Dr. Pinkie Feinstein, The Psycho-Creative Institute, Israel
The Psycho-Creative Journal, Volume 2, No. 5, December 2025
Abstract
This article proposes a psycho-creative model in which natural creativity is understood as the primary emotional mechanism that generates self-potency: the embodied inner sense of I can, I will manage, and I have my own way through this.
Unlike task-specific self-efficacy, self-potency reflects an existential form of agency rooted in emotional mobility, intuitive responsiveness, and the capacity to influence internal and external conditions through spontaneous creative movement.
Drawing on the psycho-creative perspective, the paper argues that natural creativity is not merely an artistic trait but an essential psychological infrastructure. When active, it restores emotional flow, expands internal spaciousness, strengthens intuition, reduces dependence on external validation, and reawakens inner autonomy. These experiential processes provide the lived foundation from which self-potency emerges. When natural creativity is blocked, emotional stagnation, rigidity, depressive inertia, and anxiety-driven tunnel vision replace the flexible, adaptive, and self-directed movement of a healthy psyche.
The article further demonstrates how intuitive creative action, through intuitive painting, intuitive writing, emotional transformation, and psycho-creative coaching, reinstates the felt experience of agency. Creative engagement serves as a therapeutic accelerator that bypasses excessive rational control and reactivates the emotional system’s capacity for movement, renewal, and choice. In depression, natural creativity reignites passion and desire; in anxiety, it expands perception and reintroduces safe unpredictability, restoring the ability to transform rather than react.
Ultimately, the paper positions natural creativity as the missing link in contemporary understandings of psychological strength. Self-potency develops not from insight alone but from direct encounters with one’s own creative force. When creativity flows, the individual transitions from passive endurance to active authorship. Natural creativity thus becomes the root of inner empowerment, enabling the psyche to rediscover its innate truth: I can.
Introduction
The psycho-creative concept of self-potency refers to a fundamental experiential quality within the human psyche: the inner sense of “I can,” the intuitive feeling of “I have my own way through this,” and the grounded belief “One way or another, I will manage.”
Unlike self-efficacy, which evaluates a person’s belief in their ability to complete a specific task, as described by Bandura, self-potency is existential rather than task-specific. It describes a lived, embodied sense of agency, emotional mobility, adaptability, intuitive responsiveness, and inner resourcefulness.
Classical psychological theories have described elements related to this inner power but never fully articulated its creative-emotional foundation.
For example, Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory established that autonomy, competence, and intrinsic motivation are core psychological needs that fuel human agency and vitality. Similarly, research on psychological flexibility by Kashdan & Rottenberg, shows that emotional adaptability is central to mental health. Yet these frameworks do not fully explain how such inner freedom develops.
The psycho-creative approach fills this gap by proposing that self-potency awakens when the individual experiences themselves as a creative being, capable of generating responses, shaping outcomes, improvising solutions, and influencing reality through spontaneous action.
This proposition aligns with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, which demonstrates that creativity and spontaneous engagement activate a deep sense of mastery, authorship, and vitality. Likewise, Winnicott’s theory of play suggests that creativity is the basis of the “true self,” and that emotional health depends on the ability to create from within rather than merely adapt.
Contemporary creativity research supports this view: Forgeard has shown that creative self-expression enhances psychological well-being by expanding emotional range and strengthening inner coherence. Bonanno’s Studies of resilience similarly highlight that people regain strength and adaptability when they can generate new responses and reorganize internal states in the face of challenge, processes that are inherently creative by nature.
For the psycho-creative perspective, these converging lines of evidence point to a single conclusion:
Natural creativity is not an artistic luxury. It is a necessary psychological function.
When natural creativity is active, self-potency rises, the personality remembers its freedom to move, respond, and transform.
When natural creativity is blocked, self-potency collapses, the psyche loses access to inner movement and becomes trapped in rigid emotional patterns.
This article develops the idea that natural creativity is the inner engine of self-potency. When individuals reconnect to their spontaneous creative movement, they regain confidence, courage, flexibility, emotional spaciousness, passion, and the lived sense of “I can.”
Through this lens, psychological strength is not merely the ability to endure, but the capacity to create internal movement even in the presence of difficulty.
