People often ask me why I write. It isn’t necessarily the most lucrative career choice. In the age of smartphones and acronyms, attention to grammar is an antiquated art. Writing isn’t as set a career path as being a doctor or a lawyer or fine tuning valuable skills at a trade school. Yet, it’s the only career path that makes sense to me.
Something I am in continual reminder of is the amount of trauma that exists in this world. I remember once in school my professor was lecturing about John Keats and his (very true) theory of forging a soul through suffering. I asked my professor what that meant for people who didn’t suffer. Do they wander through the world soulless? My professor told me that people devoid of suffering don’t exist: everybody suffers.
True we suffer to different degrees. Some of us experience pain as a lesson. We learn from it and grow as humans, incorporating our newfound knowledge into our daily routines. However, it’s not so easy for everyone. Others may find themselves trapped in their trauma and unable to proceed with normal existence.
This is where storytelling can be beneficial. Traumatic events are not noteworthy for their rarity of occurrence, since trauma is a shockingly prevalent aspect of human existence. The extraordinary element of trauma instead lies in its devastation of normal life adaptations.
A hallmark of trauma is its inherent inability to be narrated. Something profound seems to occur for both reader and writer when an author is able to give voice to an unspeakable experience. Textual reconstruction through narrative thus creates a necessary therapeutic outlet for an author to overcome personal trauma.
Expressive writing satisfies two necessary elements of trauma recovery: it provides both a platform for confronting the memory and forges an interpersonal connection outside of the individual through textual transference.
Expressive writing allows the writer to unearth his or her darkest thoughts in order to work out the knotty problems of life in safe containment. Trauma can overpower the brain’s ability to cope to such a degree that the incident becomes repressed, but there are ways to access the buried memories and learn how to face the lingering ones.
Writers utilize expressive writing as a healthy way to access, vent, and overcome their repressed pain. Additionally, just as the person undergoing analysis develops an understanding that enables them to ease the original trauma, both the writer and reader of a conflict or trauma centered text can achieve heightened recognition and healing through textual reconstruction of a traumatic event.
By putting their story into concrete words, survivors of trauma are able to reclaim control of their lives and share this realization with readers.