PART ONE - Trauma, Writing, and Healing
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| Ernest Hemingway |
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| Kurt Cobain |
My mom is a therapist, and she believes that the most talented of artists are tortured souls: Kurt Cobain, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, and Vincent Van Gogh, just to name a few. I never really knew what she meant by that; it was just another psycho-analytical tidbit she’d bring up in conversation (and she had/has a lot of them). At the time, I didn’t fully understand the concept of a tortured soul, because I never witnessed or experienced trauma firsthand. The only intense pain or distress I’ve gone through was getting my braces. Eventually, I experienced trauma through other mediums—survivor movies, news reports on 9/11, recounts of the Holocaust like Elie Wiesel’s Night. By now, I have a pretty good idea what it’s like to have your soul tortured. Whatever happened to that soul, whether it was abuse, death, or war, is beyond my perception, but watching and reading about it definitely helped me gain a new perspective.
(NOTE: If you really want those mirror neurons to fire, then I suggest you watch Angelia Jolie’s Unbroken.)
I’ve never experience traumas listed in the book. I was never abused, witnessed a murder, or any sort life-changing occurrence like that. I can write to heal minor trauma’s like my grandfather’s death or the loss of a once close friend. So I guess I’ll let this little paragraph serve as a warning that I’ll write this from an outsider’s perspective, not a victim’s.
There is so much to say about this introduction, so many different angles to write about and discuss. I wish I could cover it all! But, let’s face it, that would take up a lot of my time and yours, so I’ll just cut to the chase and make both our lives a little easier.
Anderson and MacCurdy bring up the term “culture consciousness,” (pp. 2) and I like to think that as a cultural support group of sorts. If we weren’t “conscious” of innocent teenage rapes, or white cops shooting black teenagers, then no one would ever put the energy into helping, let alone understanding, the cause. According to the text, those who suffer from PTSD feel like they have to stay silent, because “they fear that others will be broken” (pp.4). Just before the official PTSD diagnosis, Vietnam veterans, as well as those of previous wars, came back home to “a culture that could not or would not understand or accept them…” (pp. 3). Wow, just image. No one there to feed off your suffering and give you a consoling bear hug.
One of the many interesting points I got out if this text was that you can’t recover from trauma by yourself. It’s down right impossible. Humans are social creatures and if we can’t emit a little of our pain to others then of course we’ll feel empty. Ergo, tortured soul. Ergo, why we need therapists (thanks mom). But! “Silence is easier than confrontation,” Anderson and MacCurdy explain.
(NOTE: From now on, I’ll make life even more easier for us and refer to the authors of this book as And and Mac…or Mac and And…or Mac and Cheese.)
It takes less energy to mope and grieve and suffer internally than it is to just come and say it. Which is why writing is such an almighty way to heal. The only person you have to confront, is yourself (or if you want to get literal, your brain—specifically the hippocampus).
Eventually, And and Mac mention, “re-externalizing the event,” (pp. 6) a term coined by a clinical professor at Yale. In short, it means to transfer your trauma from brain to pencil to paper (or from brain to mouth). Just get it out in the open. Isn’t that what writing is all about?
When you’re alone, you’re the only person who can comfort you. As Mac and Cheese put it, to heal is a “change from a singular self, frozen in time by a moment of unspeakable experience, to a more fluid, more narratively able, more socially integrated self.” (pp. 7) We can’t control the past, but we can write about it. Writing, in a sense, is a way to control the mind (wow, I’ve never thought of it that way).
But you know what really boggles my mind? The fact that Freud wasn’t mentioned sooner! It took And and Mac nine whole pages to praise his “seduction theory,” a notion that the origin of women’s psychotic breakdowns (hysterics) was from sexual abuse (pp. 9). He was just so ahead of his time that he couldn’t convince his colleagues, let alone himself, that there was so much abuse in their world.
And this brings me back to my take on trauma: our world is a bag of shit. Some of us are so clueless. We like to stay comfortable in our “normal,” honky-dory lives, where everything is made of cashmere, and smells like Play-Doh.
Ignorance is bliss.
BUT!
Ignorance is also isolating. I think it’s SO important that we read about traumatic events whether it’s in the first or second person. We’re not only helping someone recover, but we’re also connecting as a human race. Mac and Cheese preach it themselves, “we are all survivors” (pp.5)
PART TWO - The Struggle for the Self
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| Sigmund Freud |
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| Aristotle |
Who knew that writing about yourself and your troubles was tabooed way back when. It was considered “dangerous,” it soiled our innocent little minds of the ideal world. That’s why I’m so grateful for all those dudes who thought, “Our world isn’t perfect, let’s examine it’s flaws and analyze, maybe even fix, all the stuff that people don’t even want to think about.”
So let me take a moment to thank Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Ben Franklin, Freud…you get the idea.
Kathleen Pfeiffer and David Bartholomae both agree that writing from a personal standpoint is down right catastrophic. It’s like they think students writing about their parents divorce would end the world.
Boy…people need to learn to CHILL OUT.
I took a class last semester called Queer France, and we it pretty much speaks for itself. We read and studied gay literature and personal essays (in French, of course). But it was interesting to think that the first book published about a gay character was in 1902. It’s called L’ immoralist if you ever want to read it. The author was most likely gay, but he had to make his novel fiction so he wasn’t shunned from society. So there’s a good example for ya. Imagine for all those years, being secretly gay and not even being able to express or write about it. They had to live with their “condition” in absolute silence.
Thankfully the human race evolves in ideas and learns to accept change (albeit at snail pace, but at least we make an effort).
And and Mac say that, “students’ public and private lives are inextricably connected,” (pp.13) and I take that to mean that we all share similar life experiences, good and bad. If we get to share that in the classroom and discuss it, I’m sure it has a resounding effect. I’ve learned in some of my past writing classes that other students, even professors, have had a grandparent with Alzheimer’s. Knowing that kind of made me feel less alone. There’s someone else out there feeling the same exact way you way, well, maybe not exact, we’re all unique snowflakes, aren’t we?
Mac and And write that “teachers find themselves more and more alienated from students who seem less and less attentive and more resistant to the increasingly abstract benefits of academic literacy…” (pp. 13). That reminds me of english class, having to compare Romeo and Juliet to Wuthering Heights. Or writing about the significance of that stupid green light in The Great Gatsby. It’s assignments like those that made me dread literature. Finding the themes, motifs, and symbols was so arbitrary to my appreciation of the text. I’d much rather relate The Catcher in the Rye to my personal life.
Side story: I’m an avid reader (or was, it’s hard to be a book worm in college). When I read classics for my own enjoyment, I got more out the book than I ever would in an english class, because I didn’t look for the underlying message or theme, I just read as person looking in and relating to the characters.
“Write what you know,” is something almost every writing professor has told me. If you write from personal experience, the text is more convincing and tangible (even with fiction!). And and Mac say that “the public and the private are essential components of the professional text.” (pp.14). So why don’t we read biographies and non-fiction novels in english class then? I think real life is more compelling than fictional, but I guess that has to do with past school administrations thinking personal texts were dangerous for students. Maybe I’ll write Obama a letter asking him to change the schooling system from reading classic fiction to classic non-fiction. Oooo, that would be awesome!
Whenever I read something from the first person, I’m in the author’s (or character’s) shoes. And I think it’s nice, therapeutic even, when you can find a bit of yourself in someone else, real or not.
I took an autobiography class last semester, and it was probably the milestone of all writing classes I’ve taken here at IC. I basically looked and analyzed my life, like I would a boing old piece of literature from high school. But it had more of an impact on me because it was MY life.
And that point can help me segue to…
PART THREE - Shape and Substance of Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice
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| A Child Called "It" by Dave Pelzer |
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| Night by Elie Wiesel |
Here, Mac and And start to talk about the contents and essays of this book. And I know I’m not ever going to be teacher, but I think it’s a good life skill to be able to meditate on your thoughts in the form of the written word.
They say that teachers “discover that ‘diaries’ help students become stronger, more engaged readers and that they help students explore subjects that are of real and lasting importance to their lives.” (pp. 18)
BINGO! So Obama better get to work and turn english class into biography class. I bet it would make bullying decrease tenfold.
Anything in this post is fair game for discussion in class on Tuesday. But here are some points I think might be cool to talk about:
Films and books about trauma: are they just as healing as writing about it? How do you connect with them? How do they make you feel? What book/movie about a traumatic was most moving and emotional for you?
Should the english curriculum in high schools include biographies/autobiographies? For example, Night by Elie Wiesel. Would students inadvertently “heal” on their own just by reading about another’s suffering?
Is it more fun/enjoyable to right about yourself or someone else? If you’ve ever written about a traumatic experience, how did you feel before, during, and after writing it? Did you ever have a diary?
