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Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma
The author of Write to Restore shows survivors of sexual abuse how to heal through journaling and personal writing.
Writing Ourselves Whole is a collection of essays and creative writing encouragements for sexual trauma survivors who want to risk writing a different story. Each short chapter offers encouragement, experience, and exercises.
When you can find language for the stories that are locked inside, you can change your life. Talk therapy can only go so far for the millions of Americans struggling in the aftermath of sexual abuse and sexual assault. Sexual assault survivors can heal themselves. Sexual trauma survivor communities (and their allies) have the capacity to hold and hear one another's stories--we do not have to relegate ourselves solely to the individual isolation of the therapist's office.
What you'll learn inside Writing Ourselves Whole:
How to reconnect with your creative instinct through freewriting
How freewriting can help you reclaim the parts of yourself and your history
How "restorying" the old myths about sexual trauma survivors can set you free
If you have read books such as Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, or Louise DeSalvo's Writing as a Way of Healing, you will want to read Writing Ourselves Whole.
Praise for Writing Ourselves Whole
"A raw, powerful, necessary, wise and practiced guidebook to the revolutionary practice of finding the words, language and voice to transform suffering." --Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues
"Rich, intelligent, passionate, intimate, honest and encouraging . . . This book is a treasure trove!" --Ellen Bass, author of The Courage to Heal
Writing Ourselves Whole is a collection of essays and creative writing encouragements for sexual trauma survivors who want to risk writing a different story. Each short chapter offers encouragement, experience, and exercises.
When you can find language for the stories that are locked inside, you can change your life. Talk therapy can only go so far for the millions of Americans struggling in the aftermath of sexual abuse and sexual assault. Sexual assault survivors can heal themselves. Sexual trauma survivor communities (and their allies) have the capacity to hold and hear one another's stories--we do not have to relegate ourselves solely to the individual isolation of the therapist's office.
What you'll learn inside Writing Ourselves Whole:
How to reconnect with your creative instinct through freewriting
How freewriting can help you reclaim the parts of yourself and your history
How "restorying" the old myths about sexual trauma survivors can set you free
If you have read books such as Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, or Louise DeSalvo's Writing as a Way of Healing, you will want to read Writing Ourselves Whole.
Praise for Writing Ourselves Whole
"A raw, powerful, necessary, wise and practiced guidebook to the revolutionary practice of finding the words, language and voice to transform suffering." --Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues
"Rich, intelligent, passionate, intimate, honest and encouraging . . . This book is a treasure trove!" --Ellen Bass, author of The Courage to Heal
287 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 25, 2017
67 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 14, 2018
This is not the kind of book I generally read and -- as much as I like and admire Jen Cross -- I didn't pick it up for my own reasons. I know Jen Cross's work from a reading series I like to attend, but we had never spoken until this past week. Cross's publicist asked Laurie Edison and I to use our blog, Body Impolitic, as a stop on Jen's blog tour for the book. So Laurie and I have both read it and, earlier this week, we interviewed Jen. The interview will be on the blog in the next two weeks.
I'm not a survivor of any significant level of sexual trauma myself, but I live in this world, so the topic is of interest to me. I also appreciate the way that she makes clear that almost everyone living in the world is a survivor of some kind of trauma, and that many or all of the practices she puts forward in the book apply much more widely.
Basically, this is a how-to book for individuals and groups who are interested in using writing (generally freewriting) as a tool for healing. It is an extraordinarily comprehensive, careful, and detailed roadmap. The author uses her own experience extensively to help us understand why she needs this work, and how it works for her, but the book is not a memoir.
Reading it with a view toward interviewing the author was interesting, because both Laurie and I noticed that it is so precisely and fully laid out that questions are hard to come by (we found some). It is also beautifully written, and the freewriting leads to a multiplicity of styles which work extraordinarily well together.
If this sort of book is for you, then this book will absolutely be for you. If this sort of book is not for you, keep its name in your back pocket because you'll meet people who need it.
I'm not a survivor of any significant level of sexual trauma myself, but I live in this world, so the topic is of interest to me. I also appreciate the way that she makes clear that almost everyone living in the world is a survivor of some kind of trauma, and that many or all of the practices she puts forward in the book apply much more widely.
Basically, this is a how-to book for individuals and groups who are interested in using writing (generally freewriting) as a tool for healing. It is an extraordinarily comprehensive, careful, and detailed roadmap. The author uses her own experience extensively to help us understand why she needs this work, and how it works for her, but the book is not a memoir.
Reading it with a view toward interviewing the author was interesting, because both Laurie and I noticed that it is so precisely and fully laid out that questions are hard to come by (we found some). It is also beautifully written, and the freewriting leads to a multiplicity of styles which work extraordinarily well together.
If this sort of book is for you, then this book will absolutely be for you. If this sort of book is not for you, keep its name in your back pocket because you'll meet people who need it.
October 11, 2023
Lots of good thoughts, ideas, and prompts here, but this is aimed specifically at amateur and therapeutic writing rather than writing for publication.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews