Writing About Trauma: What We’ve Learned Since 2020

With a little help from our friends

Memoir, a subgenre of creative nonfiction, is often the home of stories of trauma. As I point out in my blog post Writing About Trauma: What Memoir Is and Isn’t, memoir has a bad reputation for being all about trauma. It’s an unfair assessment. Yet, as a memoir writing coach and editor, I do find that the majority of my clients want to write a memoir about emotional pain, loss, grief, addiction, disease, or toxic relationships.

My personal feelings are that people are more motivated to share the negative aspects of their lives (rather than the good times) because those are the experiences they have reflected on and learned from the most. This is true of my own life. I have spent much of the past three and a half years analyzing my failed second marriage. From that failure, from that disappointment and emotional pain, I have learned more about myself than at any other time in my life. I could not have become who I am now—someone I am happy with and proud of—if not for that experience. Maybe there’s a memoir in my own future.

Mass Trauma—It’s a Thing

I’m compelled to write a second time about addressing trauma because I have heard more and read more about trauma in the last two years than the previous twenty combined. And the reason? The pandemic. Globally, COVID has sickened more than 393 million and killed almost 6 million, as of this writing. No one in the world—literally no one—has remained unaffected by COVID’s impact. Subsequently, health experts on TV, radio, podcasts, social media, and in writing have been forced to discuss the worldwide fallout with terms like mass trauma, collective trauma, and traumatic stressor event.

Trauma, once most often the psychologically painful side effect for war veterans, survivors of domestic violence and rape, serious accidents, natural disasters, harassment, witnessing violence, and the like, has driven tens of millions of US citizens to seek mental health counseling and medication for the first time in their lives. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, was first added to the bible of mental health disorders, the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual), in 1980 primarily as a descriptor for the mental health challenges faced by military veterans, particularly those who served in the Middle East. My father served in World War II. He definitely suffered from PTSD, then referred to as combat fatigue or battle shock. Upon returning from Europe in 1945 at the end of the war, he received no treatment and no counseling. And he never fully recovered.

Trauma, whether we like it or not, has become a household word—a mental health problem that knows no boundaries among class or color or gender or ethnicity. However, as I stated at the beginning of this, the dark experiences of our lives tend to be the ones we reflect on and learn from the most.

Therapeutic Journaling Can Help

Have you been journaling during the past two years? I wrote about the mental health benefits of therapeutic journaling a while back. This practice became more popular than ever during the last two years. Have you documented the day-to-day challenges you faced on your own, or as a parent, employee, employer, or caregiver? What lessons from this unprecedented time in our history will we learn and share for our children and future generations to help them navigate the difficult challenges life throws at us?

What have you learned about yourself since early 2020? Is there a memoir about survival, creativity, or transformation in you? Let me know in a comment. And take care.

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.

Heal and Grow: The Power of Journaling

If you’ve ever visited my website, you have likely noticed that I am a volunteer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI. I mention it on my About page and I have written several blog articles about mental health-related topics that are posted on my Blog page, but which were originally posted on the websites for NAMI.org and Life At The Intersection, my friend Terri Lyon’s creative activism site.

Like millions of other families in this country, there is mental illness in mine—diagnosed depression and anxiety.

For those who are diagnosed with mental health disorders or syndromes, treatment most often comes in two forms: psychiatric medications and psychotherapy (one-on-one talk therapy and peer support groups).

So, why in a blog for my editing business am I taking you down this road? As an editor, blogger, and writer myself, I wondered how best to merge these two worlds—my advocacy for those with mental health disorders and my skill with words.

That quest inspired me to educate myself about journaling. I found that journaling comes in many flavors—gratitude, art, prayer, dream, travel, and so on. But with a focus on mental health, I’ve chosen these three styles to discuss: therapeutic, reflective, and expressive. Let me share what I’ve learned.

What Is Therapeutic Journaling?

Therapeutic journaling differs from traditional journal or diary writing, which involves recording the details of daily events. Instead, difficult life events and challenges are written about and discussed with a mental health practitioner for the purpose of working through pain and trauma and moving toward self-confidence and recovered mental health.

Therapeutic journaling allows you to come to a deeper understanding of yourself and gain a different perspective on these difficulties. By identifying patterns in thinking, you see your struggles in a new light, allowing you to break the patterns.

