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Therapeutic writing
Is not it cynical to tell someone who has suffered a trauma, just write? On the contrary, famous writers have just begun writing for traumatic experiences, and for many, this was the only way to deal with terrible experiences. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, for example, also reflects the author's experience in the mass murders of the First World War.
contents
- Creative writing
- Therapeutic writing
- Writing in therapy
- Writing and dreaming
- Dreams as predictions
- The dream diary
- Writer with mood disorders
- The diary
- Brain Train
- The writer's block
- self-discipline
- The sensitivity
- Ways out of the paralysis
- Literature:
"How long has it been since you wrote a story in which you wrote down your true love or unrestrained hate? When did you last dared to let out a cherished prejudice so that it struck Lightning to her side? What is the best or the worst in your life, and when are you ready to whisper or shout it out? " (Ray Bradbury)
Free the soul: Therapeutic writing helps to process traumatic experiences. Picture: Nursing - Fotolia Writing helps to express feelings, especially unconscious, repressed or embarrassing. But the feelings can not only be expressed in this way, but also be brought into a form and, at the next step, made willful.
Because of this, writing is so important in therapies because the view narrows in psychological crises: all doors seem to be closed, everything beautiful falls out of perception, the world shows gray in gray. Writing is often the first way to break out of the inner prison, to widen the gaze, and yet not to be at the mercy of fears and psychological injuries.
The therapist initially plays the role of the gentle guide. Unresolved questions often trigger a writer's block, mentally troubled ones fall into fear of writing down words and thoughts with taboos, people in crisis are afraid of their inner images, which oppress them; Frozen feelings only break open piecemeal, and a mental chaos confuses the client when writing.
First, the therapist takes the client's fear of failure. Writing as a cure is not meant to win the Nobel Prize, but to clarify the chaos of the psyche.
Creative writing
Creative Writing is originally from the USA and is an integral part of every university. In Germany, this free writing first met with a rejection, since it was precisely the solid structure of the literary genres that represented the writer's tools. Only in the wake of the reform processes after 1968 did creative writing enter into pedagogy. In the US, it was professional writers who developed it, while in Germany it was primarily intended for personal development.
Creative writing techniques have existed since ancient times. Dadaism, surrealism and modern art discovered the play with language and the real or supposed nonsense as a form of expression.
Creative writing involves techniques that get the flow of thought going. This includes writing without inner scissors, so write down what I can think of without thinking about the final product. This process is difficult to separate from the so-called brainstorming, the writing in connection with other activities such as dancing or painting or observations. The goal is not to have a fixed goal, but to engage in writing.
This creative writing serves different purposes. The first and perhaps most important is to have fun. That sounds banal, but is also a main motive for professional writers. For example, Ray Bradbury, the author of Slaughterhouse 5, said the fun of writing was the basis of writing.
What sounds banal can drive recovery for those suffering from severe mental health problems: they have just lost their fun.
Creative writing can develop into an important therapeutic process: the person concerned writes himself from the soul, what is raging in him and deals with his problems fantastic. Nobody slows him down: He does not hurt his rage, his grief, or his hate, and constructively stages situations he suffers from. He gets to know himself better at the same time.
Often the victims sit in front of what they have written and think: "Wow, that was really me?" Experiences and experiences process them so in the writing, because to make language is an essential moment of the human being.
Regular writing brings the own unconscious into consciousness. Which topics, which problems do I encounter, which keywords do I think? Anyone who writes is active and at the same time can observe his activity from a distance. The inner writer becomes the observing self.
Therapeutic writing
Writing by serious trauma and mental illness should be accompanied by a trained writing therapist. But if the writer does not suffer from trauma, sexual abuse, etc., that is unnecessary.
Creative writing is important for anyone who works professionally with language: making business letters livelier and better communicating with other people. The more I write creatively, the more creative I become.
Writing can bring me out of a deep black hole. Because, if I think it can not go on, I can write about it exactly; and then it goes on, first on the paper and later in life. I can only capture the thoughts in these bad moods, they are part of my life, and if I feel better they may become an exciting story.
Creative writing runs without judgment. When I publish an article, a novel or the protocol of the volunteer fire department meeting, I structure the text.
But creative writing is not about it. That's why I do not need any prior knowledge in creative writing. The only thing that counts is curiosity.
Playfully, I get to know aspects of myself that were buried deep in the unconscious. Especially when I'm dissatisfied, positive imagios of what I could be, and, by writing it down, become more and more of them.
Writing also helps in therapy to master supposedly hopeless situations by offering unconventional solutions. When writing something always own, so something completely different than I planned before. In this process, the writer changes, usually without even noticing it at first.
