Aimee and Tess Blog Post

Although I won't be researching writing in letter form, I find letter writing to be extremely useful in the healing process. I recently discovered that writing a letter to one of my overwhelming emotions (e.g. worry) actually helped me acknowledge it through personifying it and ultimately gain compassion towards it. Writing this letter allowed me to restructure my relationship with my worry in a way that helped me regain power in that situation--I didn't feel so helpless anymore. I was able to get out of bed and start my day with a more positive outlook. No matter to whom or what you address a letter, there is something in the direct communication that opens space for your transformation with that entity.

I really enjoyed Aimee's chosen article, "Writing Memoir and Writing for Therapy." This piece spoke to a lot of my own questions I have for my research paper. What exactly can a professor do to draw a line between therapy and writing? But in reality, this fear-driven separation doesn't give a fair portrayal of what counseling actually does. Both therapy and writing to heal have a process that involves confession, yes, but more importantly, the restructuring of thought processes surrounding trauma. DaPra describes this process when she says that "while the initial writing—the first draft—may provide a cathartic effect, the lasting benefit comes from seeing the problem in a new light—the organizing, editing, and structuring of a piece of writing."

Both therapy and writing have the potential to be ineffective. "The point is, that isn’t the fault of the subject. Poorly run group therapy, where members do nothing more than complain about the same problems over and over again, doesn’t make people better, either; in fact, it can make them much worse, by reinforcing negative thought patterns. But both writers of memoir and those in therapy must reflect thoughtfully on their stories."

Emotional Intelligence: Lauren, Charlotte, and Karen

The articles our class has shared so far have been surprisingly attention-grabbing. Many of them I found relevant to my own research in teaching emotional literacy and the problems in how we teach our kids through public education. I also found a lot of their articles to be relevant to issues our campus has been facing. I particularly appreciated the article "Should White Men Stop Writing?" because as a white person, I've often struggled with figuring out how to join the conversation on racial injustice without taking a space that isn't mine to occupy and without silencing voices of POC any further. Even though white men cannot possibly account for the stories of POC, he can talk about his experience with his whiteness. Tim Wise, a white author on racial injustice in America, once said that he never thought he had any experience with race until he realized his whiteness is his experience with race. It's a lack of obstacles and assumptions. It's a place of privilege that allowed him to remain blissfully unaware for a notable amount of his upbringing.

I also really enjoyed Charlotte's "Empathy and emotional intelligence" article because I found it to be closely linked to my own research. It's interesting how Konstantikaki and Ioannidou argue that all eight forms of intelligence should be given an opportunity for exploration by students. I know a lot of alternative schools, such as Waldorf schools, strongly emphasize the interdisciplinary way of teaching that intertwines different forms of intelligence. 

Allie and Kirsten Response

I found the three articles that Allie and Kirsten chose to be both intriguing and informative. Kirsten's article, "Can Emotional Intelligence be Taught?",  was especially interesting because it built upon my own research for my paper about teaching writing and healing in the classroom. I have no trouble believing that mental and emotional well-being strongly impact one's ability to succeed academically. Teaching emotional intelligence in a kindergarten setting has shown clear benefits to the students despite their young age, because emotional intelligence is crucial at every stage of development. Kahn was able to present studies that not only proved the positive effects of creating room for emotional development in the classroom, but also provided tangible ways it can be done

Allie's topic for research particularly resonated with me because gender binaries are often implicitly reinforced in academia, and can lead to harmful effects on students. I believe that challenging social norms in a classroom is an excellent way to both encourage critical thinking and to also encourage a space for reflection on ways it impacts students on an individual/personal level. Despite the Buzzed being extremely entertaining, it also makes a strong point on how prevalent gender roles are taught to us, especially in our consumer-driven society that sells products geared towards each gender.

Overall, I think both Allie and Kirsten have chosen topics that offer a lot of insight into how we teach younger generations and ways we can encourage a space for healing through academia.

