Notes towards an Essay
Written at the suggestion of the founder of Focused Light, the following thoughts had already begun to form faintly in my mind, for the subject of the title is close to my heart. His suggestion was more specific: how writing poetry helps. It seems to me that though there are differences between poetry and prose, writing both can help in very much the same way, though there are differences in how they help that spring from the difference between poetry and prose. So in this essay I want to write about how writing words in any form might help, a list of words, a list of phrases, a poem, a prose-poem, chopped-up prose, prose non-fiction, prose fiction, and any other form or way of stringing words together.
Writing can and does help, no question. The act of writing, taken as a whole – finding a biro, finding and opening a notebook, sitting down at a desk or resting the notebook on your lap, or, as I write this paragraph now, sitting cross-legged, back straight, in bed at 7.18am on a Tuesday morning – creates a space, a mental space, a physical space, a space of time, ten minutes, maybe half an hour, or more. Somewhere quiet and alone, though it could be in a café or pub, in a quiet corner, by a window, as long as it isn’t too crowded, and one find a seat, and there isn’t too much noisy chatter and laughter, the muzak isn’t turned up to loud – a space where one feels safe enough to explore ones thoughts and memories, and feel one’s emotions.
Writing has helped me in this way with many problems, major and minor, over the years.
There’s another way it has helped. I have had information relayed to my conscious mind about abusive treatment as a child during sleep, in dreams and in flashbacks. Flashbacks are different from dreams, even when they occur in sleep, in my experience. In 2 flashback I have re-lived in real time and in incredibly vivid detail, abuse that happened when I was a baby, and both occurred in sleep, just before waking. On waking, seeing the importance of what I had just dreamed, or what had just been revealed to me in a flashback, I have written down the dream straight away. Then I can refer to those notes later and be sure they are accurate. Also the act of writing down a dream helps me to remember it. Some of these dreams I still remember clearly. When I ask myself, can I be sure of that? – I can find my notes and check. Except for minor details, I find my memory is accurate. Occasionally I find that my memory has omitted a detail from the dream, and my notes remind me of that detail. I have also written down in detail dreams that shed light on childhood trauma, though they are not memories.
Creating a Safe Space for Reflection Through Writing
One of the flashbacks occurred the morning after I did a writing exercise suggested by another excellent book, Rescuing the ‘Inner Child’: Therapy for Adults Sexually Abused as Children, by Penny Parks. She suggests writing a series of letters and replies, to and from your inner child. When first I sat down to do this, I straight away had the idea that contact with the child would be more immediate and direct if instead of letters, I wrote a conversation. I still have the notebook containing these conversations between A (adult) and B (boy). A begins by saying, “You are safe now, I will look after you. You can safely tell me what happened to you….” And as I woke next morning, the boy did tell me, in the form of a flashback in which I re-lived a terrifying experience. So writing helped to stimulate the unconscious brain somehow to find the place where a significant memory of abuse was stored, and serve it up whole, as it were, in the most vivid detail possible: I experienced exactly what the very young boy experienced. How can I be sure? Gut feeling. Also, why should my brain have faked such a thing? I simply do not believe the brain can manufacture fiction as vivid as that, complete with an actual taste of vomit in my mouth which lingered for seconds after I woke. I thought on waking there was a fragment of real vomit on my tongue, but when the taste and feeling of something physical on my tongue faded and vanished without my having to swallow or drink some water, I knew that it was a memory-taste, like a taste-hallucination.
Right now I am in the process of writing my autobiography, which is really the story of my mental health. My whole life has been affected by childhood trauma. My body and mind still hold the memories of it. There are also one or two physical symptoms which continue to this day, and psychological symptoms too, chronic memory problems chief one. I have found writing about these symptoms helps me to understand them and make sense of them. And writing about my life means visiting the past through memory, and getting to know and understand and empathise with younger versions of me. This is well known to be therapeutic. I have a note of something that an experience clinical psychologist (and friend of moMENtum) told me about this. He said what is important in understanding and recovery, is not to try to remember more about what happened, but rather to get to know my younger selves and different ages, from early childhood to late teens Somehow this brings all these fragments of myself together, enabling me to feel myself as something more whole and healed, rather than scattered fragments. Writing has helped enormously with this, and still does. It is as effective as talking therapy with a good therapist. You don’t even have to show your writings to anybody. Writing itself is the thing that helps healing. There’s an excellent book on this subject: Opening it up by Writing it Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain, by James W. Pennebaker & Joshua M. Smyth. One thing I learned from this book that Pennebaker’s discovery that writing about one’s worst sufferings, recent, or childhood or both, helps to heal and be happier even when the writer doesn’t share the writing with anyone, has since been backed up by a large and growing body of solid scientific research.
There is difference between writing prose (essay, journal, notes, letters, etc) and writing poetry is, for me at least. When I write a poem I spend a lot more time on each sentence, getting it right, and at the same time exploring the subject, which is located in one’s own feelings and memories, but also can extend to books, and also conversations with people, including therapists and other trauma survivors. But the therapeutic effect, the help one gets from writing, is much the same, the psychological process is much the same (in my experience). But the time spent mulling over the words when writing a poem is also time spent with the subject-matter of the poem, and the quality of that time is different. Remaining in creative contact with the words of a poem while writing it enables feelings, ideas, images, memories, to rise up from the unconscious mind, enriching the poem, and also illuminating the problem, deepening understanding of the problem, which aids recovery and healing.
I haven’t mentions catharsis. Catharsis is not a thing I’m very familiar with, not a word I’ve ever used in relation to my life of complex post traumatic stress, of trauma, symptom (depression, panic, sexual malfunction, haemorrhoids and other physical symptoms) and recovery. I have only very recently read a little about it, and I guess it really doesn’t contain any new information or insights. It’s a word for something I’ve experienced and felt, both in myself and in watching films and plays, reading autobiographies, biographies, novels, short stories, and so on. The essence of it seems to be, you suffer emotionally, and the experience of the emotions (sadness, grief, anger, fear and so on) in relative freedom and safety, is a release. Which means that as the emotions fade, happiness comes, wells up, takes their place. That happens. But why that happens, and enabling that to happen is not something that knowing about catharsis tells you. What sets you free, what helps, what gives understanding, is making contact with the truth, discovering the truth, perceiving the truth, learning the truth and about the truth, becoming aware and conscious of the truth. All of this includes and involves experiencing the cathartic sequence of emotions (sadness to relief to happiness, fear and tension to relief to freedom and relaxation), but catharsis is not the chief thing, not the whole thing. These are my first thoughts on this subject. They are open to revision, correction, expansion and development.
James Turner, November 2024
