Finding Old Wounds to Heal! Please Help!

Hi, Chelle. My opinion is that writing a book about one's difficult life isn't a very good way to deal with it. It won't make the pain go away. Books written for that reason don't do well at meeting the public's taste in reading matter, either. I think talking with a psychotherapist works much better for the purpose of healing. As you feel better, you'll become more able to write. Also learn as much about writing as you can, and practice. But start with small projects that are more comfortable to think about.

P.S.: There's a forum called Life Story Writing farther down the page.

Michelle, why do you need to overcome your past life choices before starting to write now? Remember the past, try not to repeat the parts you didn't enjoy and remember fondly the ones you did, but you don't have to overcome the past, if such a thing is even possible to do, in order to write. Your past is part of what makes you you. Build on it. Learn from it. Move on from it. But never leave it behind. It helps identify you as a true individual.

As for telling your story, novels are works of fiction. They aren't real; they aren't about telling the author's life story. Use your personal experiences to make your characters and settings come alive, but I would not worry overmuch about writing your biography just yet.

Chelle...

I don't think you can portray anything still so raw and fresh as fiction until you've had some distance from it.

Work out your feelings in essays and poems; put them away and come back in time. In the meantime, write something else. Learn how, and then when your story is ready to come out, you'll be ready to tell it.

I'm going to echo BlueTexas. Your past is still too close to you. You need a certain level of objectivity to write about it and that can only come with time.

You say that everything turns out to be essays or poems. So focus on essays and poems. As you grow, both as a writer and a person, you'll be better equipped to tackle more difficult, longer works.

Hi Chelle,

I'd like to echo what everyone else has said. There's good advice here. Trying to use your own life as fiction right now, while it still feels so raw, might be useful to you but not so interesting to a reader. So how can you use this material for yourself? Journaling is good, and reph mentioned psychotherapy, which I also think is great.

My best recommendation would be the workbook called "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. I found it useful for just this kind of work--getting it out of myself and onto paper in a way that could help me become a better artist. I highly recommend it.

I'd also like to say that reaching out, like you've done here, is a great step. I think the community at AW is very supportive, and you'll find that you're not alone here.

I'm about to give you some great advise here so listen up.....you don't want to write a novel, but writing most certainly does help you to work things out and understand the past a bit better. What you need to do is journal. Journaling is a private experience where you can get out the anger, the bitterness, fear, and even fury without risking any harm to yourself or those around you. When someone is to the point that they actually write a book about the past they have normally moved on past the hurt and want their experiences to help someone else to find their way through the same type of pain. I have years and years of journals with poems, hate letters, memories, and just talking to myself about my life in the present, past, and my hopes for the future. It does teach you how to write, how to express yourself in powerful and helpful ways. Take it from me, when I wrote CINDY WHEN HELL FROZE OVER I knew I had to wait to publish it until I was strong enough to stand up to the objections and abuse from my family, from even total strangers telling me I was crazy, and they didn't believe a word of it (the book). Publishing a book about your life isn't cathartic or healing it is damn hard and you have to know where to draw your boundaries on what you're willing to share and what isn't anyone's darn business. I have a blog at www.mdmkay.blogspot.com. that has an article on journalling and other recovery issues for survivors of child abuse. I hope it might help answer more of your questions. I wish you all the luck in the world on your recovery and your writing carreer. B.t.w. keeping a journal doesn't stop you from writing from publication it just helps you keep to less harmful topics.

I can relate to you, I had a similar existance, and as a result I tended to ball up into my room. People always knew where I was because I was always in my room with the door closed, the curtains pulled shut, and the light off. At school I received a daily dose of being surrounded by kids knocking me to the ground and kicking me in the ribs until I couldn't get up. It all came to a head about six years ago when my father (who I had a once a year relationship with, and he was a drug addict/alcoholic/among other things) died. The hole in my heart tore open and I was just horrible to be around. So how did I cope? Journals and prayer. Now, older, fatter, and wiser, I can look back from the outside and discover things that I did not notice when I was in the middle of that twister. I have kept a journal almost everyday since I turned 17 years old (that's over 22 years of journals) and honestly I didn't know why I kept them. They did keep me going, and now when I read them as an older person I understand myself better. Someday, when the pain subsides completely, I will write the story of my life (which includes 3 months in a coma, and my father didn't even care), but until then, it's fiction, because it's easier to write about other lives than my own. Baby steps. Do little things first. Journal. Then poetry when your at your roughest moments. Then eventually, you will gain the strength needed to face anything the world throws at you. Oh, by the way, love is also what helped. My wife (even though she's still not sure if writers are artists) has been supportive and loving for over 20 years, and true love also helps the growth process because you learn from each other.

At the risk of making the echo continue on, I'm going to chime in here, and agree with everyone else. You don't want to write your life story while the wounds are still fresh. But a journal is an excellent way to figure out those emotions, and work on that pain.

Don't get me wrong, that pain will never completely go away. But you'll eventually be able to distance yourself from it a bit, and then you can write your story. But keep a journal, because as time goes on, and heals your wounds (or wounds the heels who hurt you), facts and incidences will become blurry. And how you look at things will change. You'll be able to look back someday, and think of how far you've come.

Until then, journal your life, and write fiction. One thing you have, that someone who hasn't gone through what you've experienced, is the memories of how you felt. You can tap into that emotion with your fiction, even if the subject has nothing to do with your experiences.

When I wrote my life story, I simply sat at the computer and started to type. It was truly the hardest thing I have ever done. It is amazing how much I had to endure just writing because it was as if I had to relive it all over again. One thing is for sure, I healed tremendously by doing so. You can do it, just take it one page at a time then move on to one chapter at at time, so forth.

