Lost for Words: Can Writing be Healing?

How many times have you heard people say in the aftermath of a traumatic event: “I just can’t talk about it right now.”  They describe themselves as being “lost for words,” as if the right words have not yet been invented to pinpoint feelings with precision. Some people eventually find their voice by writing poems, essays and memoirs, or keeping a journal.  For those who are visually oriented, the voice may speak through a painting or a photograph. The body tells us when we’re ready to unpack and codify feelings, to put words or other artistic expression around experiences for others to hear and see. For some, the impulse to jot down notes or keep a journal is a continuous, or discontinuous, process. For others even the mental recollection of the experience can stay tucked away for years and emerge long after, perhaps during another life-changing event that dredges up old memories. A Vietnam War veteran once shared that he didn’t speak about the war he experienced until years later when his son was about to be deployed to the Desert Storm conflict in the early 1990s. “It hit me like a ton of bricks – my son might be about to experience the same horrors that I had witnessed. I had to start talking, sharing my own experience, after twenty years of silence.” Sometimes the burden of owning the story is so great that there is a need to fictionalize and tell it as if it happened to someone else. It can take months or years to become comfortable with the telling.  Whatever the starting point, be kind to yourself and acknowledge that, while writing may help in the healing process, it takes time, reflection and […]

Critic or Critique: Giving a Writer Useful Feedback

  Most writers need feedback about their work – some more than others. Ray Bradbury, for example, was not only a highly motivated and prolific writer, but also a ferocious reviser without need for advance readers. He was disciplined in his writing process and daring. He said, “When you write – explode – fly apart – disintegrate! Then give yourself enough time to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.” If and when he did show his work to others before publication, he had already logged double-digit revisions. But, most of the rest of us earthling writers need support and encouragement along the road to the finished product. There are those writers who show their manuscript to no one until they think it’s ready for publication, but often, when I’m still revising, I like a nudge now and then from a carefully chosen reader who will be honest enough to say that they have no sense of what I’m trying to say, or they lost interest after the first paragraph, or they just couldn’t figure out what my characters were trying to do. This usually happens when I don’t know what I’m trying to say and I’ve wandered off into a thicket of ideas. My reader is not going to tell me what to do or how to find my way, however they might offer a clue or notice that there is too much of something and not enough of something else. Perhaps I won’t agree with my helpful reader – but I was the one who asked! […]

Grieving the Death of a Child

            When Tom L. lost his son, Mike, age twenty, in a fiery motorcycle accident, he never dreamed he would write a book about it. In fact, Tom described himself as a poor student and felt fortunate to finish high school. But, ten years after his son’s death, he still carried a profound sense of sadness at losing his only child. “Some friends thought I should be feeling better by that point,” recalled Tom. “But you just can’t push a button and make the pain go away.” He visited a counselor who told him that what he was feeling, besides normal grief after devastating loss, might be unattended sorrow. “Perhaps there is something else that you need to do, something that really allows you to express your feelings. Grief is like a garden in a heart washed out by a storm. You’ve got to tend the soil and grow new flowers. You seem to have a circle of supportive friends, but are there any details about your son and your relationship with him that you’d like others to know?  Why don’t you write me a list of those things, those thoughts that you want to nurture and grow.” Tom started writing and couldn’t stop. “I wrote my heart out,” he said. Two weeks later he had two hundred pages describing his son and what it was like to be Mike’s father – and eventually his friend as Mike grew into a young adult. Not everyone will attempt to work through grief by writing a book, but anyone who has experienced the death of a child of any age understands how profoundly difficult it is to ease the ache in the heart. What writing seems […]

Approaching an Understanding of the Vietnam War Era

For those who grew up during the Cold War, the Vietnam War was an unexpected tragedy creating unimaginable losses. This memoir follows the  experience of losing a beloved young West Point officer  at the height of the war and the healing that came many years later at reunions of those who had served with him during the war. Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War.  

Write, Eat, Walk, Write: Food for Thought

    One of my challenges in the writing process is how to stay connected to whatever I’m working on and enough distance, at the same time, to have a perspective on what I’m trying to say. Sometimes writing can feel like I’m looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I can work for hours laying down sentences and still feel I am not quite “there” on the page. My usual impulse is to get up and go to the refrigerator, just to check and see if something delicious has magically appeared. Even though I’m the one who stocks the frig, something new and different might have arrived mysteriously between paragraphs.   Amazingly, this little trip away from the desk helps the writing process almost instantly. As soon as I stand up from my desk, a sentence will reorganize itself in my head. Jonah Lehrer says in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works that this is the “outsider” problem. A writer reads her sentences again and again and very soon begins to lose the ability to see her prose as a reader. (In other words, I think I know exactly what I’m trying to say. I think I’m being clear, but that’s because I’m the one saying it.) A writer must reread and edit as if she knows nothing and doesn’t know what these words mean. She must somehow become an outsider to her own work.  But how can we achieve this?   Novelist Zadie Smith suggests putting a finished manuscript in a drawer – a year is ideal, she says, or as long as you can manage – so that you can become more of a stranger to your book and eventually read it in a new […]