The Psycho-Creative View: Natural Creativity as Emotional Infrastructure
The Psycho-Creative View: Natural Creativity as Emotional Infrastructure.
In the psycho-creative worldview, natural creativity is understood not as a luxury or an optional talent, but as a foundational part of the human emotional system. It functions as the inner infrastructure through which emotions move, release, transform, and reorganize. When this system operates freely, the psyche maintains fluidity and adaptability. When it is blocked, emotional energy becomes stagnant and the individual loses access to self-potency. Creativity is therefore not merely expressive but regulatory, and serves as the bridge between emotion, intuition, and action.
Children demonstrate this effortlessly. Their spontaneous creative actions, drawing without planning, inventing stories, dancing instinctively, or imagining worlds, serve as natural emotional regulators. Through these acts, they process frustration, relieve tension, reorganize fear, and transform excitement into coherent form.
Adults, however, often lose this natural regulatory mechanism as a result of chronic self-criticism, cultural inhibition, and over-intellectualization. Once the creative-emotional system collapses, emotional flow becomes narrow, rigid, and dependent solely on cognitive strategies that cannot fully replace the lost internal movement.
Major emotional contributions of Natural Creativity:
It reconnects the person with inner movement
Natural creativity restores the innate rhythm of emotional flow by reawakening spontaneous inner motion. When individuals create intuitively, without planning, without performance pressure, they encounter a subtle but powerful sense of internal movement. This movement reactivates emotional flexibility and counters the frozen states associated with anxiety, depression, and helplessness. Through creative action, the emotional system “remembers” how to move again.
It restores the sense of emotional spaciousness
Creative engagement expands the internal space in which emotions can exist safely. Instead of feeling trapped within a narrow emotional corridor, the person experiences greater room for exploration, expression, and variation.
Emotional spaciousness reduces intensity, softens fear-based contractions, and allows the psyche to reorganize itself around openness rather than threat. Spaciousness is essential for self-potency because potency cannot be felt in a psychological environment that feels “too small to move.”
It supports intuitive decision-making
Creativity naturally strengthens intuition by inviting the individual to act without over-analysis. As creative processes unfold, people practice trusting internal signals, noticing subtle cues, and making spontaneous micro-decisions.
These intuitive choices build a sense of competence that translates into real-life decisions. Rather than depending exclusively on rational calculation, the person learns to use intuition as a reliable guide, an essential element of self-potency.
It reduces dependency on external validation
When individuals reconnect with their natural creativity, they rediscover an internal source of satisfaction and meaning. The creative act itself becomes rewarding, reducing the need for approval from others.
This shift dismantles fragile, externally-based forms of self-esteem and replaces them with an inward sense of self-worth. Less dependency on validation allows the person to take risks, initiate actions, and operate with greater independence, hallmarks of emotional potency.
It strengthens inner autonomy
As people experience themselves as capable of generating forms, ideas, gestures, and emotional transformations from within, they strengthen their psychological autonomy.
Inner autonomy is the ground of self-potency: the sense that “my inner resources are enough,” “I can rely on myself,” and “I have an inner route forward.” Natural Creativity restores this internal authority by giving the person repeated lived experiences of their own agency.
Self-potency becomes possible only when the creative-emotional system is awake, fluid, and accessible. Without creativity, the individual remains internally passive; with creativity, they rediscover their emotional engine and inner movement toward life.
Why Natural Creativity Generates Self-Potency
Natural creativity is the experiential foundation upon which self-potency is built. Self-potency, the inner sense of I can, I will manage, I have a way, I can influence my reality, is not created through thought alone. It emerges from living experiences in which the individual witnesses themselves as an initiator, mover, creator, and transformer. Creativity provides exactly this lived encounter.
Natural creativity provides the experiential foundation for self-potency because:
It activates the inner source of emotional power
Creative expression is a direct meeting with one’s internal reservoir of vitality. When individuals create without external instruction or approval, they discover emotional energy that belongs entirely to them. This activates a felt sense of personal power: “The movement is coming from inside me,” “I am the source,” “I can generate something new.” Once this sensation is awakened, it becomes easier to approach challenges with a stronger internal force rather than collapsing into helplessness.
