Story As Therapy - Healing The Wound

'Write to save yourself and someday you'll write because you've been saved.'

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Whilst working on my recently completed PhD I began to explore the origins and purpose of story. I say, 'began', because the more research I did, the more I realised that this is a never ending exploration. My interest was initially sparked by my own experience as a storyteller, but also by the realisation that many of my creative writing students were finding some sort of therapy through their own storytelling, some drawn to it consciously, others unconscious of the motivations but surprised by the results. Surprisingly, this occurred not just in writing memoir but also in fiction writing, something which I have come to believe is often autobiographical in theme, if not in plot and character. With this in mind I began exploring the link between creativity and healing, and more specifically the therapeutic functions of writing and of story.

For a time I became particularly fascinated with our first recorded storytellers, the shamans. Playing the role of priest, healer and story teller, the first shamans were responsible for the health of the mind, the body and the spirit of their people; interconnected roles which in today's society have been separated. As psychologist, Jean Achterberg wrote, 'in traditional shamanic cultures, healing bears little relationship to the remission of physical symptoms. It refers rather to becoming whole or in harmony with the community, the planet and one's private circumstances'. Rather than treating the symptoms they search for and treat, the cause. To do this shamans journey into 'other' worlds, returning with stories to tell their patients in order to help them realign with the forces of the universe.

The Navajo Indians and the Tibetans use intricate sand drawings as part of their healing ceremonies, the patient symbolically entering the story by sitting inside the drawing. Prophets such as Jesus and Buddha told parables to help rebalance peoples' lives. Even the traditional Catholic confessional can be seen as a space in which a person is able to tell their story, in the process relieving themselves of its burden. Today there are a plethora of narrative based therapies that encourage the patient to uncover their own stories, the therapists aware that within the stories or 'wounds', lie the clues to their patient's health. As psychologist, Bill Plotkin wrote in Soulcraft, Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, the patient must 'find one inner place in particular that is immensely and uniquely painful. This place harbors an early psychological wound, a trauma so significant she formed her primary survival strategies of childhood in reaction to it, so hurtful that much of her personal style and sensitivities have their roots there'. In order for healing to begin, the stories behind these wounds must be uncovered, acknowledged and then released.

From my own experience of writing, I knew the power of the imagination to step beyond the boundaries of the physical world in order to heal or simply give meaning to life, so it was a natural step to begin exploring the parallels between the writing journey and the shamanic journey. In Writing as a Sacred Path, Jill Jepson argues that 'writers, like shamans have a special connection with the world. They view reality through the lenses of imagination, intuition, dream and myth'. This is a connection I recognise, not only in relation to the process of writing but to the 'call' that makes writing essential for survival, because, as Kafka once put it so succinctly, 'a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness'. In shamanism, too, any shaman who resists the call will die, for according to anthropologist, Mercea Eliade, 'a shaman's vocation is obligatory; one cannot refuse it'. The call involves a descent into sickness and the only way to heal is to accept it, for the shaman is 'above all a sick man who has succeeded in curing himself'.

Retrieving lost or stolen fragments of souls is an important aspect of shamanic work and is a large part of Fern's journey in Flight. In the beginning of the story she is paradoxically, at once too light and too heavy. The heaviness is due to the amount of guilt, fear, grief and anger that Fern is holding, while the lightness is caused by that fact that much of herself is missing. She has left parts behind, possibly in other places, other times, other dimensions even. And other parts have been stolen. Fern must acknowledge and release the guilt, fear, grief and anger, whilst following the threads and reclaiming each missing part, in order to become whole once again.

Fern's journey also, in a sense, mirrors the process of initiation that a shaman must undertake before he or she is qualified to heal others. When the story opens Fern is suffering from a sickness of spirit that will be fatal if she doesn't address it. As the story progresses, Fern moves (sometimes willingly and sometimes reluctantly), from ill health to vitality or fragmentation to wholeness. Gradually she becomes her own healer and in the end she will become a healer of others. A shaman of sorts.