Three Secrets of Stress-Free Weight Control

After working in the area of counseling and eating disorders for many years, I recognize that one of the chief sources of stress and low self-esteem for people is the anticipation of failure at weight control.  Many people report a kind of feeding frenzy just before D-day (the day the diet is to begin), followed by failure to stick to a plan during the first three days, followed by a rebound in weight. Thinking about dieting and weight control can be more stressful than the actual process. In fact, the lead up to “time to go on a diet” can even result in greater weight gain. We are constantly bombarded with methods to lose weight. Usually they involve expensive programs that promise success. However, there are three important ingredients in any weight loss program that do not involve money or signing up with any particular program. You can do them yourself, for free, and be on your way to successful weight control. Think of these steps as your diet “launch pad.”   Begin by monitoring your present weight and deciding not to gain any additional weight. Whatever your starting point – if you are ten, twenty or fifty pounds or more overweight – the first step is to monitor you weight by weighing yourself daily for three to four weeks and trying to maintain your weight rather than gain. If you don’t lose weight during this time, it doesn’t matter. The goal is to maintain your weight and not put on additional pounds. Start to keep a diet diary. As you begin to weigh yourself each day, keep a record of what you are eating. Notice if your weight seems to increase or decrease depending on what you […]

A Friend in Need: Memories of War

The following is an excerpt from the memoir: Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War.   There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.    Dwight David Eisenhower   It’s late April 2011, and already broiling hot at the entrance to the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center in Columbus, Georgia. This outing is part of the planned program of events during my fourth reunion with the guys of Alpha Company. Once again, we’re part of a motley crew of former GIs who served in the 22nd US Army Infantry Division in various wars, a few spouses, and me, the only Vietnam War widow in the group. In spite of the fact that we are here among about two hundred veterans of all ages, our section of the bus – those connected in some way to Dave’s Company back in 1969 – behaves like a merry band of war buddies, joking and teasing, ribbing each other about things that happened long ago in the region of Tay Ninh.  Now they include me in their repartee, as if I had been there, too. Our bus driver, Ike, a thin, talkative man, lightens the atmosphere further when he chimes in over the loud speaker in his melodious Georgia drawl throughout the two-hour bus ride from Atlanta with quips like: “Whatever you folks do back there behind me, don’t wake me up while I’m drivin’ “ How amazing to be on a road trip with these guys who were with Dave forty-two years ago in the jungles of Vietnam. Each time I’m with these men at a reunion I’m flooded with the feeling that Dave is present among us, that he is smiling at me from somewhere in the room.     Joe, […]

Celebrating Fathers

A memoir in which a wonderful relationship between father and son is described, and the loss of the son in Vietnam. Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War.

Father’s Day: Contemplating Fathers and Our Heritage

  As we approach Father’s Day this month,  I’m wondering what I would be if my father had been someone else.  This is the question posed by a magnificent collection of vignettes about fathers, called “Forty Fathers,” a book created by author Jess Meghan and photographer Sam Lindberg. This is not a book about parenting, It is rather about the enduring bond, like a fiber-optic cable, that stretches between father and child, father and adult-child, regardless of how much the father was present or absent from the child’s life.   Each tiny essay with accompanying archival photograph in “Forty Fathers” is a personal recollection, a deeply moving portrait of a son’s or daughter’s heritage. I will present several of these small anthems during this month as we contemplate fatherhood. Here is an excerpt by Cindy Brown Austin, entitled: “He Never Came Empty Handed.”   “I didn’t have a daddy. I had a father. And that was a different species altogether. Daddies wore shoes large enough for you to hide in; they stood in the doorway like unmovable bulwarks when the overflow from the project’s outside insanity flooded its banks and tried to push its way into the household. Having a daddy was greater than having money. Having a daddy meant you were a whole entire person in the world, not a torn scrap of a person, or a remnant from some thrown-away relationship that no longer existed. In the world of my early childhood my father was a shadowy figure, close enough to watch but too far away to make any real impact. My father had a wife who was not my mother. He married this woman, an older lady, in order to remain in the United States. […]

Remembering Gold Star Wives on Memorial Day

Gold Star Wives live in every part of the United States and come from every station in life, but they have one thing in common: Each one lost their spouse in war or from war-related injuries. There are tens of thousands throughout the country and about 8,000  have found their way to membership in the national organizaton by joining local chapters or becoming a member-at-large. The members of the Gold Star Wives (GSW) of America have battled since their formation by two widows in 1947, with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, to assure that spouses and family members of veterans are not forgotten. They have fought for pensions, health insurance, and education benefits. They have pressed for acknowledgment of the costs of war such as the long-term impact of chemical exposure, psychological effects, handicaps and ultimately the recognition that someone they loved made a supreme sacrifice.  The many chapters of GSW across the country and the world carry out numerous volunteer efforts to keep the legacy of the sacrifices of military service alive. Find out who they are in your community and support them in their efforts. As emotioanally difficult as it is to accept membership in this group, they wear gold-colored clothing and a cap at memorial and official events so that they can be recognized. To learn more about the Gold Star Wives, visit www.goldstarwives.org
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