First of all, and especially for psychologically deeply hurt people, in a fictive story I can allow all my hatred, anger and grief, and fully live it out, even and just do not express all that I learned, not express it to be allowed.
Writing in therapy
Writing is a therapy to express yourself. In therapeutic writing, the text remains as a product, which firstly activates the self-esteem of the person concerned and, secondly, enables next steps in healing.
Writing focuses on the person concerned. Even with creative writing, the client sees his thoughts in black and white, so he can not avoid it. The writing thus provides a framework and a structure and only by this help, when there is chaos in the emotional life. In addition, texts provide protection: Between the patient and the outside world, and between the patient and the therapist is the paper or laptop.
Writing alone, regardless of content, sets in motion both a creative and a structured process: expression follows the reflection of what has been expressed, and this process can also be constantly evolved as if starting anew.
The inner pictures come to light through the words. Just because the person concerned brings his unconscious mind to terms, he sums it up and starts to work with it.
First of all, the writer goes into his unconscious by identifying himself with the writing, but secondly he goes out again: reading his own text, he sees his inner pictures from a distance.
Writing and dreaming
Creative writing and dreams overlap, because both are the language of the unconscious and thus of our patterns of life.
Many religious cultures have dreams of revelations of other realities, future predictions, and prophecies. This is not entirely true, nor is it entirely wrong: dream images do not designate an external, scientific reality, but an inner, a subjective reality. They are symbols, symbols, and in this sense they show mental processes and dangers. Literature also consists of such symbols.
For example, dreams of death rarely herald a real death.
Although this is also possible and proven again and again, death in the dream is usually a transference: whether it is that our feelings die for another person, whether it is to let an aspect of ourselves die because we neglected it it is that a friendship diverge.
Killing in the dream also does not necessarily mean that the dreaming becomes a murderer, but is an expression of our anger about someone. Dreams of suicide can show that we are unhappy, feel lonely, in a dead end in our lives, and can seriously warn us.
Our own death is the most important picture of death because it shows the death of an old and outdated self-image and the need to evolve to a higher state of consciousness. In particular, dreams are widespread in which someone watches his own death, his own funeral.
The direction in which development is possible is indicated in the details of the dream images: An execution can, for example, show that others do not like their own development, that other people are compelled to suffer. Or it may indicate which social environment has to be abandoned. For example, if a dreamer dies in the village he comes from while studying in a distant city, the dream language is simple. The old self no longer exists, and in the new phase of life there are other tasks - man is no longer the old, whether he likes it or not.
Dreams of meetings with people who are already dead do not indicate a true survival of the souls of these dead, but explain the belief in a life after death. Because in the dream, these "ghosts" really appear. Rather, these deceased are for something important, whether it was with the deceased grandmother open questions, whether we reconcile with a deceased symbolically in a dream.
Only a few death dreams are actually warnings of dangers in the outside world. Even mothers who dream that their children are drowning in a lake or run over by a car, for example, usually have a psychological reason. Be it the fear that the mother does not correspond to her own ideal of the parents or are it hidden tensions between mother and child.
Dreams as predictions
Dreams work much like fairytales. Many fairytales could appear in a dream in almost unchanged form. The idea that dreams predict the future is ancient. The ability of the soul to overcome the laws of science, time and logic, promotes the desire to use these unrecognized knowledge possibilities.
The research on so-called dream-dreams, that is, the reading of thoughts in dreams, the seeing of future events in dreams, has not really progressed in the last decades. There is agreement that dreams are usually based on clues that we have absorbed in the unconscious during the day and are processed at night "with the wisdom of the heart" and without the controlling authority of critical thinking.
Dreams usually do not come true, they are symbolic: when thousands of dreams occur when friends die or people are killed in a car accident, there comes one in which this really happens in a dream. Much more common is the psychic reality: a dream in which the lover flies away and two weeks later he tells that he moves to another city and the relationship ends, unconscious hints. The question was probably already in the room, without that we wanted to admit that.
Ann Faraday calls dreams the "guard dogs of the psyche," who are constantly on the lookout for signs that escape the mind. Only the dreams make us aware of these hidden feelings and problems.
Dreams are always "true" because they reflect the dreamer's life, problems, feelings and life issues. So, whether there are paranormal dreams, dreams that describe outer realities, can only be judged when we are very familiar with this "language of the heart" and can separate these different levels. This was in cultures that dreams anyway as a sign of Ghosts, gods, or higher prophecies, not the case.
Most of the alleged predictions are in this very field of tension: in hindsight, we often imagine that we have just dreamed something that happened, and even "clairvoyants" simply refer their influence to others to such claims.
