. . . .
When other people share their experiences, I keep my mouth shut. Generally, they feel that something was stolen from them. I can only empathize. I don’t feel that Kent took something from me. If anything, I gave it to him. I was a willing participant. Does this qualify me as a victim? (Course Documents 2003)
Such expressive language may not supply easy answers or resolutions to dilemmas (though it happens), as we want Claire to learn about the social and cultural forces that have conditioned women to submit quietly to men. Nonetheless, expressive language does lift burdens off of our shoulders, rendering problems visible, giving them shape and form, so that we can better see them and define them and analyze them in different ways. This unburdening, in turn, helps us distance ourselves, rhetorically and emotionally, from the trauma in question. In an opposite way, expressive language also functions as a more direct conduit to our feelings, emotions, and thinking. Demystifying problems makes them less scary. It is an act of unifying or “suturing” our splintered selves, so that we can become more whole (Anderson, Holt, and McGady 2000, 58–82).
When we somehow distrust our readers, we not only censor ourselves, but we also produce fewer words, in total, as well as fewer words per minute (e.g., Elbow 1998). This lack of fluency often means that we cut short the time and language we need to arrive at our intended meaning. That is, visible language generates more language and more thinking, in turn extending the thinking-writing cycle. We need to generate enough ideas in our writing to discover exactly what it is we want to say, what we most need to write. If we lack fluency, then we’re likely unable to generate enough detail to more fully comprehend it and to analyze it, or to revise it in productive and healing ways.
The reverse is also true: When we indeed trust our readers, we gain confidence in ourselves as writers, have reduced fears of evaluation, and hence increase our production rate. The writers in this study always trusted their readers (if they were even thinking of their readers), and therefore were highly fluent, providing extensive diaries, email messages, and website postings.
Being committed to the topic we’re writing about also affects our fluency and thinking. We have to be invested in our subjects, cognitively and emotionally. This occurs when we have complete freedom in our choice of topic, purpose, and audience, as did the writers explored in this book. Under these circumstances, we can become deeply absorbed in our activities, to the point of becoming unaware of the passage of time and of our immediate surroundings. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls these “flow experiences,” which become intrinsically rewarding for us—the best kind of motivation, which, in turn, promotes writing fluency and thinking.
Even the processes we engage in as writers influence our production rate and thinking. Research on composing processes reveals that writers constantly engage in mentally shuttling back and forth between larger “global” plans, such as audience appropriateness and organization—and smaller “local” concerns, such as word choice and syntax (Perl 1994; Flower and Hayes 1989).
When we compose for purposes of healing, we likewise grapple with words and ideas, tugging and pulling between many types of oppositions, including: (1) the whole idea, tone, or attitude we wish to convey versus the individual parts; (2) the past time period in which the traumatic experience occurred versus the current time period; (3) the need to focus on negative experiences versus the impulse not to sound completely negative; and (4) the experiences we wish to show in our writing (i.e., sensory images and details objectively conveyed) versus the meaning we want to tell or summarize, via using generalizations and adjectives. In such writing, we also engage in analysis (breaking wholes into parts) and synthesis (forming wholes from parts). These simultaneous mental actions create tension or “critical thinking,” as well as creative thinking (John-Steiner 1997; DeSalvo 1999).
Thinking, then, resides deep in the heart of composing through trauma. In the people you’ll meet in the chapters ahead, you’ll see them courageously engage in a host of specific thinking strategies, such as making decisions about identity, motivation, audience awareness, genre, rhetoric, and imagery. You’ll also see how these writers wrangle with how they are alike and how they differ from other people, as they try to fit themselves into their radically altered realities brought on by their trauma. You’ll see these writers grapple with all types of “oppositions” or tensions, as they try to gain some resolution on more level ground.
In doing all of these things, they tap into their inner stream of consciousness—witnessing it, focusing it, and suspending it. It’s important to clarify that this type of thinking is indeed “higher-order” thinking—maybe the highest of all types of thinking, because logical deduction and induction become merged with reason, emotion, and spirituality. In the combustible heat of writing through serious and immediate trauma, all of these big guns fire at the same time. Have no doubt: Expressive language, fluency, and thinking are the first pillars of composing through trauma. Of course, anything as complex and unwieldy as this needs other support beams, a few of which I’ll take up now.
Shape and Structure
Composing through trauma works because it’s flexible enough to thrive without structure, as well as to be shaped (later) into any genre. Shape and structure greatly help everyone: They contain meaning in recognizable vessels, helping readers to understand the whole message. Shape and structure also provide some familiarity, safety, and confidence for writers. Even though a piece may not be intended for anyone else to read, a defined shape can increase the writer’s feelings of wholeness wrought from fragmentation or chaos.
However, you can seldom begin with a form or a shape in mind when writing about trauma. Fluency must come first, or else you have nothing to mold into a shape or assemble into a structure. It really is as simple as that. If you begin with a structure or a form in mind, then everything you do is tailored to fit within your pre-fab mold. This approach will stunt or smother your ideas and thinking before they have a chance to grow and bloom. In many ways, then, the point of composing through trauma is to avoid structure and form, as long as possible, because structures tend to force us into tidy little boxes of closure—“the right answer” or “the point.” While forms can help readers understand our meaning, they do not necessarily help us discover our own meaning, unless, of course, we are satisfied with our discovered meaning and somehow want to mold it into a more definite shape.
It is also true that we often perceive a lack of organization (and thinking, purpose, and even sanity) unless a writing has a clear thesis at the beginning, followed by a few paragraphs of evidence and a conclusion paragraph. Discourse can be organized in many different ways, and just because a message does not conform to this particular, deductive sequence doesn’t mean it was composed by a willy-nilly writer. It only means the reader was trained to see one pattern in a world of infinite design possibilities. Consider the following piece by Jake.
I will tell you about the fear, and what I did about it.
In my dream, there is an owl flying around the restaurant, circling above our heads, or maybe just mine. I can’t tell if I’m alone or not. When I say to the owl, “Get out,” a voice dripping with sarcasm and hate repeats my words from off screen. Suddenly I know, in that instant and positive way that knowledge arrives in dreams, that it’s the devil and he’s in the bathroom. Then there is a couple, standing, arms linked, younger than I am. Their faces are familiar. “How do I know you?” I ask them. The girl answers me, and though she is directly in front of me, her words are miles, even dimensions, away. It sounds like she says, “We told you this would happen,” and the boy gives her a warning look, like I’m not supposed to know. “Know what?” I ask. Another instant flash of dream knowledge arrives—I have, in fact, seen them before, and they are both dead. This startles me into consciousness.
I hear myself breathing, gasping, gulping.