw, unspoken artistic feeling. But philosophy gives you the curious questions to follow it: What is this feeling about? Where did it come from? Is it even mine? Finally, therapy is where you learn to actually work with it.
That is why philosophy matters to me; it simply gives me a way to track a vague feeling and turn it into something tangible. Color, like art, doesn't mean the same thing to everyone; a simple shade of blue can evoke a calm peace or a heavy memory. Early on, noticing these colors allowed me to step into my inner world as a quiet guest. From there, philosophy gave me the language to stay and study it, teaching me how to question and reflect on what I felt. And my clinical training—alongside my own therapist—gave me the psychological tools to finally feel like the owner of my internal world, not just a visitor.
I wanted to build a space where you could explore your inner world too, and that is exactly what this blog is about. In each post, I’ll share a painting or photograph and explore what its colors bring up in my own experience as a way to check in with yourself. From there, I’ll bring in a philosopher's idea that helped me question that feeling, and I’ll end with a practical psychological tool that helped me work through it. You can read the posts in order or start with whichever color feels closest to where you are right now. Colors don’t mean the same thing to everyone, and that’s the point. Try asking yourself:
- What color does today feel like?
- What color am I carrying right now?
- What color am I letting in from other people?
Sometimes those questions get much further than a standard "How are you feeling?"
If your brain also connects things that don’t seem to go together, or if you feel more than you can put into words, this blog is for you.
Artwork is by Minjung Kim