A Rope Down, A Balloon Up
How Writing Your Personal Story Is Healing
by Natalie Safir

I ask myself, why is memoir so popular these days? I believe that our awareness of the fleeting, ephemeral qualities of life has increased. With media images coming at us with astonishing speed, and disappearing just as fast, we have a need to slow down and capture personal experience in a form that lasts. Also, with so many more people on the planet, the desire to highlight individual lives becomes understandable.

"I write these stories to explain myself to my children," a woman revealed in a memoir group I lead at a senior center. "I want them to know who I am and who I was. Somehow there is so little I can say to them face to face."

Seniors are eager to leave a record, to recreate life as they lived it—to describe and honor themselves as a vital form of self affirmation. Writing a personal memoir or journaling is a way to claim your voice, tell a unique story, find language for what may seem incomprehensible. It's a digging instrument that leads to discovery and the potential integration of disparate aspects of ourselves.

The process offers a way to remember, to access what's lost, retrieve and re-present experiences, transformed into useful form—to give order and meaning to the difficult and the joyous. In creating something, you already shift psychic gears into a productive mode. As you re-view what you have lived through, healing shifts in perspective take place, and sudden realizations may occur.

In Opening Up, psychologists J.W. Pennebaker and S. Beall showed that repressing thoughts and feelings about distressing or traumatic events may be linked to illness, whereas expressing them through writing may prompt significant improvement in health. The writing process enables you to tolerate difficult feelings, and as the work develops, to experience an enlarged sense of self. In being present with your own pain, you find the courage to go through it, and develop more strength to continue. "Creative work can permit us to pass from numbness to feeling, denial to acceptance, conflict and chaos to order and resolution, from rage and loss to profound growth." writes Dr. David Aberbach in Surviving Trauma. Some may write to better understand their lives, others to address unfinished business. Suggested topics, such as: things I never told my father, what I never said to my mother, can release a torrent of expression, newfound connections and understanding.

Writing develops self-mastery that in turn contributes to emotional and spiritual growth. Finding the language for your struggles becomes an active private meditation and may bring the beneficial effects of mourning. A writer friend once said to me: I don't want to write about my mother's death; I'm afraid it will hurt; still, it's the only thing I really want to write about.

I encourage discussion in memoir writing groups. Members jog one another's memories and find common associations. As one woman described her old neighborhood in the Bronx, another was led to recall afternoons sneaking into the local movie theater with her girlfriend. A skilled group leader can help people open up and will spur them on. Once trust has been established and the leader has demonstrated sensitivity, the act of sharing can bring the comfort of community. In my work with groups, I have witnessed a shared energy field of intent and trust build and touch each participant, softening an otherwise solitary confrontation with the page.

For those who decide to try the process on their own, books like Listing Your Self by Segalove and Velick may help you get started. Set your intention before you begin. I recommend finding an atmosphere of comfort, a space made for the work, the best personal time of day for creativity, the company of a particular pet or music. Some like the efficiency of a laptop or PC; others prefer the intimacy of longhand. Whichever, it's important to bypass the judgmental editor-mind so that language can flow unrestricted from deep inner places.

I think of personal writing as a rope down and a balloon up. Alice Walker calls her writing "a sturdy ladder out of the pit." Because black, feminine experience has been so devalued and repressed, opening up can be a terrifying task. For her, the intimacy of memoir became a way to freedom and safety.

In her essay, "When We Dead Awaken," Adrienne Rich explains that we need to know about the past, not (only) because we want to pass on tradition, but because we need to be able to break its hold on us. "Memoirists step carefully from one emotionally charged fragment to another as they explore the psychic geographies of their pasts: the secrets and the shame, but also, thankfully, the love."

Those who have engaged in personal writing report enrichment and a new way of viewing themselves. "It gave my life back to me," a woman in her 80s recounted, "and now I see the whole story—how one thing led to another." There is satisfaction in the re-collection of pieces of our lives as we write and make sense of our personal narratives. No small part of the healing comes from the laughs a group can share, an amazement at common experiences, the joy and pride in a newfound awareness of how much life has been lived.

Natalie Safir is the author of four collections of poetry, a certified personal coach/therapist with practices in Rhinebeck and Tarrytown, where she has been teaching poetry and memoir writing for many years. She has developed and led Writing as Healing programs at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center. www.nsafircreativepassages.com.