From Trauma to Writing: A Theoretical Model for Practical Use

Why do some writing professors advocate personal essay as a course and others don’t? Why do students choose to write about traumatic events? What’s the evidence that proves personal essay is healing and therapeutic? 

These questions and more are discussed in MacCurdy’s piece, From Trauma to Writing. She begins by looking into the brain and what happens when we experience a traumatic event. Everything that happens during that traumatic moment skims the surface of our conscious, verbal state and goes strait to our sensory center. This explains why such events are so vivid in out minds. That’s why students often write about it—because it’s easily accessible. You can be as vivid and descriptive in your writing at possible. Writing it all out thus helps with healing, making the internal external. Linking memory to images, images to word, and words to emotion. 

I remember I had an assignment in my personal essay class where we had to write about some sort of life-changing/traumatic event. I wrote about how I almost drowned as a kid. I was only six, but I can picture it like it was literally yesterday. 

MacCurdy gives tons of evidence why we remember these terrible experiences, using research studies as well as her own personal observation with student’s writing and reactions to personal essay assignments. A lot of her students found it difficult to retrieve such details. Some make there experience a cliché by labeling their experience rather than getting to the root of the story. It’s even been mention how writer’s often resist such deep, specific description because they feel uncomfortable re-living the trauma. It’s true when they say, the devil’s in the detail. But once you successfully verbalize the imagery, student’s can delve deeper and “form order from chaos.”

Personal essay, unifies the pain and isolation caused by trauma, thus bringing student’s together, but also stressing their individuality. I think college isn’t just an institution aimed to land students a job, it’s also an environment where students learn to detach themselves from the comforts of home and learn what it means to be an individual, independent human being and surviving in the world. Personal essay fuels a basic human understanding that we all have pain—life isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. 

A lot of healing comes from sensory detail. But what if, for some reason, you just can’t remember some key details. Do you guess to the best of your ability and lie? Do you think healing is still possible in this case? Or does it mean that the absence of a particular scene or image mean something more? Like the example of the student who loved her grandmother but couldn’t remember much detail and realized she never really had a relationship with her.