Fable

Transcribe Past Trauma

Into Understanding and Resilience

Writing creates a new experience and provides a third perspective... We are re-pairing the emotional trauma with the basic explanation. This process builds an integrated experience whose narrative can be further abstracted and incorporated into our autobiography. It builds to a sense of resolution so we no longer feel the compulsion to relive the event and finish what our body started...

That we remember, think about, and dream of unresolved issues has been a central feature of psychological study for several decades. In 1927, Bluma Zeigarnik and her mentor Kurt Tewin, found that people had far better memories for interrupted tasks than completed ones. For example, if you are interrupted just before the end of an exciting movie, you will remember the movie more vividly and for a longer time than if you saw the movie’s resolution. People have a basic need for completing and resolving tasks.

-James Pennebaker,
Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, p 90.¹

On the one hand, we are all afflicted by traumatic experiences - our Furies - and build rigid defenses which inhibit and limit our capacity for living as ourselves. Our mind and body can complete, resolve and integrate our traumatic experience, and provide us with the opportunity to flourish as we overcome helplessness. After trauma, we wither or we thrive.

Do we need adversity to develop our highest levels of capacity, fulfillment and development? In all likelihood, yes.

Athletes who train stress their bodies, then recover. The adaptation to the training stress increases their capacity. Athletic training is controlled wounding and healing. Most athletes know, often after learning the hard way, that unguided training can incapacitate.

After enough time off, an athlete could start with a blank slate - an uninjured body, a knowledgeable coach and a carefully regimented schedule of training stress and recovery. An athlete can make steady progress until he reaches the limits of his personal physiology.

Everyone encounters hardship. Adversity is like training for athletes - stress which can grow the capacity to endure stress.

We cannot control the magnitude of adversity we might encounter. So real-life adversity will wound, and in all likelihood, create trauma. These wounds are necessary for experiential growth, but we also risk long-term damage.

Wounding starts at the instance of life, so we never experience a state of pure health. We do not get a blank slate. Rather, we carry with us the consequences of all past adversity. We already have defenses against past suffering.

So where do we start? Do we heal our old wounds first? Do we develop resilience first? Or do we try to clear out past experience, clean off our slate and start fresh?

It seems to me so much of the traditions of psychology, personal growth, and spirituality focus on either healing old wounds or creating a fresh start. If so, what capacities do we need to be successful in either circumstance? Jonathan Haidt offers three:²

This large body of research shows that although traumas, crises, and tragedies come in a thousand forms, people benefit from them in our three primary domains: [Ability, social relationships and knowledge. For a greater discussion, see Peanut Butter: Able, Worthy and Wise]

The first benefit [ability] is that rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes your self-concept. None of us knows what we are really capable of enduring...

The second class of benefit concerns relationships [social relationships]... Adversity doesn’t just separate the fair-weather friends from the true; it strengthens relationships and it opens people’s hearts to one another...

The third common benefit [knowledge]: trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present and toward other people... a great many people facing death report changes in values and perspectives. A diagnosis of cancer is often described, in retrospect, as a wake-up call, a reality check, or a turning point... The reality that people often wake up to is that life is a gift they have been taking for granted, and that people matter more than money.

-Jonathan Haidt,
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth In Ancient Wisdom pp 138-140.
My book review.

Recovery from old adversity, cleaning the slate for new adversity - both of these approaches will have limited value unless we can translate our past and new experiences into a rich understanding of our own ability, worthiness and wisdom. For this, we need tools.

I believe the first tool is a pen...

James Pennebaker³ directed four groups of volunteers to write for 15 minutes over four consecutive days. Each group had different instructions:

1. Just vent emotions (about a deeply-personal, emotionally-upsetting experience, a trauma-object),
2. Just write about the facts of the experience,
3. Vent emotions and write about facts,
4. Write about superficial or irrelevant topics (the control group).

The group who vented emotions and wrote facts (Group #3) demonstrated significant improvement in health - 50% fewer visits to the university clinic over the subsequence six months. This group, in subsequent interviews and questionnaires, reported improved moods, more positive outlooks and greater physical health. No other group showed any improvement.

What is going on?

The physical act of writing is going on. Pressure on a skate melts the ice below and creates a frictionless glide. Writing requires friction. Feel the scratch of paper and the flow of ink.

Hear sound change as you slow down or speed up the tugs on the pen tip. Strike out a line or two, and the paper almost yells. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to edit your own work.

See progress as thoughts fill the page. Thoughts become clearer as doodles, scratch outs, interjected asides, and picky wordsmithing muddle a stranded collection of legible words.

Each type of pen has a unique feel. I currently write with a 0.3mm pen in long, lean strokes. When I used a 0.7mm pen, I wrote in looping, sprawling script. Underlining text and writing comments in the margin is a different experience for each book because of differences in paper, page size and book thickness. Journaling in a Moleskine is luxurious compared with scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad.

And as a writer, I feel great triumph and joy whenever a pen runs out of ink. We shouldn’t celebrate the generic formlessness of the blank page. We should celebrate passing of a dead pen and the potential of a newly uncapped one.

