Unaware of my personal trauma legacy, I began my professional life as a teacher two weeks before my nineteenth birthday, soon discovering that in my inner-city, grade-one classroom injustice in the form of poverty and biased school practices and assumptions would provide me with a lifetime of worthy causes to champion. In my twenties and the decades beyond, I sought out new learning and teaching experiences to support my desire to, in Gandhi’s words – “Be the Change” – I wanted to see in the world. During this time of continuous professional evolution, I discovered how writing in my journal helped to calm the emotional flooding and other reactive behaviours that stemmed from the early traumas I had not yet named.
Eventually the habit of calming myself through writing led to Under the Moon, my first novel. Through writing about ageism, the medicalization of the aging process, and how making art can help us to find inner strength and wisdom, I discovered my personal connection to this making process – storytelling. At that point in my life, I had to return to teaching to support my family and learned pretty quickly that teaching Literature to high school and college students left little time and energy for novel writing. My journal remained a mainstay and writing short non-fiction pieces for small magazines serving the area helped me to work at the craft of writing.
Ten years after McClelland & Stewart published Under the Moon, during a break from teaching I researched and wrote Transformation in Canada’s Deep South to document the agricultural, social justice, and grass-roots activists challenging traditional approaches to farming, criminal justice, and human services. Writing grew in importance as I faced life crises and shifts in relationships. I soon found that through daily journal work I navigated these changes with more grace than I would have had without the influence of this reflection practice. In time, I began writing short stories and found these small bursts of creativity deeply satisfying.
While teaching a summer course in creative writing in Vermont, the father of my children died suddenly. In the days and weeks following his death, I began to drive back and forth between Vermont and Toronto to help with the chaos that followed. As I drove, a novel about two-middle-aged women living in the aftermath of an early, unhealed trauma came to me almost full blown. In previous fiction writing, a single character led me into a story. This time, I had a whole community of characters shaping how the novel unfolded. Because its subject was dark, it was a story I didn’t want to write. I suspect the novel’s group of characters had to work together to ensure I would follow through. The Kinder Sadist, my second novel, emerged from what felt during its writing to be a tragic, haunting chaos. It wasn’t until after its completion that I understood why I had to write the novel. This story and writing generally had become an indirect and therefore safe way to explore and resolve the more terrifying experiences of others’ and my own traumas.
As regular exercise does for the body, physical writing supports resilience and balance of the body, intellect, emotions, and spirit. As soon as I understood this, I began Once Upon a Body, a memoir exploring my early trauma and how I learned to recognize and heal its after-effects. During this writing period, I received another insight involving the relationship between fiction writing and emotional healing. The Kinder Sadist had become a container for those aspects of my personal traumas I couldn’t access except through the sensations of terror and despair my fictional characters felt. Writing about others’ feelings, thoughts, and sensations helped to reveal and release my own. Inadvertently, I had stumbled upon a source of healing that springs from imagining how fictional characters heal.
This insight freed me to complete The Buttes, my third novel and my first foray into eco-fiction. Writing Once Upon a Body taught me how important the greater-than-human world had become during my traumatizing childhood and adolescence. The sense experiences of belonging, absent among my human relationships, were everywhere when my caregivers freed me to explore the world, first in my grandmother’s garden, and then in Point Pelee National Park. In these havens, I discovered the welcoming acceptance of the natural world, in tame landscapes like our family garden, and in the wilder Point Pelee landscapes of forest and lake and pebbled beaches. In our garden and at Point Pelee, I experienced a rhythmic, healing peace as I learned to listen to the voices of this accepting and nurturing outer world. These experiences fed my imagination through the numinous world of story.
When I first trained in Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), a body-inclusive group of acupressure points that are stimulated during feeling or speaking of a challenging experience, person, or ongoing situation, it was to help college students learn how to self- and co-regulate when their personal traumas interfered with their abilities to set and reach goals and believe in their abilities to succeed in school and in life. Writing became a part of their healing journey because the subjects I taught required reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
For some time, I credited EFT with their successes, overlooking the storytelling-writing community we created together. Now I know that every healing technique in the service of wholeness requires not only the inclusion of the body but a weaving together of the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual wisdom that comes with telling ourselves our stories through writing, reflecting on, revising them, and, ultimately, revealing them to trustworthy witnesses.
Answering the call to heal from our early and adult traumas so we may “Be the Change” is an enriching experience. Still, even without the burdens of unhealed trauma, we can feel isolated by the systemic unfairness embedded in our institutions. While there is no easy fix for the largest issues, we can add our share of optimism and clarity simply by attending to our own unresolved issues and moving forward with others to increase the justice, kindness, and peace in the world.
When we embrace our healing journey with tools supporting our safety, we reclaim our power through our individual contributions to a more harmonious and loving world. As we connect with others engaged in social justice actions, we discover even greater healing power in community, ensuring we never do this difficult work alone.
Thank you for visiting Winter Blooms.