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This article examines the experience and effects of a trauma-responsive program that uses creative methods to address the ongoing psychosocial impacts of transgenerational trauma and youth suicide, which disproportionately affect First Nations people in Australia. Our aim is to understand how the aesthetic (sensory-affective) dimensions of such a program serve to promote experiences of growth after trauma, manifesting in a sense of connection to both self and community. The paper focuses on the second of two immersive, experiential workshops delivered seven months apart in the regional town of Warwick in Queensland, Australia. In the light of self-reports of growth and personal transformation following the initial workshop, the paper examines the key drivers of such growth, focusing in particular on how trauma-related experience is metabolised through cultural containment. It builds on Bion's concept of container/contained, combining analysis of the affordances of immersion. Framed in cultural rather than medical terms, the larger goal of the paper is to establish how cultural programs fill a gap in trauma informed support, facilitating the processing of trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a psychosocial lens, informed by relational psychoanalysis, this article discusses the design, delivery, and impact of The Big Anxiety's 2022 festival in Warwick, Queensland—an arts-based program that engages with lived experiences of trauma, distress, and suicide, and in this case with the devastating impact of youth suicide, disproportionately affecting First Nations communities. It describes the festival's methods of creative engagement, examining how these create conditions for the transformation of trauma and for experiences of growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]