When Punching Paint Becomes Peace: The Neuroscience of Somatic Release Through Violent Expressionism
- Julie McVey
- Nov 12
- 7 min read
How sleep medicine, Jungian shadow work, and splatter art converge on the same truth: your body knows what your mind keeps explaining away
The Body Keeps Score (Even When We Don't)
In the sleep lab, I learned something that changed everything: the nervous system is a better historian than the mind.
I'd watch patients come in, filling out intake forms with careful optimism. "Sleep's been fine lately," they'd say. "Stress is manageable." Then I'd attach the electrodes - EEG leads mapping brainwaves, sensors tracking breath, heart rate, micro-movements.
And the body would tell a different story.
REM patterns fragmented like broken glass. Cortisol spikes at 3 AM. Limb movements that suggested the body was still running from something, even in sleep. The data didn't lie. Even when patients believed they were fine, their nervous systems were screaming.
The body remembers what we've trained ourselves to forget.
I spent over two decades in neurology and sleep medicine, working with veterans, trauma patients, and people whose bodies had become battlegrounds they no longer recognized. I learned to read the language of the nervous system - the twitches, the breathing patterns, the way someone holds tension in their jaw without knowing it.
But here's what the lab couldn't answer: What do you do with a body that won't stop remembering?
Therapy helps. Medication has its place. But there was something missing - something primal, physical, necessary - that couldn't happen in a clinical setting or on a couch.
Fast forward to today: swap EEG leads for paint buckets, polysomnography for splatter walls.
The truth remains the same. The body needs completion, not cognition.
What REM Sleep Teaches Us About Release
Recent sleep research reveals something profound: REM sleep isn't just rest. It's emotional recalibration.
During REM, your amygdala - the brain's fear center - lights up like a Christmas tree. Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex (the logical, storytelling part of your brain) temporarily goes offline.
This is not a bug. This is the design.
Your body needs to process emotion without interference from the narrator trying to make sense of it. In dreams, you run, you fight, you fall, you fly - your nervous system rehearsing, discharging, integrating experiences through movement, imagery, and chaos.
The body literally moves through what it cannot think through.
So, here's the question that haunted me after leaving clinical practice:
What if we could recreate that process consciously? What if we gave people permission to discharge their nervous system while awake - with intention, with witness, with art?
The Punching Bag as Therapist
There's a reason boxers, fighters, and athletes describe training as "therapy."
Research consistently shows that high-intensity striking exercises don't just build strength - they reduce cortisol (your primary stress hormone) and restore vagal tone, the parasympathetic rhythm responsible for emotional regulation and sleep quality.
Translation: When your fists speak via exercise, your nervous system exhales.
But here's what most people miss: the vagus nerve - that critical highway between your brain, heart, and gut - doesn't respond to logic. It responds to rhythm, breath, and impact.
This is why talking about your stress rarely releases it.
This is why "just relax" doesn't work.
Your body needs to move the energy that's been locked in stillness. It needs completion of the fight-or-flight cycle that got interrupted when you had to "stay professional," "keep it together," or "be the strong one."
The punching bag lets you finish what your nervous system started.
Now imagine adding paint.
When Violence Becomes Art
Every punch becomes a brushstroke. Every swing, a color arc of liberation. The wall becomes witness and canvas - your aggression transforming into evidence of aliveness.
This isn't destruction for the sake of chaos. This is the nervous system completing its ancient loop.
This is shadow work in motion.
Carl Jung believed that to become whole, we must make the unconscious conscious - to meet our disowned parts without shame. In The Red Book, he documented his own descent through images that were raw, surreal, often violent. He painted not for aesthetics, but for integration.
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
If Jung had a punching bag and neon paint, he might've joined us in the splatter room.
The Abstract Expressionists of the 20th century understood this intuitively. Artists like Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning didn't depict the world - they processed it through aggressive strokes, through chaos made coherent on canvas.
Each painting was a nervous system discharging. Not unlike a trauma survivor shaking, crying, or laughing after release. The body finishing what it needed to finish.
When movement becomes art, chaos becomes coherence.
The Convergence: Where Science Meets Soul
Here's where it all lands:
Athletic expression, sleep cycles, Jungian integration, and violent expressionism all converge on the same principle:
The body holds truth until we give it permission to speak.
In traditional therapy, we talk about the body. In somatic work, we talk to the body. In the splatter room, we let the body speak for itself - through color, sound, breath, impact, and laughter.