Ephron Micro Essay

     I was the youngest out of five daughters in a makeshift family--my older sister, Abby, and I inherited three step sisters at the marriage between my dad and his new wife, whose sugar-blond hair and sweet pea cheeks seemed to me the pinnacles of womanhood and secrecy.
     It was never a competition between my sisters and myself because I always came in last. I was last to buy a bra, last to get my period, last to learn the language of flirting. Even at fourteen, my toothpick arms met at the center of my plank board chest. I wore a 28AA.
     I never really chose to be an outsider. I wanted to hang out and talk about boys. I wanted to make weird home movies and have inside jokes. There's a family photo of us: the camera captures the backs of three of my sisters, all holding hands walking down the sidewalk, me in the grass trying to keep up.
    With my nose pressed against the window, I grew up watching them thrive and rage their way through adolescence. There would be glimpses--moments of acceptance into their pack--a trip to the pizza shop, a pleasant car ride on a family vacation. But it was at this brink between knowing my place as the unwanted little sister and the hope of their acceptance, that my stance would teeter, unstable. I'd say or do the wrong thing and fall back over the edge, back again to the outside of the window looking in.
    To this day, it's rare for me to have female friends. A very small handful. It's always been easy to make the initial connection with other women--an extroverted personality makes for quick acquaintances. But it's always in that in-between moment, the teetering between acceptance and watching from my window, that I retreat. I say the wrong thing, I start acting weird. The ghost of my fourteen-year-old-self stirs somewhere deep within me, telling me to keep my distance, that I don't know what I'm doing and it's not worth the risk of a likely rejection.

"From Trauma to Writing" Response

Marian MacCurdy's essay on healing through writing was exactly the type of essay I've been looking for to include in my research for the pedagogy of writing and healing. MacCurdy addresses the delicate balance between an emotionally-literate writing class and therapy. Writing about trauma doesn't necessarily (and usually isn't) about the most emotionally-charged or intense experiences. And if they are, they need to be approached in organic, natural ways. She claims that "once students get beyond the clichés that can undermine the power of the experience, I have found that those emotionally charged topics can generate sharp imagery, clear sensory detail, and thematic sophistication" (MacCurdy 159). She moves on to examine how writing about trauma actually helps students master literary devices more than traditional academic writing. Because trauma is non-linear, non-verbal and imbedded within images, sensations, etc., learning how to "show don't tell" is essential to convey an experience effectively. It's a win-win scenario. Writing about trauma helps take a chaotic event and help recover from it by making sense of it and being heard, while also more effectively teaching a student how to write.

Micro Personal Essay

Emotion was a complicated entity in my household growing up, an entity I could never truly understand. 

I have always felt everything, both joy and sadness, deeply and with every drop of passion in my body for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are of me crying or throwing tantrums that were intense to say the least. My next door neighbor, Miss Fran, and I would frequently spend time together when my parents were out of the house. I can recall throwing a fit, over what I don’t remember. She witnessed it with patience and a heart swelling with sympathy for my overreaction. I begged her not to tell my mom. She promised that she wouldn't. 

My parents were not as understanding about my “temper.” I was often scolded, grounded, and otherwise punished for my emotional episodes. I remember hearing the word “cry baby” a lot. I remember a day, I might have been four or five, when I was sitting under my mother’s antique coffee table, sobbing uncontrollably. I remember my mother defeatedly telling me how I never go a day without crying, and up until the present day, her words are etched into my memory. I remember thinking at that moment, “wow, it’s true,” and made a conscious effort to go more than one day without tears. 

Before they separated when I was seven, my parents always fought. I remember my sister woke me up one night during one of their fights and the two of us stowed away across our backyard and into Miss Fran’s house. She was in the shower when we got there. She got out without washing the soap out of her hair. 

