Yesterday I picked up Pete Walker’s book on CPTSD, and as I listened to his words, it hit me.
OF COURSE!!!!
When I wrote Lost and Found, I learned so much about myself.
It helped me process an extremely complex and confusing experience I was going through, and I found out how much of my own story I was telling, even when I was telling Cassie’s story.
So much so that every chapter feels like a lived experience to me. And while some parts are actually 99% true to reality, all parts are 100% true to emotions.
And as I listened to Pete Walker’s chapter on Verbal Ventilation, it made sense why this process had felt so healing to me:
“Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left-brain cognition to intense right-brain emotional activation.
It fosters the [writer’s] ability to put words to feelings, and ultimately to accurately interpret and communicate about his various feeling states.
When this process is repeated sufficiently, new neural pathways grow that allow the left- and right-brain to work together so that the person can actually think and feel at the same time.”
So many times we do things because we follow our intuition, we follow our gut instinct that something is good for us.
It feels so validating to come across the research and scientific explanation behind it, confirming that yes, you can trust yourself to know what’s good for you.
Writing Lost and Found saved me, and I will forever cherish the healing experience that came with writing it.
If you were to use writing as part of your own growth process, what story would you tell?
Not sure? Try out my free exercise to find out.
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