The One (and Only) Technique That Finally Helped Me Write About Trauma

‘We all have a story to tell – the denial of that story can cause despair.’ I credit this to Arnold Zable but I think it comes from Jungian psychology . We are nothing but the sum of our stories. The more I write and perform, the more clarity it gives me on my personal history and understanding of human nature. Writing releases so many emotions and

The one practice I kept was writing. It made the cut because I can’t deny how many good things in my life have come as a result of my putting words out into the world. It also felt like a respite: one area where I wasn’t skeptical of my identity. I’m at my most courageous on the page because interrogating my feelings with words feels justified and

Stories that do carry some element of truth can actually be the most troublesome, because we put a lot of stock in ‘truth’, no matter how selective and partial it may be. Perhaps, as your classmates years ago never failed to point out during P. E. lessons, you were ‘bad’ at sports. Okay, but maybe you were bad at sports because you preferred painti

some of us writers start out wanting to write excellent fiction (or nonfiction, in my case) and then get stuck because that’s . . . the wrong starting point? At the end of the day, the writing is just a vehicle for something else—some feeling about the world or human experience that you want to suggest or precipitate in your readers.

As the world around us becomes increasingly complex, chaotic, and confounding, writing remains one of the most reliable tools we have to root ourselves into more truthful, nourishing lives. Carefully crafted words help us unearth and resolve the self-sabotaging stories stewing in our subconscious. They act as a beacon, beckoning us towards who we’r