My father had a raging temper that no one ever talked about. My childhood was spent walking on eggshells, never knowing what would set him off. Six-foot-four and over 200 pounds, my father's untamable rage was more terrifying than the T-Rex that I used to think lived under my bed. Emotion was never predictable in my household. It was trial and error. It was crying for attention. It was yelling to feel heard. It was the secret, repressed love-hate relationship I had with the voices that I knew only I could hear. It was absorbing all the pains of the world into my five-year-old heart without a single crumb to lead me down my path of emotional literacy. 

Entering the Pedagogy of Writing and Healing

I’ve always known that I wanted to teach, but not in the conventional way that I initially pursued. I came into Ithaca College as a secondary English education major, only to feel lost and discouraged for the first two years of my college career. I eventually switched to writing, which was the only aspect of the English education field that ever truly inspired me. I think what discouraged me from pursuing my education degree was that the pedagogy we learned was so narrow-minded. Much of what we were taught was about the infrastructural flaws in our public education system and how to maneuver around them. I didn’t feel inspired. I felt constrained. Within the first semester as a new writing major, I learned more about myself than I had in the previous four semesters. I explored language and the ways I can manipulate it to better understand my environment, our culture, my emotions and my own personal narrative. I became an essential part to what I was learning, rather than a separate entity from it, and was pushed out of the passive, disengaged absorption of facts and ideas and into self exploration through the learning curriculum. It was at this point that I remembered my passion for learning and my desire to be the same figure that inhibits and encourages the same learning experience in the lives of others. I still want to teach, just not in a traditional American school. 

The authors we have so far read this semester have more finely sculpted my intent to teach. Typical classroom settings reflect our overall society in that neither allow for space to address or explore trauma and general emotional literacy. Mental health and illness have always been both hushed and shamed through culturally embedded stigmatization. Yet, as we have discovered, isolation is one of (if not the most) aggravating force behind mental illness. In all the classroom and workshop examples we have followed in Writing and Healing, people heal most when working within a community to allow one to feel protected, accepted and heard by their peers. Many of our readings discuss the necessary environments that are conducive to a healing experience. 

In our two most recent readings, Jeffrey Berman’s “Writing about Suicide” and Jerome Bump’s “Teaching Emotional Literacy,” I gained a more detailed understanding of what it logistically takes to turn a conventional class into an opportunity for a deeper, more meaningful kind of learning—self exploration and healing. Both authors listed the necessities and obstacles they faced while transforming their courses. However, the more I learn about the pedagogy of healing through writing, the more questions I ask: does one have to be an established educator before introducing such a stigmatized and controversial curriculum? Is there a place in existence that focuses its teaching on emotional literacy and community learning? If so, where are they and how were they established? What other types of educational facilities teach in this way? Workshops? Private schools? I want to spend the rest of my time in this course researching how one enters the discourse of writing and healing and how I, as a perspective educator, can enter the field by focusing my teaching in this way while also incorporating other principles I value in education, such as sustainability and independent thinking. 

"Writing about Suicide" Response

This reading provided me with a tangible way of incorporating healing into traditional classroom settings and curriculum. More importantly, however, it provoked the question that I want to explore further in my 1-page write-up: How can I join the discourse of writing and healing? Or rather, how can I enter this discourse to mediate healing through writing? It's a career path that has become increasingly appealing to me and I want to use the rest of my time in this course researching what I need to do to logistically enter this field of emotional literacy through writing.

Berman's experience constructing a class for healing was a trial and error creation from scratch. He had to take numerous precautions to make sure he was not liable for worsening mental illness by clearly stating that his class was not an attempt or substitution for mental health counseling. He also had to warn his students that the material in his course may be triggering and for students to take the necessary actions if they react negatively. Berman's choice of making his students' diaries optional and anonymous was a great choice conducive for self-exploration in a no-pressure, self-driven manner, a manner that ultimately proved more beneficial than had it been required. He found a way to make his class focused on the writing, the stories being told, and the effort of his students, rather than attempting to make sense of their stories or trying to adopt the role of a therapist. For most students, including Jon, simply feeling heard was enough motivation to further his understanding about his childhood and family secrets.

