Big on my daily gratitude list lately is WordPress. I find such a great forum here, but the truth is I have been writing to express myself since I was very young and no one much was there for me.. I wrote a lot and often my Mum silently invaded my space, found what I wrote and confronted me on it, saying it was wrong.. Dear old Mum, sorry Mum that was wrong of you much as I understand your desire to know a child who seemed so very alien and strange to you.
I am glad now when I can just sit down to write and I have a little less censorship over it. There was a gift given to me in early sobriety, access to the writing of recovering artist Julian Cameron, I am sure if you love writing you may be familiar with Julia’s work, from memory one of her earliest books is called The Artist’s Way. In that book Julia introduces the idea of ‘morning pages’ that is you get up and write without censoring anything first thing or earlier in the day to clear out your mind, you do not even read it back much until later. Its a good practice but one, some of us with an intense inner critic or murdering voice inside may find hard.
Writing our way through trauma may also be a way of trying to piece together a broken or lost narrative as in trauma we often lose access to aspects of our story or experience that can become fractured. On that subject I would like to share two powerful quotes on trauma and narrative as well as healing.
The first is from Rilke
“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life, and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth— it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall and clears it for a different celebration where the one guest is you. In the softness of evening it’s you she receives. You are the partner of her loneliness, the unspeaking center of her monologues. With each disclosure you encompass more and she stretches beyond what limits her, to hold you.”
What a profound explanation of how both long term therapy and writing about it can heal us and contain us.
The second I came across on a PTSD quotes page after finding a link via Google Image search and is from Jessica Stern
“Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.”
This speaks to the fact some of our trauma may not be accessible to conscious memory…oftenlying dissociatedand only accessible through confusingand confounding body symptoms.
I was interested a few years ago to come across a book by addiction recovery writer John Lee on writing from the body, according to John’s experience of healing, and working through his own trauma by writing we can do a process of tuning into parts of our body to ask what it may say and to give it a voice.. For example what would your lungs say if they could speak, what about your heart, sore back, feet and hands?
Add to this that when we do consciously embark upon path of inner work the psyche will often begin to co-operate with us.. So we may get dreams or even nightmares, we may find old experiences just percolating up from the unconscious, we may even have sensations in our body that if we can tune into them speak of a emotional situation manifesting physically, I had this a month or too ago when I felt in therapy the clear sensation of someone holding onto my left wrist while turning my arm behind my back while repeatedly hitting me over the head. In the flashback I was begging them to stop but this called to mind two insights, one I often do this to myself and two when I had a dream in an earlier therapy of a nasty man I was clubbing over the head with a bottle of scotch my then therapist Wendy B said to me : that is really a profound metaphor for what you tried to do to yourself in your addiction, Deborah.
Connecting with these dream images, writing them out working with them, feeling or sensing where the tensions or pulls live or express in my body all of this helps me connect. And writing helps me to tap in, to externalise, to meander, to reach out, to play around with and then reassemble broken pieces or fragments of dreams, memories, associations, inner voices and inner figures, parts or sub personalities that have a lot to reveal of what we underwent or suffered as part of our trauma.
Emerging From The Dark Night 