Note: Therapeutic journaling sits in the wheelhouse of trained therapists, psychologists, LCSWs, and clinical settings. The type of writing that is done is not dramatically different from expressive or reflective journaling. The distinguishing aspect is that the journal entries are read and analyzed as part of the writer’s mental health treatment.

In summary: Therapeutic journaling is about delving deeper into your life’s experiences to make sense of them, learn from them, and gain new perspectives on your challenges. Writing about your thoughts and emotions provides opportunities for healing and growth.

Expressive vs. Reflective Journaling

I found this description of these two journaling styles in a February 2014 article on a website for the Education Resource Group. It is meant as a classroom writing assignment:

Expressive writing is personal and shows your thoughts, ideas, and feelings about an experience. Reflective writing goes beyond just sharing an experience, requiring the author to look back at the past and apply what he or she has learned to the future.

For some, the distinction between expressive and reflective journaling might be a case of splitting hairs. Let’s see if I can bring the purpose of each into focus.

What is Expressive Journaling?

Expressive journaling was popularized by Dr. James Pennebaker of the University of Texas, Austin. According to Pennebaker in his book Expressive Writing: Words That Heal, expressive writing promotes physical, psychological, and behavioral health.

Expressive writing, explains Pennebaker, is not so much about what happened during your day but how you feel about what happened. By regularly documenting your emotional reactions to life events, you are able to identify problematic thinking patterns that might not be serving you well.

In summary: Expressive writing is not about what happened but how you feel about what happened. Okay, so what’s the difference between expressive writing and therapeutic writing? The primary difference is that expressive writing looks at your current daily life, while therapeutic writing focuses on memories of past trauma or injury and how they detrimentally affect your thinking now.

What is Reflective Journaling?

Reflective journaling is the process of writing down your daily reflections (hence the name) about something positive or negative that happened to you. By thinking back on the day’s events, reflective journaling lets you put into words what you have learned from your experiences.

In summary: A reflective journal encourages you to think about all you experienced in the course of your day and decide what learnings you can come away with. It’s a reflection on your behavior and the behavior of others in relation to you. Whether an experience was good or bad, there are lessons to be learned.

Tips for Journal Writing

Regardless of which type of journaling you choose, follow these guidelines to get the most from the practice:

• Choose a quiet, private place with no distractions.

• Write at the same time or as close to the same time as possible each day you journal.

• Write daily if possible or, at least, several times during the week. The more often you journal, the better you will become at it and the clearer a picture you will get of yourself.

• Use whatever writing medium appeals to you: a pencil or pen that feels good in your hand, a special notebook or journal that is yours solely for the purpose of your regular writing practice, a laptop or desktop if you’re firmly rooted in technology. The choice is yours. The medium does not matter, just the practice.

• Write quickly and don’t stop to edit or correct. Don’t over-think it. Just let the words spill out.

Pitfalls of Journaling

At the risk of sounding like a silly fuddy-duddy, journaling can have its downsides. Here are a few behaviors to be on the alert for.

• Journaling can dredge up all kinds of emotions and might cause an outpouring of negative feelings and memories. It should never drive someone to a place of despair. Sharing your journals with a mental health practitioner, a journal writing group, or even just friends can keep you balanced and keep your memories and feelings in perspective.

• Don’t write excessively, to the exclusion of other activities. Journaling should add insight and growth to your life, not rob you of other life experiences.

• Over-analyzing your journal entries will not lead to improving your life. You can analyze your words to death. Read your entries a day or more after you’ve written them with an eye toward planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Journaling is meant to be a complement to your life’s activities.

Benefits of Journaling

Journalist and therapist Kara Mayer Robinson, in an article for WebMD, summarized the many reasons that journaling is beneficial. Journaling…

• Promotes self-awareness. You will get to know yourself better.

• Lets you take charge of your emotions and worries. See them. Name them. Take control of them.

• Shifts your viewpoint about yourself and those around you. You will gain a broader perspective.

• Creates a positive opportunity for healing and recovering self-worth. Whether you write in a journal about problems or gratitude, a healing process happens.

Your Comments and Stories, Please

I welcome comments about my descriptions of these journal writing styles and the usefulness of one form of journaling over the other. If journaling in any form has improved your life, I’d love to hear about it.

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.

