What can I expect during a session?
During a session you can expect to get pen to paper straight away by following a simple prompt. There is nothing more nerve wracking than staring at an empty page, so we begin to communicate with the page the moment a session starts. A warm-up may be a prompt such as “How am I? How am I really?” or a list of statements beginning with a stem such as “I want…” or “I am…”
Once the page is no longer empty, we focus on entering an attitude of noticing, reflecting through writing on how it would feel to write without self-criticism and to accept the words of other group members with an open heart, without the need to explain or improve.
We build through a series of small writes and shares to a longer focus piece. Either an individual piece or a collaborative piece and the opportunity to reflect on what we noticed as we were writing.
We then warm down, perhaps thinking about what we might like to take with us from the sessions and what we might like to leave in our notebooks until another time, perhaps the next session. We may check out by sharing what we will be taking away with us.
What can I expect over a block of sessions?
Over a block of sessions, you can expect to form a bond with the other group members. It’s a special way of knowing people when you have connected with their creative parts and shared some of their deeper aspects rather than just meeting one of the masks we all wear.
Some people report parts of themselves coming back to life. This is because by tapping into our innate creativity we are getting underneath the thoughts and feelings that become habituated through survival responses. It is also because we are joining up the different parts of ourselves through developing a mindful attitude, through connecting thoughts and feelings and memories to the physical world and our bodies. We are getting beyond what we expect to a place of freedom where what is can be allowed to just be without censorship, judgment or criticism.
You may find a feeling of resolution through noticing similarities between your life story and that of other group members. Or this may come from exercises that allow you to pan out and take a broader view of harmful incidents in your past. You may draw connections between the values held by your family or community and your responses to sexual violence. You may see that having an extended period of recovery is not unusual and in fact makes perfect sense. And you may shift deeply held, often unconscious, feelings of guilt or shame that keep traumatic memories alive by seeing that sexual violence can happen to anybody because it is a problem that exists within our society, not within us as the individuals it was inflicted upon.
How does groupwork help with trauma, especially the legacy of sexual violence?
Sexual violence is the tip of an iceberg, and the iceberg is a system that reduces and objectifies women while suggesting that possessing objects gives status and power. By leaving this iceberg for a while to step onto a little ice cube that is made of quite a different substance, you can get a better view of what that iceberg requires of you. Perhaps it requires your silence, or that you carry shame that is someone else’s.
Most trauma experts agree that it’s not what happens to you that makes the trauma stick, it’s the lack of support afterwards. With sexual violence this is more than just a lack of support, it is often a damaging set of messages, habits and customs where the support should be. Groupwork can provide a supportive community through which you can – over multiple sessions – come to disentangle some of this messaging and feel the support which allows you to heal.
The support you get from other survivors differs from the support of a therapist in that it is given freely from the heart from a place of simply wanting to help. Seeing yourself in turn being able to offer this to someone else builds a deep kind of confidence, self-respect and sense of power. It also helps you to re-story your suffering as something that has value – that it can help other people.
Sometimes seeing that other people have the same thoughts and feelings as you makes it easier to share things that are frightening or that seem unacceptable. This sharing creates the opportunity to be accepted and validated by others which can lead to a greater sense of belonging, not just inside the group but beyond.
How does writing help with trauma, especially the legacy of sexual violence?
There has been a lot of research since the 90s that has shown that writing has a beneficial impact on both mental and physical health as well as improving grades, less visits to health centres, better life satisfaction. Writing can help in the aftermath of trauma whether you choose to write about the traumatic event or write about your life experience more generally.
People theorise about trauma in two ways. Some people speak of trauma as something pushed down that is trying to burst up. They think about defences such as denial or repression as forces that inhibit the release of the trauma and so they understand writing about trauma as being a release. This frees up the energy that was spent pushing it down, allowing you to use that energy for more of yourself. For example, if your depression was numbing you so you wouldn’t have to feel your trauma then releasing your trauma can lift your depression as feeling will be more bearable. Writing about the trauma or how it feels during the hardest moments can release this energy. Writing about ourselves in new and unexpected ways can elude our habitual defences.
Others think of trauma as being stored in certain parts of the brain that are not well connected to the rest of the brain’s networks. So when we are triggered we are overwhelmed by ‘feeling memories’ which seem as if they are here-and-now reactions to present dangers and when we are not triggered we cannot access the feelings that so overwhelm us in other moments. This relies on a natural division between the left brain which deals with language and facts and the right brain which deals with our experience of ourselves and the world and with metaphor and imagery. So using creativity can link these two different experiences, allowing us to find the words, whether a metaphor, a list or a poem, that can communicate to ourselves a type of knowledge that may have escaped us for years.
Trauma is a word that is used to describe events but also the legacy those events leave behind in mental and physical health ‘conditions’. As our understanding of our trauma can be shaped by society’s messages, it can be locked in by negative emotions such as shame. If we use writing to explore our values or unpick this messaging, we can dissolve the shame and then the emotion, images or sensations related to the trauma can be processed by the brain and can recede into the past where they belong. If current life circumstances are triggering e.g. if we are living alongside racism or misogyny, rewriting important myths and fairytales can help us think of imaginative ways to negotiate our circumstances or to gain a sense of mastery, community or power in the face of oppressive conditions. Wherever there is oppression there is always resistance and tapping into that can give a sense of agency and vitality.