As writers and readers, as tellers of stories generally, perhaps one of those hidden rewards that stories provide us with, is a way to frame and comprehend the journeys we take within ourselves to uncover the stories we didn't know were there and to bring them out into the light. As with my earlier novels, the writing of Flight represented a stage in my own evolution as a person and a writer. It wasn't easy to write and in the process I had to explore some of the darkest corners of my psyche. But it was essential that I write it. There are different ways in which Flight can be read: as an adventure story, as a psychological story, and as a journey of the soul. The challenge has been to write a story that is true to myself and yet will satisfy the reader in each of these readings.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/

Who Do We Write For?

'What I represent every time I set out to achieve something, is myself.'

Maya Angelou

In previous posts I've pondered on why we write and what our responsibilities are as writers. Now I want to explore who it is we write for, something which is clearly linked with our reasons for writing. Often when we do a creative writing class we are asked to consider who we write for, an exercise I have always struggled with but one that is nevertheless useful. An acquaintance of mine who is a non fiction writer friend says he can only find the right tone and style for a particular book by choosing a person he is writing for and imagining it as a conversation. However, in most cases we are less specific, perhaps writing for women, or children, young adults, or readers of a particular genre.

Asking ourselves who we write for can help us to usefully consider our market and perhaps choose a genre in which to write, if that suits our need. We may then have to adapt our style to that readership, in the process considering our use of language and the concepts we wish to explore. Even more importantly though (to me anyway), is that asking who we write for helps us to identify what is limiting us as writers. If we write for our critics then we will be writing to please. If we write for our mothers then most likely we will be leaving out much that we need to explore, or conversely we might be writing simply to shock. If we write only for our publishers then we run the risk of losing our voice and purpose. Writing for a specific genre too, runs the risk of boxing us into a category that we can subsequently find it difficult to escape from. We might become boxed into a genre, a style, even a theme and one day find ourselves with nothing left to say because we are no longer growing. Paradoxically though, we may instead find that the limitations of a particular genre give us more freedom to explore, allowing our imaginations to work within the relative safety of its boundaries. And of course, if we love a particular genre then it follows that we will enjoy working within it to create our own stories.

I would like to say that I write for myself, that I follow my heart. And in a sense I do, because I write what I feel needs saying. I don't imagine a reader; if I did I would find myself tongue tied. I don't imagine a story because I expect it to unfold as I write. I don't even imagine a genre because I'm not sure I could stay within its boundaries. However, even when we write for ourselves our perspective is limited, by our ideology, our history, our culture, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. . . In the end, perhaps all we can do is as Aldous Huxley suggested when he wrote: 'Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always at bottom, to be more themselves.'

Considering who we are writing for can also help us to explore further the reasons we write at all. I had to write Flight. It was a deep need that demanded resolution. It was also a responsibility – to tell a story I felt needed telling. In its writing I tried not to think of readers or publishers, and instead concentrated on uncovering the story I had to tell. Because Flight is my story and I had to live much of it. It is difficult to say how much of the novel is true in the factual sense of the word. Like Fern, I was born in Adelaide and adopted by a religious couple. There are, however other true events in the story that are not so easily identified as fact. Describing how she writes, Isabel Allende said, 'in the slow silent process of writing I enter a different state of consciousness in which sometimes I can draw back a veil and see the invisible. The writing of Flight was just this, a stepping through the veils and a drawing together of my own numinous experiences. I wrote down the visions that came to me unexpectedly, the glimpses of a past beyond the boundaries of my own life and the dreams which spoke to me symbolically. And in the process something coherent formed from them in the shape of a story and one that refers back to a long tradition of storytelling that explores the journey of the soul and our initiations into the mysteries of life.

The themes in Flight are broad but the novel was written for me, to help me understand the threads of my life and to make sense of all that was happening to me. It was also written for anyone who has suffered a loss of meaning in their lives, anyone who is questioning the limitations of the physical world and who is courageous enough to take the journey to self. It is my way of reaching out to others and sharing something I feel is important. So far the novel has been called a work of literature, a commercial thriller, a young adult novel, a fantasy novel, a romance, a spiritual novel and a memoir. I sincerely hope it embraces all of these categories while defying the limitations of any one of them.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Rosie Dub. All rights reserved. You may translate, link to or quote this article, in its entirety, as long as you include the author name and a working link back to this website:http://writeonthefringes.blogspot.co.uk/