"Voices from the Line" Response

I believe this essay is my favorite piece we have read so far. Julier does a phenomenal job describing and sharing the Clothes Line Project and the significant impact it has had as a collaborative work both for its participants and in the community. Julier wades through the different shirts, lightly grouping them into which stage in the healing process they might have been capturing. For some, simply telling what happened was enough; giving their stories a voice was a step towards wholeness and healing. For others, their shirts focused "on hope, or on searching for something missing, or at times on the reconstruction of a world view different from the one that was authored by the perpetrator, or one while made violence acceptable" (Julier 370). I took particular notice of the shirts that spoke to perpetrators directly, as a way to distance oneself from their victimized selves, and to claim a new, more empowered identity (Julier 371).

As someone who has experienced forms childhood trauma that have influenced my adult behaviors in different relationships, I can see how not only writing this kind of story but also having it hung up in solidarity with many others would make me feel capable of healing and taking back the control over my life. Julier integrates the idea of isolation and community, an idea we've seen since the book's introduction. Because the feeling of isolation stunts one's ability to heal, writing in this manner is definitely most effective in collaboration and unification with other voices. It brings power to their themes and messages, as well as draw awareness and empathy from the public.

I also find it important that Julier mentions that educators create a space for women to share traumatic stories by feeling protective of them. These women have been vulnerable in every aspect of addressing and coping with their experiences, and thus to allow them to heal through writing, one must do their best to protect their students from shame, judgment, misrepresentation, etc.

"Pathography and Enabling Myths" Respone

This essay deeply resonated with many beliefs about the healing process that I've already formed and further developed my understanding in a way that was easy to absorb. It's true that when someone becomes ill, our society is quick to view illness as "a condition to be corrected, rarely to be simply accepted" (Hawkins 223). The focus in these situations is immediately put on the illness, while the person suffering from it is rarely acknowledged as needing his or her own attention. Serious illness is a traumatic experience for most people. Even after a cancer patient's illness falls into remission, his or her emotional response may not have followed suit. 

This is where Pathography comes into play. It allows those who have endured serious illnesses or other traumatic experiences to make sense of and organize their overwhelming and complex emotional reactions to their experiences. It helps a person reach out (either to others directly or to a vague general audience), leading him or her out of the isolation that frequently comes with trauma. Hawkins claims that "serious illness threatens not just the existence of the body but also the integrity of the self" (241). Pathography creates a space for those who have experienced illness to not only explore and understand their emotions but to also "go beyond it"-- to grow within the writing process itself and give new meaning to their experiences, as well as reach out to others who still suffer. 

"Healing and the Brain" Response

Honestly, this reading was probably my least favorite from our selected works. Alice Brand focuses 95% of her piece on explaining the functioning of the brain and very little time actually writing about healing, even though she makes a few connections to healing within the reading. I also found her writing to be choppy and her syntax was a bit hard to follow. Regardless, she does make some interesting and useful claims that can apply to what we're learning in class.

Brand argues that the psychology behind emotions and healing are more complex than most people know. She emphasizes the amygdala, which seems to have the most power in producing emotional responses. This small part of the brain "gets the message forty milliseconds before the intellectual part of your brain does" when someone sees something that resembles a snake (Brand 201). She revisits this idea later in her essay when she claims that "the amygdala can register 'memory before it even reaches our senses...prior to and independent of' the intellect" (Brand 208). These findings reminded me of our first reading and people who suffer from PTSD. Flashbacks occur when something resembling some aspect of a memory triggers an emotional response, before the person can reason their way out of it by realizing there is no real danger here in the present moment. As a person who suffers with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), I often am unable to reason my way out of a panic attack or some other state of anxiety because whatever triggered me sent me spiraling into a certain emotional response, and my reasoning abilities go offline for a while. However, writing is a way I can better understand these emotions, which prepares me to deal with future anxiety.

