Is writing about trauma bad? (and the delicate balance between too much and not enough)
I was having a conversation with my therapist this week, and it made me think about the role of writing in healing my trauma. If you’ve subscribed to my blog, you obviously know I wrote a whole eBook about it. But let’s talk about it a bit differently than my last post about writing through the slumps. Let’s talk about writing trauma.
Photo from Unsplash.
“The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.’”
I have rough weeks, and then I have rough weeks. I, on occasion, have a good week! This was not a good week.
Something I found interesting, though, is that despite this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week, I didn’t write anything related to these bad feelings.
For those of you who still read this meandering blog, I’m still writing poems every day! I’ve kept on schedule so far through the year, which is a miracle, and for the first time, I would say my poems didn’t really match my feelings. They were more intellectual. They were more about what I was thinking rather than what I was feeling.
That’s neither here nor there in terms of quality, but it made me wonder about the healing journey for me.
“You can make any poem about your mother,” my boyfriend, Sandy, says. He says it frequently enough where I feel comfortable making that quote in the present tense. “I was looking out the window,” he mocks, “and the shifting clouds made me think of the time my mother…”
And what’s worse, it’s true! Admittedly, I wrote a poem about candle wax today, and I somehow managed to relate it back to my father. Wild. Insane. I don’t get it.
What I do get is that writing has been a coping mechanism for me since I was six years old. Maybe I was too young then to understand, but it was an escape. Same with reading. Same with playing the piano. It was a place where I consistently received praise, where I felt safe, and where I was able to put my troubles or pain in perspective. More than that, I could imagine a life away from a house I, as my mother put it, “couldn’t wait to leave.”
And writing about what has happened to me and how I feel about it has been helpful in coming to terms with the realization that what I experienced to an extent was abusive. But at what point does writing about it become more hurtful than helpful? My life is more than the trauma I’ve experienced. And my interests and talents go beyond that as well. So yes, writing about trauma is helpful in understanding and healing and coping. But there’s a delicate balance, and one that I’m still trying to figure out myself - because in the effort to heal, I don’t want to hurt myself further.
Cool! Here’s a poem I wrote maybe last week? I dunno, time is weird right now. And be sure to let me know your thoughts if you’ve made it this far, and to subscribe to my blog!
When to get rid of poetry
They don’t fit anymore/they don’t sound like me anymore/it hurts too much to keep reading, to keep writing, to come up with beautiful analogies, or metaphors, or a string of things when I just want to say/I’m hurting/please help me I’m hurting/and would anyone come if I called?/There’s no saying if there’s an end to this poem/because I would get rid of poetry every day if I could/I would sell them for pennies in a front yard I don’t have yet/I would donate them to the trash bin in the basement of my building/I would tape them on my neighbors’ doors so they know a taste of the pain happening on the other side of their walls/& these poems don’t fit anymore./It only makes sense to give them away.