This is what I've spent 20+ years learning across neurology, firefighting, organizational psychology, and now this work:
The nervous system doesn't need to be analyzed. It needs to move.
When we combine motion (punching), creation (painting), and consciousness (shadow work), we don't just regulate - we reclaim.
What Actually Happens in the Splatter Room
People ask me: "What should I expect?"
Here's the truth: I don't know what will happen for you. And that's the point.
Some people come in angry and leave laughing. Some come in "fine" and leave crying. Some discover they've been holding their breath for years. Some realize they've forgotten what it feels like to take up space unapologetically.
What I do know is this:
You'll be given paint, impact tools, protective gear, and a blank canvas. Maybe music. Maybe silence. Always your choice. Always permission.
Permission to move without apologizing. Permission to be messy. Permission to let your body say what your words can't.
The flow state that follows isn't accidental. Neuroscientists call it transient hypofrontality - the temporary silencing of your brain's self-critical chatter. It's the same state athletes enter when they lose track of time. The same space artists inhabit when creation takes over.
Jung called it individuation. Csikszentmihalyi called it flow. I call it peace.
Because sometimes peace isn't stillness. Sometimes it's the sound of a body remembering how to breathe - in color.
And If You Just Want to Have Fun? We're Here for That Too.
Look, not everyone walks into the splatter room carrying the weight of the world. Some people just want to throw paint at their friends and laugh until their face hurts.
That's not only okay - it's beautiful.
Because here's what I've learned: you don't have to be "working on yourself" for your nervous system to benefit. You don't need a trauma backstory to deserve release.
Sometimes the most profound healing happens when you're not trying to heal at all.
When you're throwing paint at someone you love - someone you feel safe with - something primal happens. The laughter isn't just joy; it's discharge. The play isn't just fun; it's permission. The mess isn't just chaos; it's freedom.
You might walk in thinking it's just a birthday party, a date night, a team outing. And then halfway through, covered in neon paint, breathless from laughing, you realize: I didn't know I was holding this much tension. I didn't know it could feel this good to let go.
That's the magic of this work.
The nervous system doesn't care if you came for therapy or came for fun. It just knows: Finally, I get to move. Finally, I get to play. Finally, I get to be loud and messy and unapologetic.
So yes, come for the Instagram photos. Come for the chaos. Come because it looks wildly fun (because it is).
Just don't be surprised when you leave feeling lighter than you have in months - and you're not entirely sure why.
Your body knows. It's been waiting for this.
Who This Is For
This work is for:
Leaders who've been holding the weight of their teams so long they've forgotten what their own body feels like
Creatives who've intellectualized their art until it lost its pulse
Anyone who's been told they're "too much" and learned to make themselves smaller
Teams that need to release collectively before they can build authentically
People in transition - between careers, relationships, identities - who need to grieve what was before stepping into what's next
Anyone tired of thinking their way through what needs to be moved through
Friends, couples, families who just want to do something wild together and make memories covered in paint
This work is not for:
People looking for a substitute for clinical mental health care (we're complementary, not replacement)
Those unwilling to get messy - literally and metaphorically
Anyone who takes themselves too seriously to laugh at the absurdity of life
The Paradox of Violent Peace
Here's the paradox at the heart of this work:
The violence is the path to peace.
Not violence against others.
Not violence that harms.
But violence as energy in motion - the force your body has been holding in civility, in performance, in trying to keep it together.
When you give that energy somewhere to go - when you let it hit the wall, splash across canvas, explode into color - something shifts.
The rage becomes revelation. The chaos becomes clarity. The destruction becomes creation.
This is what my background in firefighting taught me: sometimes you have to break things down to save what matters. Sometimes controlled destruction is the only way to prevent total collapse.
Your nervous system already knows this.
It's just been waiting for you to catch up.
Ready to Let Your Body Speak?
If you've read this far, something here landed for you.
Maybe you're tired of managing symptoms instead of releasing their source. Maybe you're curious what your body's been trying to tell you. Maybe you just want to throw paint at your best friend and see what happens.
Here's what I know:
The paints already mixed.
The canvas is waiting.
Your nervous system's already fluent in this language.
The only question is: Are you ready to listen?
Julie McVey is Co-Founder and CEO of Wicked Rae's Splatter Studio, a Somatic Release Specialist, and former sleep medicine clinician with 20+ years of experience in neurology, organizational psychology, and trauma-informed care. She believes the body speaks in colors, and it's about time we started listening.
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