Many dreams are so broad in their testimony that, like astrology, they always seem to arrive: If I'm dreaming of a shipwreck or a storm, the likelihood of a ship going down somewhere in the world at that time is a storm wreak havoc, very big. And besides, news about it comes to my mind when dealing with my dream.
It is rather an indication that dream imagery influences our behavior rather than providing information about an event that happens independently of us. To remedy this, a dream diary, in which the details and the time of the dream are accurately noted.
The dream diary
The dream diary combines dreams directly with writing. For this we need a notebook and a pen. We forget most of our dream content within a few minutes. But to interpret what a dream means to us, even small details are important. Therefore, we put the dream diary directly to our bed: While we fall asleep, we note, as long as we can, which images arise in our heads. At the moment of waking up, we reach for the book and immediately record our dreams. Even if we wake up at night in between, we immediately record the dream images.
In the notebook, we create tables or clusters in which we note which elements occurred in which dreams, in which dreams, which actions took place and how these set pieces could be related: What happened in the outside world on that day, which events are reflected in the Dream? We leave free space for interpretations: what can this action mean, what problems does the dream show, what solution does it offer?
The real life: If we find a connection to everyday life, we should make a note of it. What is analogous to the happenings in the dream? What are the differences between dream and waking? The dream often shows solutions to a problem precisely with such differences, alternative decisions that make sense, or it bumps into what weighs on us. If we have noted such references, we can reflect them and perhaps gain new insights. However, these references often appear encrypted in the dream.
A dream diary makes sense, because we often notice the meaning of a dream image only with a time lag. Days, even weeks after a dream, it falls from our eyes "like scales". Often we do not recognize until years later which dream symbols had which meaning in which time.
A dream diary helps to discover recurring dream symbols and thus "our themes". This applies to people with mental health problems especially for nightmares, in which characters, whether spiders, cats, dogs, certain men, clowns or insects to the core of the fears like confluence indicate. But these topics are equally positive: which figures in the dream protect us? Let them come to consciousness or continue to vegetate in the shade?
The next step is to work with these recurring characters, as we fall asleep to the events of the past and future dreams, to bring these images into our consciousness, and to keep a record of how the dreams are changing.
Even more: the dreams and thus the fears can be influenced. If we are afraid of one figure and identify with another, then in our waking / half asleep thoughts, we can make our alter ego mature into a hero who faces the challenge or shrinks the danger.
We can also use the dream diary as a basis for developing stories from our dreams. This is how we free ourselves from them, and in the best case, this creates literature that strangers like to read.
Developing fictitious stories out of dreams relieves those affected whose dreams of serious problems immensely. History creates a distance from one's own experience and suffering and puts it on a general level. The fictional characters develop from an aspect of the self, but they are no longer at some point, but lead a life of their own. If we can observe these "plots" independently of our mental states, we have freed ourselves from our fears.
Writer with mood disorders
Writers are among the most frequent affective disorder in all occupations. Jack London, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ernest Hemmingway suffered from bipolarity, and Hemingway probably had a borderline disorder. Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire and Hölderlin suffered from depression.
Whether the hen was there first or the egg can sometimes not be said: Do writers overload the brain with their complex fantasies, and that reacts with psychological problems? Or do they have the affective disorders beforehand and are therefore particularly suitable for the profession?
The psychiatrist Felix Post found in a study with 100 Anglo-American authors that 80.5% of them suffered from psychosis such as depression; every third person was an alcoholic. Extreme mood swings characterized writers as well - whether it was clinical bipolarity or borderline remains open. Other studies showed a tendency of writers for depression and schizophrenia.
The propensity for depression may be because writers are much more concerned about the world and its position in it by profession than "ordinary people." In addition, professional writers live in extremely precarious conditions: they never know if a novel that they write years to succeed or even find a publisher. They are also very lonely in their work. In addition, they reveal themselves in their texts openly, a writer who does not reveal much of himself, the audience hardly. This broken self-protection can also lead to mental disorders.
By writing, people with mental "disturbances" learned that they were able to creatively use their mental transgression of boundaries by crossing literary boundaries. The difference between whether the social environment considers someone "sick" or "ingenious" often depends on whether he puts his "crazy ideas" on paper.
The diary
An often underestimated form of creative writing is the diary. It belongs only to the one who writes it. Poems, textbooks, thoughts, fantasies, finished stories, everything can be included. This journal goes over in the notebook. Whether in the bus, in the cafe or in the dentist's waiting room - the best inspiration is the observation of the people around me. This sharpens the view and the sensitivity.
A diary does not just have to mean the sober capture of details. These too are important, but, here, in the genital area, there is room for the crazy thoughts, the fantastic ideas, and the supposedly impossible wishes that proliferate in the unconscious. Every essential insight can be written down and read later. If it does not make sense, that's no problem at all.
