Write to Restore: A Step-By-Step Creative Writing Journal for Survivors of Sexual Trauma (Writing Therapy, Healing Power of Writing) - Softcover

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Jen is the author of Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma (Mango, 2017); her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in over 50 anthologies and periodicals, including Nobody Passes, The Healing Art of Writing 2010, Sinister Wisdom, Matador Review, 14 Hills, and Best Sex Writing 2008. She has a novella, Night Hands, under contract with The Massachusetts Review. She's been awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Jen Cross is a bookseller and writing instructor at The Book Passage. Visit her website at writingourselveswhole.org

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Excerpt from Our Words Restore Us

Our words restore us, and our writing can restory our lives.

In a quiet morning bedroom, on the bus or subway on the way to work or school, in the laundromat while waiting for the spin cycle to complete, at a kitchen table, at innumerable cafes—over and lover, throughout the country, around the world, people are sitting down to write.

Early morning, over lunch breaks, during the wee hours of the night: we who have experienced something that interrupted our sense of ourselves, we who have been irrevocably harmed or violated, we who experienced something so outside our normal, our understanding of ourselves, that we lost even the language to try and express it—we are turning to the page. We who had language taken from us, we whose words were ignored or denied, we who were hurt even before we had the words for what was being done to us – we reach for words anyway.

We are a species made of words and story. When we are without language for ourselves and our lives, we often feel profoundly disconnected from community, even from the rest of humanity.

Writing can be:

• a way to release images and experiences that have been held in our bodies for years
• a way to discover what we didn't know we knew
• a way to restory ourselves and our lives
• a way to regain trust in our creative instinct and voice
• a way to heal in body and mind

As you reach for words, sometimes it is helpful to have someone with you. This journal guides you through a series of exercises I first developed for the Write Whole survivors writing group, offered through my organization, Writing Ourselves Whole.

 In this guided workbook, a companion to my book Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma, we'll move loosely through a series of themes, beginning gently before shifting to more intense writing midway through, then broadening out to connect with community and self-care.

Journal writing can be a practice that changes us, helping us to find language for experiences that are fragmented within us, or that feel incomplete. This book is a tool as you grow your own practice; use it in any way that best serves you, your words, your writing, your healing.

Make the prompts work for you. Sometimes, if you’re stuck, you might want to try changing the pronoun in the prompt. Most of these prompts are in the first-person singular (“I”), but you can change to first-person plural (“we”), the second person (“you”), or the third person (“she/he/they”). See how the writing changes when the point of view changes. If you get stuck while you’re writing, you can just start over with the same prompt, you can make the prompt a negative (add a “not” in there somewhere), or use the phrase, “What I really wanted to write about was…”