Writing and Trauma: Finding Your Voice
Award-winning playwright Cynthia Moore discusses trauma, the Flow State, and finding your voice, including four writing exercises.
I started writing at 6, filling notebooks with scribbled poems and stories, to drown out the sound of my stepfather’s rage. At night, when the gin flowed freely, his yelling filled the house and all I could do was write, write, write. In the morning, I would tenderly offer a crumpled poem to my mother, who responded with a cool, probably hungover, nod. When they shoveled me into a Swiss finishing school at age 11, my despair was so great that I wrote about death and suicide, and my teacher told me to knock it off, it was “too morbid.”
Writing was the only way I knew to drop a bucket into the well of my unconscious. It was a well filled with pain, but as I grew older and found my own way in the world, the bucket brought up jewels and luminosity. The bucket revealed that an entire world of magic and unfathomables existed below the surface of daily life. Words came to me without invitation, images flowed from me, and I discovered the Flow State. It was my first experience of the numinous.
Many traumatized children find themselves accessing a Flow State of one kind or another. Early on, it can be labeled disassociation, but if cultivated as a portal, it can lead to exquisite revelation. At the very least, it is a portal to a world beyond the one we are trapped in. When I learned to cultivate my Flow State, I found that words poured from my fingers. I had trained the access channel from brain to fingers early on, and when I required inspiration, it came. The lesson in high school became, Say Less. This has always been a problem for me! I can overwrite anything, including a Driver’s License Application!
Writing is a dance between Left brain and Right brain, between the chooser, thinker, editor, and the poet, creative, and intuitive. The trick is to enable them to fully trust and support each other. Let the Right brain write, regurgitate, overwrite, and then call in the Left brain to edit and review. This is a metaphor for the two sides of us, the rational and the irrational, the mind and the soul.
The soul, buried deep within us, longs to have a voice, but our culture worships the mind, and the mind keeps her locked in the basement. I’m grateful that I was so desperate to connect with my soul that I learned to uncover her when I was young, and she has informed my writing ever since.
Writing exercise: Make yourself comfortable, relax, and write a dialogue between your Right brain and your Left brain (or your soul and your mind). Let them speak freely. Be surprised.
When I found myself working as a performer, director, and playwright in the theater of the 1970s, my writing found its way to the stage. I wrote dozens of plays for our theater company, for the children I was teaching, for no reason at all.
Plays taught me about dialogue, about conflict and denouement, about edge. The problem was, I was working in all-male theater companies and I was trying to write like a man. I could be harsh and funny and feral, but I couldn’t be vulnerable. When an editor reviewed my memoir, she said, “I need to FEEL you in here, Cynthia, I need you to be vulnerable.”
This, it turns out, would be the single most challenging and enlightening comment I would ever have to metabolize. What is it to be vulnerable? To reveal pain, to share sorrow, to map our way through to the other side. Everything changed. I had to go back to childhood and jackhammer the paving stones I had laid over that well of pain. I had to stop hiding behind fancy words and masculine metaphor.
Writing exercise: Write about a single painful experience you have had, but write about it in the third person, with great compassion and kindness for who you were at the time.
So, in addition to dancing between the left and right brain, I had to learn to dance between my heart and my head, my feelings and my wisdom. Writing is, above all, cathartic. Readers want to identify with your struggles and rejoice with you when you overcome them.
True voice is reaching deep within you and speaking from a truth only you know, with the palette of colors available only to you. You are unique. Your story is unique. Don’t hide. Whatever you try to hide will come roaring out when you least expect it (like my feminine side when I was trying to write like a man). Be bold. Be brave. Tell the truth.
Writing exercise: what do you try to hide in your writing? Who are you trying to be/ appear as? What lurks beneath that? A rager? A narcissist? A sociopath? Write from that place! Write as your Shadow. Be surprised!
Writing is the antidote to trauma. It excavates the dark places and gives them voice. It reaches other people’s hearts and creates connection. It builds ladders to heaven and tunnels to hell. Writing is an act of courage and of reverence. It can reveal the unseen world. And now, more than ever, we need the unseen world. Write about it. Give it voice. We need your truth.
Writing exercise: Write yourself a letter from the archetype of God or Goddess, Kwan Yin or the Buddha. Write as a divine being to your human self. See what emerges.
Check out Cynthia Moore's Dancing on Coals here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
