Using writing to process trauma
Over the course of just two weeks, I had four different people ask me if I think writing can either help or heal trauma.
The short answer is yes.
The longer answer is that fiction and nonfiction do different things, and how we write impacts how effective writing is for healing. But more than one therapist of mine has, upon learning I am a writer, encouraged me to write both fiction and nonfiction. So let’s explore what writing can do for trauma survivors.
Fiction
As it has been explained to me by therapists, fiction plays two roles in healing trauma: 1) It can help you remember what happened to you if you suffer from trauma-induced amnesia; and 2) It can help you through imaginative nurturing.
If part or all of your traumatic memory is lost through a process called dissociative amnesia, then you might be able to barf up the truth in fiction. As counterintuitive as that might sound on the surface, it works. In my novels and short stories, and even in my poetry, I began coughing up at age 15 that I was a victim of sexual abuse and rape. There were tiny hints before that, but when I was 15, I began essentially shouting in my creative work that I had been traumatized. I couldn’t write anything without sexual harassment, sexual abuse, or rape showing up in it. The older I got, the more ubiquitous it became. Other parts of my trauma showed up as well—physical abuse, spiritual abuse, and more. My fiction screamed for me even though my memories weren’t intact.
Once my memories began returning, I could see that I had been paging myself for almost 30 years. I had left myself a trail of breadcrumbs leading to the truth.
My therapist immediately encouraged me to use my novels and stories in a new way: imaginative nurturing. The healing work comes when you give your characters what you didn’t have. I gave my characters a support network, a found family, and people to believe them. This works for the same reason that EMDR therapy works: Our brains don’t actually know the difference between truth and fiction. (Sad, but true.) If you write out a scene in which the main character is supported, believed, helped, and loved, your brain feels that you have been supported, believed, helped, and loved.
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