I wrote in my
regular blog about
Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo. I collected a lot of quotes from it and am going to paste my notes here. I am pasting them without comment for once. If I comment on why I wanted to remember a certain quote then I will try to make this more fluid than it would be and I would probably delete some quotes altogether. I'm just going to allow the quotes to speak for themselves.
The act of linking feelings with troubling events, then makes our bodies display responses associated with yoga and meditation (23).
Research has demonstrated that depressed and suicidal people are much less likely to report memories or happenings in an extremely specific way. Instead, recollections tend to be overly general and vague. It’s possible that this is a strategy for avoiding pain or that the contents of memory are being censored. Still, when narratives are reported in an overgeneralized [sic] way, any situation seems more catastrophic than it really is. (57)
A healing narrative links feelings to events.
A healing narrative is a balanced narrative. It uses negative words to describe emotions and feelings in moderation; but it uses positive words, too.
A healing narrative reveals the insights we’ve achieved from our painful experience.
A healing narrative tells a complete, complex, coherent story. (59-61)
A study by Pennebaker discovered that the more people described positive emotions in their writing, the more likely they were to be healthier afterward. But describing negative emotions either excessively or very little or not at all correlated with poorer health. Describing negative emotions in moderation correlated with improved health. (60)
Guidelines for Confronting Trauma in Writing (26-27)
Do’s
Write twenty minutes a day over a period of four days. Do this periodically. This way you won’t feel overwhelmed
Write in a private, safe, comfortable environment.
Write about issues you’re currently living with, something you’re thinking or dreaming about constantly, a trauma you’ve never disclosed or discussed or resolved.
Write about joys and pleasures, too.
Write about what happened. Write, too, about feelings about what happened. What do you feel? Why do you feel this way? Link events with feelings.
Try to write an extremely detailed, organized, coherent, vivid, emotionally compelling narrative. Don’t worry about correctness, about grammar or punctuation.
Beneficial effects will occur even if no one reads your writing. If you choose to keep your writing and not discard it, you must safeguard it.
Expect, initially, that in writing in this way you will have complex and appropriately difficult feelings. Make sure you get support if you need it.
Don’ts
Don’t use writing as a substitute for taking action.
Don’t become overly intellectual.
Don’t use words as a way of complaining. Use it, instead, to discover how and why you feel as you do. Simply complaining or venting will probably make you feel worse.
Don’t use your writing to become overly self-absorbed. Over-analyzing everything is counterproductive.
Don’t use writing as a substitute for therapy or medical care.
It is not what you write or what you produce as you write that is important. It is what happens to you while you are writing that is important. It is who you become while you are writing that is important (74).
Awaken. Breakfast. Knit some. Straighten up quickly. Walk (same three-mile route). Home. Snack: decaf coffee, homemade biscotti (chocolate orange hazelnut, these days). By now it’s nine. Get special notebook (purchased in Venice). Special pen (Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine Rolling Ball). Sit by the window (on the sofa with the shredding slipcover that needs replacing) where I always sit. Write about what I intend to write. Move to the computer. Write. Move back to the sofa. Write about what I’ve been writing and how I feel about it. (76)
As so many creative people discover, keeping a process journal is an extraordinarily useful tool in nurturing creativity (85).
(W)riting about our writing can engage us in a process that’s as helpful—and healing—as the act of creation itself (86).
Writing about traumatic or troubling life experiences initially unleashes difficult, conflicting emotions. In the long run, though, we feel better emotionally and are healthier and achieve a level of understanding of our lives that only writing can provide. Safe writing—writing that we already know or understand, writing that is superficial—won’t help us grow, either as people or as writers. For our writing to be healing, we must encounter something that puzzles, confuses, troubles, or pains us. (93)
Here, then, are the stages we can expect to go through as we work (110).
Preparation stage
Germination stage
Working stage
Deepening stage
Shaping stage
Completion stage
Going Public stage
I am a writer who very much needs to know how much time I will devote to any given project and its stages. I need a due date so I can organize my work life. It makes me feel somewhat in control of an essentially unpredictable process. Many other professional writers state they must do this, too. Alice Walker, for example, sets aside two years to write a novel. (114)
If we begin to value our creative urges, we begin to value ourselves. If we deny our creative urges, we deny that our lives have meaning and significance (128).
I believe . . . that writing an autobiographical narrative that’s . . . thirty type-written pages and that takes three months or so from preparation to completion enables us to participate in a healing process that is deeper than if we write only journal, short work, or poetry or only works about others, never about ourselves. (134)
Still, many of us (perhaps unconsciously) fear the loss of our work, which often reawakens other losses we’ve endured. What will we do with ourselves when we’re finished? What feelings have we kept at bay that will return once we’re done? Sometimes we subvert our process, shaping our work haphazardly, undoing what we’ve done, giving ourselves even more work to do so we can hang onto our work indefinitely. (143)
Why trauma survivors tend to retraumatize [sic] themselves is brilliantly analyzed in Anna C. Salter’s Transforming Trauma. Salter relates that deliberately putting ourselves in danger triggers the production of endorphins. These successfully self-medicate pain. When they dissipate, the level of pain increases. We then require even more pain relief, in an ever-increasing, ever-more-dangerous cycle. Still, the original impulse behind this behavior is to help ourselves. (161)
If we are not presently at risk, we must become conscious nonetheless of the impact of our writing upon our lives. If we want our writing to help us heal, we must not glamorize or glorify dangerous lifestyles . . . (161-162).
Many researchers, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists, like Alice Miller, Anthony Storr, M.D., and Albert Rothenberg, M.D., believe that mental illness and suicidal despair are not caused by trauma itself. They occur because the survivor can’t verbalize what has happened and what has been suffered: they are caused “by not being able to describe our feelings of rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness, and sadness,” says Miller. Feeling suicidal, then, means that there’s a story that hasn’t yet been told, that there feelings linked to that story that haven’t yet been expressed. (167-168)
The piece began, “What I don’t want to write about, what I never want to write about is . . .” (169)
Quoting Arthur Frank: The ill person who turns illness into story transforms fate into experience, the disease that sets the body apart from others becomes, in the story, the common bond of suffering that joins bodies in their shared vulnerability.
How and Why Empathic Listeners Can Help (211-212)
First, they can act as a caring presence to enable us to really hear what we’ve written.
Second, they can reflect back to us what we have written.
Third, our empathic listeners can tell us what they like in our work or what works for them.
Fourth, our listeners can tell us when there are what I call “holes in the narrative”—those places where we’re so close to the story that we don’t realize that our listener cannot possible understand something.
Fifth, when we share our work, our listeners can tell us where they would like to hear more.
Sixth, our listeners can tell us what they observe about how we have survived—our victories, our defeats, and our struggles.
Seventh, listeners can help us see the patterns in our narrative and in our lives.