Furthermore, creation shifts the emotional system from passivity to engagement. Instead of reacting to circumstances, the individual steps into the role of creator. This transition, from being affected to being effective, is one of the core mechanisms through which natural creativity generates self-potency.
It increases psychological flexibility
Creativity requires the ability to shift directions, try alternatives, improvise, and reorganize responses instantly. Through creative engagement, the mind learns to move away from rigidity and toward openness. This flexibility becomes a transferable skill: individuals who practice creative flexibility are far more capable of adapting to uncertainty, navigating transitions, and reorganizing themselves under stress.
Psychological flexibility is the opposite of tunnel vision, which characterizes both anxiety and depressive patterns. Creativity expands perception and multiplies possible responses. When a person perceives more pathways, self-potency naturally increases.
It fosters resilience and courage
Every creative act involves stepping into the unknown. There is no full certainty, no guaranteed outcome, no perfect plan. This micro-exposure to the unknown strengthens emotional courage. Each small successful creative gesture reinforces the belief that uncertainty is survivable, manageable, and even enjoyable.
Over time, this courage accumulates. The psyche internalizes the message: “I can face what I do not fully understand,” “I can move even without full clarity,” “I can trust myself in movement.” These internal statements form the backbone of self-potency.
It reinforces personal authorship
Creation gives a person direct experience of themselves as the author of movement, form, meaning, and transformation. This lived sense of authorship is far more powerful than abstract self-esteem. When individuals create, they see their impact in real time, they shape something that did not exist before.
This generates the emotional essence of self-potency:
“I am capable of influencing reality.”
“My actions matter.”
“There is something in me that can move the world around me.”
Such experiences replace helplessness with agency, and stagnation with self-directed movement.
It strengthens the connection to passion and intrinsic motivation
Creativity reawakens desire, the engine of self-potency. When natural creativity is active, passion rises spontaneously: the wish to explore, to test, to build, to express, to move, to try again. Passion is the inner fuel that allows the individual to confront obstacles with energy rather than resignation.
Intrinsic motivation grows as creativity becomes a familiar internal force. Instead of depending on external pressure or fear-based obligation, the person discovers an inner drive that pulls them forward. This internal ignition system is essential for maintaining self-potency over time.
Thus, natural creativity transforms self-potency from a cognitive belief into a felt emotional reality. It becomes not something the person thinks they possess, but something they experience themselves embodying.
The Problem: When Natural Creativity Is Absent
When natural creativity is absent, the human psyche loses one of its most essential regulatory systems. Without the spontaneous movement of intuitive expression, emotional energy accumulates in rigid structures, resulting in stagnation, rumination, and a narrowing of mental space. The mind becomes trapped within repetitive narratives and familiar fears, unable to generate new pathways of meaning or action.
Over time, this restriction cultivates an inner climate of helplessness, where the individual feels acted upon by life rather than engaged with it. The collapse of creative emotional movement leads to the collapse of psychological mobility.
Furthermore, the absence of natural creativity weakens the bridges that connect the inner world with external reality. Without creativity, desires lose their vitality, intuition becomes muted, and the capacity to imagine alternatives diminishes.
This creates a sense of existential relative unconscious “emotional tunnel vision:” a feeling that there is only one possible way to be, one possible way to think, one possible way to respond. From the psycho-creative perspective, this is not merely a lack of artistic expression but an internal crisis of agency. The person feels confined inside themselves because the essential ingredient that expands the psyche, spontaneous creation, has gone silent.
Creativity in Action: The Experiential Restoration of Self-Potency
The experiential activation of natural creativity shifts the individual from a passive emotional stance to an engaged, dynamic relationship with life. In intuitive creative work, movement replaces paralysis, exploration replaces resignation, and emotional flow replaces internal pressure.
This embodied experience is crucial, because self-potency is not learned conceptually, it is rediscovered through direct, lived encounters with one’s own creative power.
Each creative gesture, no matter how simple, becomes a micro-proof that the psyche can move, shift, expand, and generate something new. The moment a person witnesses their own ability to create, a subtle but profound transformation occurs: the realization that “I can” becomes not a belief but a felt truth.