With Creative Nonfiction, Reality Meets Great Storytelling

Creative Nonfiction

Recently, I was giving my PowerPoint presentation on memoir writing to a small audience of residents at a retirement community. When I said that memoir is a form of creative nonfiction, gentle laughter trickled around the room. “What?” I said. “Creative nonfiction? Does that sound weird?” Some thought I’d made up the term. One woman said what the others were thinking—creative nonfiction sounds like an oxymoron. How can writing be creative and nonfiction simultaneously?

Poor misunderstood creative nonfiction. Let’s explore this genre further.

Creative + Nonfiction

Everyone knows the distinction between the two major categories of writing: fiction and nonfiction. In regard to writing, creative typically means that people, places, and events in the prose have been invented. Therefore, fiction comprises imaginary events and imaginary people in an invented story. Creative writing requires using one’s imagination to craft every aspect of the story and its characters.

Nonfiction is writing based on facts, real events, and real people. Nonfiction itself has two main categories: informative nonfiction and literary nonfiction. When most people think of nonfiction, they think of informative nonfiction books or articles: self-help, how-to, academic, scientific, technical, and more. Creative nonfiction is literary nonfiction.

What do you get when you merge the mechanics of creative writing with factuality of literary nonfiction? Creative nonfiction, or CNF. Here are a few of the CNF categories:

• Personal essays

• Memoir

• Journals and diaries

• Literary journalism

• Lyric essays

• Nature, city, and travel writing

In its simplest terms, CNF involves the application of the elements of creative writing—plot, conflict and resolution, character development, setting, voice, dialogue, and point of view—with the telling of true events featuring real people and places.

Personal Essay

The two most closely related of these CNF categories are the personal essay and memoir.

Personal essays are usually written in the first person, as are memoir. But the focus of a personal essay is a topic (or subject) pertinent to the author and, unlike memoir, that topic is current or recent. The subject matter of a personal essay is typically a single contemporary issue as opposed to the recounting of a life event or series of related events that constitutes a memoir.

Memoir

This category of CNF is often referred to interchangeably with autobiography. Memoir and autobiography are not the same. The simplest distinction I can offer is this:

An autobiography is the story of a life.

A memoir is a story from a life.

Autobiographies explore the details of a person’s life in chronological order. You would read an autobiography to learn about the person. Autobiography is not a form of creative nonfiction.

Memoir, while a story from a person’s life, is constructed in the same way fictional prose is. But the plot (or story) is factual, the main character is the author, the other characters are real people from the author’s life, as is the setting (the locations where the story take place). The purpose of a memoir is to reveal what a person has learned after what they have been through.

With a personal essay and a memoir, the author’s challenges, struggles, and failures are laid bare. It’s one thing to create a fictional character who makes mistakes and suffers pain and loss. But with these two forms of CNF, the author must have the courage to expose their good and bad times.

Literary Journalism

While journalism is about being objective and factual, literary journalism takes the position that people cannot be objective because anything they have seen, heard, or experienced has been changed through their personal, subjective filters. For this reason, literary journalism uses the techniques of journalism (observation, interviews, and reviews) to look beyond the straightforward facts to probe meaning outside of the facts.

Lyric Essay

The lyric essay is much like the personal essay; it deals with a topic that has affected the author. As the word lyrical means musical, melodic, or poetic, this type of writing relies heavily on descriptive imagery to tell the story.

Other Categories

Journals and diaries are written to document the day-to-day events of a person’s life. But, as you know if you have kept a journal or diary, feelings are a vital component of these, and observation and reflection are welcomed.

Nature, city, and travel writing are popular forms of CNF. Again, the author describes the facts of the environment, but must make the reader share the experience of the places. Reality mingles with subjectivity and the result entertains and informs.

Merging Boundaries

What distinguishes a piece as creative nonfiction is writing that merges the real (the facts) with the mechanics of storytelling; real people, places, and events told in the style of fiction, employing character development, setting, voice, and tone.

If the author writes a piece of CNF, which deals with something and someone real, they have the freedom to take the storytelling in any direction they please.

CNF as a Career

Have you written creative nonfiction? Are you hoping to be published as an author of one of these CNF categories? Personally, I specialize is memoir, teaching memoir writing to residents of senior living communities. Please share your experiences with me.

Till next time. keep it creatively real. #creativenonfiction #personalessay #memoir

In addition to my business, Strike The Write Tone, I am an editor, book coach, and ghostwriter for The Cheerful Word, a memoir publisher in Hendersonville, North Carolina.