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Helen Mia Harris BA (Hons)
Loss & Trauma Therapist, BACP Registered
Book an appointment by calling
01732 453 758 or 07882 369 663

Creative Writing | Life Coaching

Creative Writing

Creative writing can be an extremely therapeutic tool to aid personal development, helping to uncover hidden or repressed feelings and experiences that hold keys to an individual’s trauma. Creative writing is an extremely powerful way of exploring our unexpressed feelings, especially when it involves revealing emotions associated with loss, trauma of separation.

The writing process acts as a catalyst to express and release our problems to the conscious mind. It is accepted that the process of writing down one’s dreams allows communication to flow from the unconscious and allows the healing process to begin.

Through creative writing therapy we can find a way to dialogue with the ‘inner self’ and gain access to emotional blocks. This can be done through writing, poetry, drawing, painting or dream work. It encourages people to gain an understanding of themselves by writing about their experiences, as genuinely as possible, describing their experiences with imagination and detail, free flowing with the connections/words/dialogues being uncovered.

The healing power of expressing our emotions in black and white is very real: “problems that had seemed overwhelming became circumscribed and manageable when I saw them on the page.”

Through the process of writing we can work with myth, imagination, stories, poetry and discussion to explore the fabric of the inner emotional life.

Creative writing therapy also helps release untapped areas of creativity and spirituality, helping to build self- confidence in one’s own creative ability in future.

‘One sheds one’s sickness in writing books.’ D.H. Lawrence.

‘That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something, you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.’ Doris Lessing.

‘We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.’ Anais Nin.

‘I always prepare myself for the sight of myself.’ Virginia Woolf.

Listening to Silences….

For one to write to be alone, to be engaged in another kind of language that corresponds to the silence that feels far more in alignment with a feeling of authenticity and truth, neither distracted nor beclouded; a language that is your own as it takes you directly into, not away from, yourself. This is your own creativity and strength whereby a sense of truth and solace can emerge out of the silence.

What is of utmost importance, through the writing process, is the larger sense that the writer is able to 'make' of what happened. In session the person may bring her writing, if she wishes, and we would explore together, through writing, some of the underlying issues around the traumatic events that would otherwise be too raw to speak about.

The construction of this written narrative ideally begins once the patient's trauma is not so raw. She should avoid all stimuli associated with the loss and trauma. Any symptoms of the trauma, like depression and sleeplessness, should have been stabilised. A safe and calm atmosphere is always established before any work begins.

CBT and other Therapies can assist with the recovery of the above anxieties. Please contact me on 01732 453758/07882 369 663 or email enquiries@psychotherapysevenoaks.com for a free half hour introductory consultation.