Moreover, creative action communicates to the emotional system that change is possible. The psyche internalizes the message that movement is within reach, that internal obstacles are permeable, and that one’s inner world can respond to life with originality rather than repetition.
This is why the psycho-creative approach views intuitive creation as a therapeutic accelerator: it bypasses cognitive defenses and reaches directly into the emotional-motivational core. In this state, the person begins to sense not only their capacity to act but their capacity to influence, to shape internal and external conditions through creative movement. This is the foundation of self-potency reawakening.
Traditional psychotherapies often try to rebuild confidence through insight, reframing, or behavioral change. While valuable, these do not directly address the blocked creative-emotional system.
In contrast, the psycho-creative approach insists that:
Self-potency returns only when the person experiences themselves creating.
Through intuitive painting, intuitive writing, emotional transformation, or psycho-creative coaching:
- the person feels movement where there was stagnation
- options appear where there was rigidity
- curiosity arises where fear dominated
- initiative awakens where passivity reigned
The recovery of natural creativity in real time produces the embodied sensation of I can , the root of self-potency.
Natural Creativity and Depression
Depression, in psycho-creative understanding, emerges not only from emotional pain but from the chronic suppression of passion and its direct manifestation – creativity.
The depressive state is marked by a collapse of inner possibility, a constriction of imagination, and a fading of desire. Without access to natural creativity, the psyche loses its capacity to initiate renewal. Creative engagement reintroduces micro-movements into the emotional system: colors, shapes, words, gestures. These seemingly simple expressions begin to reconnect the individual with aliveness and passion. The emotional system, long immobilized, discovers a pathway through which energy can move again, can change again and can release its accumulated tension.
As creativity reawakens, desire naturally follows. The person begins to feel small sparks of curiosity, the early signs of emotional color returning to the inner landscape. These subtle shifts are transformational because they reestablish the foundational belief that inner life is not fixed, that it can change, evolve, and respond. In this way, natural creativity does not “fight” depression; it re-directs its stuck mental energy to the right and healthy place.
By reactivating the mechanisms of emotional movement, creativity dissolves depressive inertia from within. It restores the sense of connection to one’s inner child, intuition, imagination, and the fundamental belief that something new is possible, the emotional signature of self-potency.
Natural Creativity and Anxiety
Anxiety narrows perception. It locks the individual into a tunnel of imagined or exaggerated threats, stripping away access to intuitive alternatives and creative responses. In this restricted state, self-potency diminishes because the person no longer feels capable of influencing their circumstances.
Natural creativity interrupts this contraction by re-expanding internal space. Through spontaneous creation, the individual accesses a mode of expression that is not governed by fear. The emotional system is given permission to move to new directions, allowing anxious energy to be externalized and transformed rather than trapped within repetitive, catastrophic loops.
Additionally, creative engagement introduces an experience of safe unpredictability, a controlled encounter with the unknown. In intuitive painting or spontaneous writing, the individual does not know what will emerge, yet the process remains safe, playful, and guided by intuitive intelligence.
Over time, this conditions the nervous system to tolerate uncertainty, reducing the rigidity of anxiety-driven responses. The psyche learns that movement into the unknown can be not only safe but pleasurable and empowering. This shift, from fear-based rigidity to creative openness, is the very essence of renewed self-potency, introducing the new state of being based on: I can do something with my anxieties and even to grow into better place through them…”
The Psycho-Creative Tools That Build Self-Potency
The Psycho-creative tools work by dismantling the inner barriers that block natural creativity and its way of allowing emotional free flow by creating structured opportunities for experiential breakthroughs.
In psycho-creative psychotherapy, the therapeutic encounter becomes a space where emotion and creativity converge, through exercises designed specifically to allow the client to safely and easily bypass excessive rationality and excessive self-criticism and reconnect with free intuitive-emotional flow.
These methods strengthen the sense of being an active participant in one’s inner world, rather than a passive observer of emotional difficulties. Each exercise, when done properly, reinforces the message that the individual has agency, movement, and internal freedom.
Emotional Creativity and Emotional Transformation offer a direct pathway for converting emotional tension into creative expansion. Instead of suppressing difficult feelings, these techniques teach individuals to “meet” emotion with movement, expression, and curiosity. This not only reduces emotional pressure but provides the psyche with experiential evidence of adaptability and potency.