Best wishes - and know that writing your life story is much harder than writing a fictional book! At least that is the way I view it

First, let me say that I, and many others sympathise with you. Many of us relate on one level or another. You'll find children of alcoholics here, like everywhere. You'll find people who were abused in everyway imaginable. Some are high functioning and you'd never know it unless they told you. Others fight just to get out of bed everyday.

In part, expressing yourself is part of the healing process, and it is important to find safe places to do that, especially with people who are going to be supportive and help you through. Chances are you'll find some here, but you also have people who won't. Chat boards are pretty mixed. However, they do have an "anxiety" board here, which is also used to talk about depression and other issues.

Now, let me also say this. You likely have a book in there somewhere. The question is, "Is now the time, or do I need to work this through privately with a supportive group/individual first?"

Is your goal to vent, or find healing? Is it to be understood or let someone have it? Poems are a great way to vent. In a sense, it is an expression of an emotional place, and they are cathartic for people. It isn't as overwhelming as a book.

Years ago I felt like writing a book about my childhood/family. But I'm also the kind who wanted to honor my father and mother, and couldn't reconcile the two. Obviously, that's not a consideration for a lot of people, but I'm glad I waited. If I write something now, I'll be much more sympathetic than angry. Generally speaking, screwed up people are screwed up for a reason, but if we are their children, we are resentful, because they set our course in life. It's not "what you did to me, as much as what I feel you've taken from me that I can never get back."

I had a terrible relationship with my dad to the day he died, and fought hard to fix that. I tried to have "that talk" a number of years back, and he put up a wall ten feet thick. For a moment I was twelve years old again. I'd driven 11 hours to see him, and wanted to pack up and leave that second, so I understand how powerful the past can be.

I had some awful stuff happen to me as a kid. I finished writing about it just last week. I told my story in the third person to get some distance from it. Felt great when I finished.

Mind you the stuff I'm talking about happened fourty years ago.

reph said:

Hi, Chelle. My opinion is that writing a book about one's difficult life isn't a very good way to deal with it. It won't make the pain go away. Books written for that reason don't do well at meeting the public's taste in reading matter, either. I think talking with a psychotherapist works much better for the purpose of healing. As you feel better, you'll become more able to write. Also learn as much about writing as you can, and practice. But start with small projects that are more comfortable to think about.

P.S.: There's a forum called Life Story Writing farther down the page.

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Ditto on the psychotherapist, I can honestly say my psychotherapist saved my life.

Mike Martyn said:

I had some awful stuff happen to me as a kid. I finished writing about it just last week. I told my story in the third person to get some distance from it. Felt great when I finished.

Mind you the stuff I'm talking about happened fourty years ago.

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That's the kind of distance I'm talking about. You have to let the anger and the hurt cool or else that's all that will come out, and that's not what you want in fiction you plan to market.

Fairytales can be very helpful in trying to envision your own life as a story. Try to look at your life from a more distant perspective: Once upon a time there was a little girl who... Also, keep in mind that in writing autobiography you need to pick a highpoint of your life to use as a climax. This will help you be able to see where you should start your story to build up to that climax.

Fairytales, I think, trivializes one's past. Maybe for some it works, for others it doesn't. For me it was a matter of becoming driven. I will succeed despite the setbacks and horror of my past and life before today. Bury it and move on. I nearly died in 1985, in a coma for 3 months, received a severe head injury that more than 90 percent of the time leaves the patient severely mentally retarded. So? I was not satisfied with only living. I didn't care what the obstacles were. My own father didn't even write me or call me during that time. So? Bury it and move on. I write stories with my past as being influential, but I don't write stories because of my past. I write stories because I love to write. Maybe someday I will write about my depressing past tragedy, but for now I will write fiction of hope, and the triumph of the human spirit.

That last part of the last sentence was powerful stuff, Chelle--a rule anybody could use to live their life on their own terms: "...if she can't accept who I am then she can't be in my life."

That can work for everybody.

LightShadow said:

Fairytales, I think, trivializes one's past. Maybe for some it works, for others it doesn't. For me it was a matter of becoming driven. I will succeed despite the setbacks and horror of my past and life before today. Bury it and move on. I nearly died in 1985, in a coma for 3 months, received a severe head injury that more than 90 percent of the time leaves the patient severely mentally retarded. So? I was not satisfied with only living. I didn't care what the obstacles were. My own father didn't even write me or call me during that time. So? Bury it and move on. I write stories with my past as being influential, but I don't write stories because of my past. I write stories because I love to write. Maybe someday I will write about my depressing past tragedy, but for now I will write fiction of hope, and the triumph of the human spirit.

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I'm pretty amazed you are as emotionally whole as you are considering what little you've shared of your story. It sounds like you've done something very important, not allowing your past to own you, and you've made plans for a future that sounds promising.

Honestly, fairytales have their purpose. An illustrator once brought up the idea of partnering in doing children's books for children in difficult circumstances. I still have her name and number, and when I get free time, I'll consider it. In a sense, it would be aimed at working out some of these issues from a child's point of view, which would take more wisdom than I have at the moment. However, the goal would be the same, in that you are taking the profound and breaking it down to the level of a child.

I love kids, but I've had more experience with this topic from an adolescent and adult perspective. You meet people who are forty, fifty, sixty, who are still in a loop of futility. It would seem wise to approach esteem-building, and cognative restructing from the earliest age. You can do that with someone who is forty and willing, but if you could stop the mayhem at an early age, you save people a world of pain. One reason is that "wounds" are half the battle. By the time someone is forty, if they are undisciplined, which is often the case, half the battle is telling them what would help. The other half is getting them to invest time and energy in what you suggest, because they've essentially built a kingdom full of coping mechanisms and structures which ultimately are self-defeating and need to be torn down, in order to be replaced with something that helps them.