Writing as Medicine

A great part of the damage of sexual abuse is the silencing.  So many people don’t want to hear about it. When you finally break through the silencing – whether it’s communicating the truth to yourself, another individual or a whole bunch of people – you chip away at the wall, the prison, which was built around your voice, around your capacity to express yourself.

I started journaling when I was 24 years old. For the first twelve years I never wrote a word about the abuse; what happened, how I felt about it, nothing. It wasn’t until the muscles in my heart and fingers were strong enough, practiced enough, for me to mention it, describe it, to claim my experience. I was doing the equivalent of bodybuilding for my voice, getting familiar with a pen in my hand pumping words from inside me, down my arm and onto the page. I didn’t know I was coaxing my voice out. 

When you write, you gain confidence in your ability to express yourself. The more you write, the more you get to know yourself, which leads me to the next step – reading it aloud. Hearing one's own voice recite one’s own words has power. I am constantly reminded of this: when I read aloud, emotions I didn’t realize were attached to my words can rise up – be that grief, fear, or joy – which helps me get to a greater understanding of what I’ve been going through. The ears can see places for more expression that the eyes don't always catch. Reading aloud means finally someone is listening to what you have to say – that someone just happens to be you.  

I pull a journal off the shelf, it’s dated 1980. I open it randomly and read an entry I’d made on a visit with my dear maternal grandfather in North Dakota: 

“Grampa told me – as a baby I hardly ever cried because my father would go into a rage if I did.”

That’s it. No other exploration. I reread this entry decades after I wrote it and saw the evidence that, from very early on, I knew I needed to stay silent to stay safe.

Look at what my own words have done for me – in the last four sentences I have made sense out of my experience. Making sense is healing. Writing about all the secrets we hold deep inside us, all the feelings locked under the secrets becomes a release.

Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, said, “Writing is a matter of necessity… and so far, it’s been a very sturdy ladder out of the pit.”

So why don’t we give it a try – right now. Let’s take a little time to free up some thoughts inside you and get them onto a page. I find it helpful to read someone else’s words to spark my pen into action. Here is a poem. Read it. Slowly. Make note of a phrase or line or word that grabs you.

The Becoming
By Nikita Gill

You became.
When you believed you were nothing.
When everything you loved deserted you.
When you crawled out of the abyss.
When the darkness was so great
it swallowed you whole.
When failure tried to pinch
your soul with its greedy fingers.
When everyone you cared for broke your heart.

This [person] you are today,
you became [them] by breaking
over and over again.

Allow no one to take that away from you.
You are valuable. You are precious.
Because you built yourself from shards.

You broke to become.

Now, take a long deep breath, maybe even two. Catch that phrase or line in the poem that grabbed you – write it out and let the pen go wherever it wants – writing the first words that emerge. Don’t overthink – just go. For five minutes or maybe even ten. When you feel finished, set the pen down, stand up, stretch your arms to the ceiling and take a long deep breath.

Finally, pick up what you’ve just written and read it out loud to yourself. 

If you did all that – bravo! If not yet, I hope you will when the time feels right. 

If this kind a writing interests you, please know that I run online writing circles for survivors of sexual trauma. You can check them out here.

Thanks for stopping by – I’ve enjoyed sharing this with you.
Take good care of yourself,
Donna