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Project 2 Final

Writing can help trauma victims process and gain control over their experiences. Through writing therapy, mythologization, and shaping narratives, individuals can manipulate traumatic events into contained stories to convey emotional truths to themselves and others. Writing acknowledges veterans' challenges and can boost morale by reinforcing identity and diminishing distressing memories. For example, a victim of war wrote a memoir to transform her portrayal from helpless to resilient by reshaping her past with a positive perspective. Poetry in particular allows trauma victims to tackle repressed emotions and feelings through artistic expression, which helps with release, understanding, and beginning the healing process.

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18 views

Project 2 Final

Writing can help trauma victims process and gain control over their experiences. Through writing therapy, mythologization, and shaping narratives, individuals can manipulate traumatic events into contained stories to convey emotional truths to themselves and others. Writing acknowledges veterans' challenges and can boost morale by reinforcing identity and diminishing distressing memories. For example, a victim of war wrote a memoir to transform her portrayal from helpless to resilient by reshaping her past with a positive perspective. Poetry in particular allows trauma victims to tackle repressed emotions and feelings through artistic expression, which helps with release, understanding, and beginning the healing process.

Uploaded by

api-711740872
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Potential Benefits for War Trauma Victims

It is widely acknowledged that trauma is prevalent among veterans, and research indicates that
writing therapy can play a significant role in their self-healing journey. A primary contributor to
trauma is the sense of powerlessness. Writing facilitates self-healing against this sense of
helplessness through the strategy of mythologization.
Neil P Baird defines mythologization as the process of establishing standardized narratives that
transform uncontrollable events into ones that are contained and predictable. [SOURCE 2] Janis
Haswell expands on this concept by highlighting how individuals can utilize writing to manipulate
and reshape the traumatic events they’ve experienced. This allows them to convey the
emotional truths of their pasts to not only themselves, but to others through the words on a
page. [SOURCE 5]
Mark Bracher emphasizes the benefits of literacy in general for self healing. His research
indicates that literacy acknowledges the challenges veterans faced during their deployment.
This acknowledgement can in-turn boost their morale and contribute to them feeling valued.
Additionally, it aids in diminishing the recollection of distressing memories and reinforces one’s
sense of self-identity. [SOURCE 3]. Nancy Miller explores further into the reinforcement of self
identity by examining Kim Phuc, a victim of napalm burns during the Vietnam War. In Kim’s
biographical memoir, she sought to transform her portrayal from that of a helpless child
frightened from war into a tale of forgiveness. Her objective with her writing was to illustrate how
she overcame her trauma from war through her deliberate effort to reshape her past with a more
optimistic perspective. [SOURCE 6]

Writing poetry[edit]
Poetry has been a very powerful form of writing for many and there are beneficial factors that
correspond with writing and reading poetry. Alicia Ostriker explains how personal experience and
memories, whether traumatic or repressed, can be tackled by the person through the artistic ability
of writing and facing these emotions that have been neglected in order to release and ease a writer's
[41]
pain. Robert Baden elaborates how poetry allows a wide range of emotions to be portrayed to
describe the feeling or what the writer had felt within their experience to later allow others to engage
[42]
and relate to their work. Baden expands this concept with the idea that no emotion is too grand or
too small for poetry, which allows others to engage with the healing experience. Baden also points
out that for there to be an act of healing and release between the emotions that have been held
within the conscience, the writer must recognize that there must be a strong enough need to be
vulnerable and willing to be able to confront these emotions and trust that the audience will then be
[42]
able to relate and potentially make others want to use this written release within their own lives.
Vasiliki Antzoulis believes that writers should be vulnerable because ignorance should never be the
course of action when experiencing all kinds of emotions. Without the ability to talk about what the
writer is experiencing, it becomes more difficult to understand what each of these emotions
[43]
represents and how they affect the writer's current views of life.
Dale M. Bauer provides insight that poetry has the power to allow people to be able to talk about
inner suffering without judgment and rather gain the ability to have others be able to compare and
connect with the writer's experience. Bauer goes on to say that these experiences, no matter if they
are good or bad, correspond with the human experience. Being able to have others relate to them
allows the writer to feel supported and reflect on what has been shared and what they have obtained
[44]
with this release and be able to begin healing. Veteran Writer, Liam Corley, healed significantly
from his trauma through the means of poetry. By sharing this method with fellow veterans and
examining its positive impacts, Corley’s research indicates the concise nature and inherent
significance of poetry works greatly for self healing. This is because poetry fulfills the crucial need for
self-expression and assists in providing a voice to those who have felt silenced.[SOURCE 4] .James
W. Pennebaker has discovered that "writing about trauma allows writers to externalize an event,
thereby detaching themselves from the experience" (Writing to Heal 98). Pennebaker argues that
once the writer can free themselves from what has been weighing them down, they are then able to
begin healing and decide whether they are going to learn from the experience, or if it is something
that has been long overdue for a release. Benjamin Batzer recognized that only the writer knows
what they have gone through, so the first steps into healing and coping with what life has given, we
must first be able to talk about these experiences to take back the power and decide the next point
[45]
of action.

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