Self-love practice supports this process by creating a supportive inner atmosphere where creative risks feel emotionally safe. Together, these psycho-creative tools cultivate the inner climate necessary for self-potency to grow: a climate of permission, flexibility, gentleness, and renewed connection to one’s inner resources.
Toward a Creativity-Based Understanding of Psychological Strength
Redefining psychological strength through the lens of creativity shifts the field from a static to a dynamic model of human functioning. Rather than viewing strength as resilience against adversity alone, the psycho-creative perspective sees strength as the capacity to creatively shift internal states and points of view, to challenge contemporary interpretation of situations and create new responses to challenges.
This reflects a more expansive understanding of adaptability. Not merely surviving challenges but transforming them through creative engagement. In this framework, psychological robustness is measured by the degree of emotional flow and intuitive responsiveness, not the suppression of difficulty or just managing to “survive it better.”
Furthermore, a creativity-based model recognizes that inner freedom, originality, and emotional mobility are essential markers of well-being. When individuals possess access to natural creativity, they are more capable of navigating unpredictable realities, initiating change, and constructing meaning. They do not collapse into helplessness because they possess internal tools for renewal.
Self-potency, therefore, becomes the natural byproduct of a psyche that is allowed to create. In such a model, therapy becomes not only a process of healing but a process of awakening the individual’s original and natural creative intelligence, the deepest source of psychological strength.
Conclusion: Natural Creativity as the Root of “I Can”
The emergence of self-potency marks the moment a person remembers their inner authorship, the moment they rediscover their ability to move, respond, shape, change and transform.
Natural creativity is the portal through which this memory returns. It reconnects the individual with the emotional and intuitive currents that once guided them effortlessly in childhood. Through the revival of natural creative flow, the person reacquires the foundational experience of being capable. This is not theoretical confidence; it is embodied realization. It is the psychic shift from “life is happening to me” to “I am participating in life.”
Ultimately, natural creativity restores the individual’s relationship with possibility. It reopens the pathways to hope, initiative, originality, and unique and personal mode of adaptation. These qualities are not luxuries; they are essential for well-being and inner evolution. When the psyche remembers how to create, it remembers how to live. And when creativity flows, self-potency rises naturally, forming the inner statement that lies at the core of human empowerment:
I can. I am capable. I have a way forward.
Reference
1. Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W. H. Freeman
2. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
3. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. HarperCollins.
4. Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878.
5. Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). Self-determination theory: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
6. Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock.
7. Forgeard, M. J. C. (2013). Creative self-expression and psychological well-being. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(3), 254–264.
8. Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience. American Psychologist, 59(1), 20–28.
9. Feinstein, P. (2025). Self-Love: Self-Love: Soul’s Center and the Basis for All Emotional Healing and Growth, The Psycho-Creative Journal, 1(1).
10. Feinstein, P. (2025). Exaggerated Self-Criticism: The Hidden Agent Behind Emotional Difficulties, The Psycho-Creative Journal, 1(2).
11. Feinstein, P. (2025). Emotional Creativity: The Freedom to Feel, Express, and Transform The Psycho-Creative Journal, 1(3).
12. Feinstein, P. (2025). Emotional Transformation: Emotional Transformation: How to leverage the problem’s energy into growth and healing? The Psycho-Creative Journal, 1(4).
13. Feinstein, P. (2025). The Creative Drive in the Human Being: A Psycho-Creative Perspective on the Third Instinct. The Psycho-Creative Journal, 2(1).
14. Feinstein, P. (2025). The Therapeutic Value of Natural Creativity. The Psycho-Creative Journal, 2(2).
15. Feinstein, P. (2020). Intuition’s Rules. Tel Aviv: The Psycho-Creative Institute.
16. Feinstein, P. (2021). Intuitive Painting in Home. Tel Aviv: The Psycho-Creative Institute.
17. Feinstein, P. (2022). Emotional Transformation. Tel Aviv: The Psycho-Creative Institute.
18. Feinstein, P. (2023). Transformation of Anxiety. Tel Aviv: The Psycho-Creative