The first time we experience a crisis, we are compelled to act in our own best interest and manage our reactions and emotions accordingly. To provide for the best outcome, we often dissociate from powerful emotions. We cannot afford “let ourselves go to pieces.” We manage, cope, survive.

Asked about the crisis, we provide a basic explanation and minimize the consequences (“But I’m OK”). Both downplay the hardship. We limit a more complex discussion out of fear of the powerful emotions. We have split the event into a Faerie Tale and a Fury’s Nightmare.

If later we meditate on the crisis, we lay bare our experience of the event. Emotions cascade into feelings and thoughts. If the result is a deeply-personal, emotionally upsetting crisis - a Fury - we might feel the compulsive need to do something else and suppress our memory to limit pain.

Writing about a Fury is a third type of experience. We mediate the imagery and pain of the emotional experience (Penebaker’s “vent emotions”) with the verbal accounting of the actual event (Pennebaker’s “the facts”). As much as we integrate these two parts, we also improve our understanding of our ability, worthiness and wisdom. We build an emotionally complex narrative.

A good touch typist can type at 60 words per minute. How many words might we “think” when we relive a moment of crisis?

We speak more than 220 words per minute, three times the rate of a touch typist. Yet when our thoughts flow rapidly, we struggle to speak clearly. We leave thoughts and sentences incomplete, or perhaps stutter. To speak a story is an experience different than the story itself.

When we write, we go an order of magnitude slower, especially if we want to address sense-making questions such as “why?” I journal at a pace of twenty words per minute, not even three good sentences.

I get fatigued after a few paragraphs as if I must rest my verbal mind before I let it chase after more vivid imagery. Sometimes I get blocked and have no energy for words. Instead, I flounder in need of narrative drama or clear explanation, unable to impose unconscious form on chaotic experience.

The tool we use affects the brain systems we engage. For example, studies show composing at a computer uses different parts of the brain than writing on paper. We are more creative and more intuitive with our pen in hand⁴.

When we journal about an emotional experience, the qualities of pen and paper are barely noticed by our conscious mind. Yet we are trained with these tools - not in the sense that we learned penmanship, but rather in the sense that we narrate and explain. We have practiced a form of mental functioning, no different than a master practicing the basic forms of Tai Chi.

We learned to use pen and paper in school, to answer homework questions and to fill up blue books for exams. We engaged certain cognitive processes every time we wrote. We recalled information, used it as the basis for a new story or explanation, and we provided structure to the story and meaning to the explanation.

As we write, we pair our verbalizing skills with our intuitive knowledge. This source of insightfulness is literally bred into our genome. Pinker explains:⁵

The world is a heterogeneous place, and we are equipped with different kinds of intuitions and logics, each appropriate to one department of reality... They emerge early in life... They may be installed by different combinations of genes...

What makes our reasoning faculties different from the departments in a university is that they are not just broad areas of knowledge, analyzed with whatever tools work best. Each faculty is based on a core intuition[italics mine] that was suitable for analyzing the world in which we evolved. Though cognitive scientists have not agreed on a Gray’s Anatomy of the mind, here is a tentative but defensible list of cognitive faculties:

• An intuitive physics.
• An intuitive version of biology.
• An intuitive engineering.
• An intuitive psychology.
• A spacial sense.
• A number sense.
• A sense of probability.
• A intuitive economics.
• A mental database and logic.
• Language.

-Steven Pinker,

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, pp 219-221.

As we write, we intuit and associate - the cognitive equivalent of brainstorming. We evaluate the cognitions, favoring the ones which make the most sense, and search until we reach a state where we can inhibit the doubt⁶ about the possibility of a better explanation. Or maybe we run out of time. We then write out the idea until we find we must cogitate more.

Just as an athlete can train so much in one day, and just as we can only learn so much new math in one day, we can only make so much sense in one sitting and one moment of writing. How often do we read something we wrote a few days ago and blanch at the qualities of the thought and writing?

Journaling, like meditating and other contemplative practices is a process. The benefits grow with consistency.

When we journal about a traumatic experience, we create an experience of experiencing; in other words, we witness. We relive then narrate. We ask “why?” - then explain.

This quality of witnessing is not as explicitly conscious an act as meditating. Our ability to approach the experience is mediated by the effort to write. The use of a pen and paper and the deliberateness of focus enhances the sense of control and makes the experience less scary.

Writing engages our natural avoidant defense in a constructive way, letting us get into the traumatic experience confident that we have safe retreat into the task of writing. The means of cutting off the trauma experience is to write about the Fury.

Writing creates a new experience and provides a third perspective. Within this act, at least two things happen. We are re-pairing the emotional trauma with the basic explanation. This process builds an integrated experience whose narrative can be further abstracted and incorporated into our autobiography. It builds to a sense of resolution so we no longer feel the compulsion to relive the event and finish what our body started.

Writing also creates the opportunity to feel able, worthy and wise. We use those body states as a resource when we confront the sensations of inability, unworthiness and ignorance which embody the trauma’s core helplessness. We modify the body’s experience, overlaying it with the ableness evoked by the act of writing. We become more resilient to the underlying trauma even if it remains unresolved.