Creative Writing, Women and Loss

Creative writing is an extremely powerful way of exploring your feelings, especially when it comes to the overwhelming emotions associated with loss, separation and trauma.

The healing power of expressing emotions on the page is very real: "problems that had seemed overwhelming became circumscribed and manageable when I saw them on the page." What matters is finding a new language to talk about loss. It may be through writing, poetry or drawing.

Some 'know' that they feel a longing to 'make sense' of their experience of loss, to find an anchor within to hold on to; to discover the inner furnishings of the soul; to represent themselves through the writing process.

"This insatiable desire to write something before I die, this ravaging sense of shortness and feverishness of life, makes me cling like a man on a rock, to my own anchor."

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.