Write Your Story, Heal Your Traumas

Ah yes, the dream of creating an intensive series of workshops with no bound to collaborative help and endless money. But what shall I focus on?

            Assuming I could rally all of my favorite therapists and psychology students into the same room as all of my favorite professors and English students, all I would need to create this scenario of a workshop series would be several undergraduate students who would be willing to participate.

            The first workshop, I would do my best to introduce students to the idea of narrative and how it affects how we view ourselves based on the stories we tell to ourselves and to others about ourselves. We would explore some of the basic ideas surrounding identity and narrative. They would then have some time to write a reflection (no word limit or requirement) on the simple prompt: Who was I? Who am I? Who will I be?

            The second workshop, I would first have the students write a short narrative about an important event in their life that they feel informed their current identity. Afterwards, I would give them several different definitions of types of narratives, positions of narratives, and the identities they inform so that I could ask them to identify what kind of narrative they wrote. If so inclined, they would have time to discuss the labels they chose for their narratives and why it’s helpful to know these definitions.

            The third workshop would be the most abstract. I would explain the uses of metaphors and other literary tools that people practicing narrative theory sometimes use in order to inform their identities. The students would then be asked to write a conceptual metaphorical narrative, i.e. a story about themselves using an extended metaphor.

            The fourth workshop would be the final go, I think. We would review previous work and previously discussed ideas. I would bring up the idea that writing narratives can often be healing, especially for people who have been through traumas or have unstable identities. I would then set them free to write a narrative about a particularly painful event in their life that ends with a solid conclusion, and send them on their way, probably cured or something.

            With their permission, I would collect all of the writing they had completed during the workshop series so that I could conduct a study because I’m scientific like that. Hopefully, the participants would gain a significant understanding of how they view themselves and how they’ll be able to deal with future trauma by writing. I also hope that they would be able to, if they wanted, submit some of the more metaphorical pieces to creative non-fiction contests seeing as how many journals are highly interested in how people can rewrite interesting stories of their lives using literary tools traditionally used in fiction.

            I’m really attached to the idea of narrative therapy because it has worked wonders for me so far. I think the simple idea of writing a scene that has a clear ending helps me rationalize that whatever happened in the narrative I’ve written is a past event, and it only informs my current self as much as I allow it. Having written it down, it is easier for me to move on and not let the negative emotions that stem from that particular scene affect me so directly. More to this end, being the narrator gives me a kind of power that my past self who was acting in the moment lacked. In this way, I gain the directive power over how I tell the story, how others will read the story, and how I feel about myself in terms of what meaningful conclusion the story eventually comes to.

The metaphors and conclusions are the two places I focus on the most. Depending on the particular event, I sometimes need to be directly in the action the way I remember it happened or I need to zoom out a little bit so that I don’t have to completely re-live the trauma. For me, at least, the especially traumatic “chapters” are highly metaphorical. And the conclusions are where I can find or insert a meaningful discovery that lends itself to healing or grappling with the fact that this “chapter” is in fact over with, and I’m a better person for it. For the way my brain works, writing these chapters helps me itemize the events in my life so that once they’re written, I can file them neatly away in my filing cabinets (in my mind skyscraper, y’all) to keep my working brain free of past debris.

            I believe that this method, especially with all the information from various articles I’ve read this semester, would help many people who might not have previously realized they had things to grapple with.