If we write diaries regularly, these "crazes" are arranged into a pattern and we become more aware of what we really want, what we want to change, and more and more clarity about how we can do that.
It helps, for example, in the evening every day to write down the happy or even interesting moments. Also, to note down the achievements we achieved brings our unconscious on a positive path: Who thinks bad, feels bad.
Brain Train
If I always do the same, and the circumstances are the same, probably the same thing comes out of it. For people who can not or will not live with their lives the way they are, this experience confirms their frustration. They think "that will never change", "that has always been like that", "I have no luck in life", or "there is no room for me".
Our unconscious mind strengthens such negative self-images once we have saved them, because it works slowly. Whether a habit had negative or positive consequences is equally valid for the unconscious because the trained trajectories work. Writing techniques help with this pattern of self-fulfilling hopelessness.
The writer's block
Authors know the blank sheet, the writer's block. People who are facing an exam, writing a business letter, or a bill often see each other in front of the keyboard, and they do not want to go on and on. Creative writing can solve such blockages because it lets thoughts flow. It is usually not the content of a factual text that leaves us desperate, but stagnation. Looking out of the window, writing about the blackbird, looking for worms out there, describing the flowers in the vase, can get the lyrics back on track.
What to do in a writer's block? Picture: contrast workshop - fotolia self-discipline
People only do what they want with enthusiasm. Even those who do not decide decide: for convenience and false security, which can break down at any time. That makes people dissatisfied. Those who suffer from this dissatisfaction or even from much more serious mental disorders usually deviate from an internal discipline.
Regularly writing a specific time at a precise time promotes a return to self-discipline. Those who fail at failure, find themselves outcasts due to a mental disorder, find it difficult to develop self-discipline, which is an organization of their own desires and goals. Deep inside, he is convinced that he can never reach those goals. He looks outwardly lethargic and passive, because he has lost the sense of why he should work on his life.
Regular writing kills two birds with one stone: First, it brings a structure into a chaotic everyday life and a confused psyche. Second, it provides a testable result. Progress, stagnation and retrogression are reaffirmed daily by the person affected and can work with this material.
The sensitivity
Creative writing strengthens the perception. When I'm sitting in a cafe bored and assuming that nothing happens, I search more carefully for details of how diverse life around me is. What eye color does my counterpart have, a small scar behind the ear, where does it come from, why is there a tiny spot on the napkin? What does the world look like? How does life feel? How do I feel? How do I react to my environment? People with mental health problems learn to concentrate without evaluating. As a result, they no longer focus on their suffering.
Ways out of the paralysis
Depressed people often feel frozen, nothing seems to move, either outside or inside their body. Writing techniques help them get out of this rigidity.
Free writing means writing on a blank sheet without thinking about it and not putting the pen down - in a given timeframe. This aimless writing can serve to find a topic. An ordered variant is writing to a keyword, an introductory sentence, an image, an object. That can stay that way, but the results can also be combined and further developed together.
Randomly selected words stimulate ideas. Chance is important to make new thoughts bubble. From a text, a catalog, a magazine, a dictionary I search out any word.
Provocations change the thoughts. Solid experiences break up. Statements that contradict facts, reality or the familiar set ideas free. Examples: I can drink air. My bratwurst eats me. I bark at my dog. My cat plays chess.
Choose several terms, no matter which, four: travel, blood, window, dog. They must appear in the text, now go. A tighter variant is a noun, for example table, an adjective, for example black, a verb for example swimming.
Select any newspaper heading. Write the story for that. Or get creative on it.
A word, a sentence, a phrase is placed in the inner circle. That's why associations are formed. They are in turn circled and connected by lines. Alone or together, either secret or on the pin board. New association chains start again at the cluster core. A so-called experimental network is created. This can be expanded and interpreted in one direction. This can again give rise to a write impulse or a topic.
By writing, people with mental "disturbances" experience that they can creatively use their mental transgression of boundaries by also crossing boundaries of literacy. The difference between whether the social environment considers someone "sick" or "ingenious" often depends on whether he puts his "crazy ideas" on paper. At best, a psychiatrist becomes a successful author who brings the life problems of many others to the paper. Even less spectacular therapies use the affected person. He achieves what a mentally confused person lacks: clarity about himself (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Literature:
Ray Bradbury: Zen in the art of writing. Berlin 2003.
Gerd Brenner: Creative Writing: A Guide to Practice. Frankfurt am Main 1998.
Sylvia Winnewisser, Simply write the soul freely. How therapeutic writing affects the soul, Hannover 2010.