Healing through writing

[deborahjross]

I just finished reading Louise DeSalvo's wonderful book, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (Beacon Press, 2000). Now, there are a lot of books about journaling as either therapy or spiritual development, or just plain self expression. This books tackles a much tougher issue: how writing can help us heal from major trauma, from unendurable abuse. Not just any free form writing, but a very specific way of honoring and integrating what happened and how we felt. Benefits are supported by research -- not only psychological but physical as well.

If this sounds all very well, consider this paragraph, which really went zing for me: DeSalvo writes about all the things she did not know, growing up, about what it means to be a writer:

I didn't know that if you want to write, you must follow your desire to write. And that your writing will help you unravel the knots in your heart. ... I didn't know that if you want to write and don't, because you don't feel worthy enough or able enough, not writing will eventually begin to erase who you are.

Erase who you are. Yes, it will, it can and it does. I sat there, in that shiver that says This Is The Absolute Truth.

I am not sure I am called to write in the particular way DeSalvo describes, but this I know. That unless I write the stories that are in my heart and unless I write them true, then I will slowly lose myself.