As a victim of post traumatic stress disorder I want to make a difference.
According to the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder approximately sixty percent of men and fifty percent of women experience at least one trauma in their lives. Women are more likely to experience sexual assault and child sexual abuse whereas men are more likely to experience accidents such as physical assault, combat, disaster, or to witness death or injury.
Why it effects some people more would be difficult to say but Psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, wrote “life is difficult.”
But what can we do about it? We can write.
Dr. Molly Harrower, psychiatrist and author of Therapy In Poetry, said “long before there were therapists there were poets and from time immemorial man has struggled to cope with his inevitable inner turmoil. One way of so coping has been the ballad, the song, the poem. Once crystallized into words, all engulfing feelings become manageable, and once challenged into explicitness, the burden of the incommunicable becomes less heavy.”
From the richest to the poorest, to those in-between, we all have crosses to bear that would push us under if we don’t have a creative release.
My safety valve has been writing.
From the time I was in high school, living in an orphanage, to being a minister’s wife, trying to keep up my perfect front, to now, at the age of seventy-five, I find great joy in releasing my thoughts upon the page, but it does take courage to open up, to bare your soul.
When we are young we often start out trying to appear to be that perfect person until we finally learn that perfection can be a chore and it tends to drive away more people than a perfect-front job attracts.
Who wants to be around a perfect person if there is such a creature?
Writing allows your true self to come through, although most of us want to guard our private lives.
We don’t want to be hurt. It is only human.
It’s only when we let down our guards, a little, that we allow others into our world.
Nobody really wants to hear about all of our money or the trappings of our success.
People want to know that somebody cares.
One way of expressing concern is to write your thoughts down and encourage others to write.
This life is just too short to keep our stories to ourselves.
We all have a story, whether we know it or not. We can numb our minds by background noise and party talk and others never learn who we really are.
To paraphrase what President Theodore Roosevelt said“many people live in quiet desperation, knowing neither victory nor defeat.”
By being open, transparent in our writing, we draw others into our lives. We can leave a legacy for our heirs, allowing them to know where they came from and inspire them to make a difference with their lives.
Leaving your memoirs to your children is priceless.
I treasure the poems, stories, letters and old pictures I found in our old family trunk helping me find living, long lost relatives who shared their memories with me. What I learned encouraged me not to give up.
In 1983, Jack Gore, an English teacher, from Plain Dealing, told me that unless your writing is personal no one will ever understand what you are trying to say.
That advice helped me to write more than anything I’ve ever learned.
Writing can be just what’s needed most to survive!
It’s not what happens to us but how we use it as a tool to achieve our dreams is what makes the difference.
Leaving my story is my way of making a difference to who just might be going through difficult times themselves.
It may take a lifetime to work out our pain but writing has made all the difference in my life and it just might be the scalpel neededt o remove the pain in your life.
Contact Sarah at [email protected]