Complicity

For twelve years of my life, I spent several weeks of every summer at a Girl Scout day camp. After my twelfth year, I decided not to return. Something wasn't right--there was a constant feeling of always being watched under an unseen eye of judgment. Trips to the porta-potty would almost always turn into privately bashing a girl from the group. I wasn't innocent, either. Kicking up gravel with sneakers that would have made a great topic for gossip themselves, I would listen to my fellow camper's abrupt topic change. I would nod in agreement. Eventually I would chime in. We would laugh at some insignificant quality of another, a quality we would use as our own form of twisted entertainment for days. But it all grew old, and I moved on from Oak Spring Day Camp. In my high school, I still gossiped in cramped muggy bathrooms during homeroom, assuming the complicity of my listeners. It would take years before I considered what caused my desire to shame others, that it was really a reflection of my own insecurity, and more years still until I saw the pattern of girls bashing girls, how our society teaches us to hate each other, rather than build each other up. 

For these epiphanic reasons, I decided to return to Oak Spring as a counselor, to positively influence the lives of these girls, and with a certain amount of idealistic hope, redirect the course of their social futures towards one of female peace and solidarity. I drove my Honda-CRV up the gravel, tree-shaded entrance with unfiltered optimism. I had plans for team work building activities and self-esteem exercises. But after a few days in breathing in the frustratingly hot and humid air, I realized something: my coworkers were no better than the girls-- that they'd gossip about each other even worse than the campers. 

On an afternoon during my second week, I brought my campers to run through the sprinkler. While they frolicked through the water, a camp-aid (a slightly younger, volunteer counselor) joined me on a bench. The two of us had been working well together all week, bonding over shared stories and experiences. What seemed to be out of nowhere, she began talking about another counselor at the camp. 

"She's so fucking lazy," the camp-aid said. "She just doesn't do anything." 

Here I was, listening to my coworker perpetuate the very behavior I sought to cut out of the girls we were mentoring. The worst part is that I agreed with her. Her claim about the other counselor wasn't untrue. The counselor was in fact extremely lazy and put a burden on the rest of us. But there had to be another way of handling this, of turning it into a solution. 

I listened to her attentively. I paused a moment before responding. 

"What do you think we could do to make it better?" I said. She looked at me, puzzled.

"How can we make this into a solution?" I said, rephrasing my question. At first she seemed hesitant, but eventually opened up to the idea of creating some kind of solution. By this point, two other counselors had joined us on the bench. 

"I came to this camp because when I went here years ago, I realized how girls are taught to hate each other. Why are boys taught to work together, while girls are taught to bring each other down? I want to lead these girls away from hate. I want to teach them how to build each other up and to work together. I'm sad to say that I've already heard gossip between counselors here. But how are we ever going to teach this to our girls when we don't do it ourselves?"

They all looked at me with sad, understanding eyes. I thought I smelled change in that hot, humid air.

"Language and Literature as 'Equipment for Living'" Response

In Tilly Warnock's essay, she explores the influences of unquestioned and usually unnoticed aspects of our identities that were handed to us at an early age, sometimes since birth. Our "directions" are something that usually, we don't have the privilege or opportunity to choose for ourselves. Our "life, time, history, race, class, gender," and names had all been chosen for us, simply by our births (Warnock 41). When these children grow up and write about themselves, they must completely reconsider the idea of "I" and "me," as they both were constructed by others and one's interactions with these social constructions. Therefore, excluding life from one's writing limits how much one can grow with her words. Life-writing should be limitless. It should involve as much revision as one needs or desires to unbound the possibilities for the meaning in the writer's life. A writer's life should mean whatever she wants it to mean, and limiting that at all will surely restrict her growing process.

For me, Warnock's most provocative idea was using her own life story to exemplify the molding factors of social constructions and the endless implications they created for her in her early adolescence. Acknowledging the unchosen circumstances of one's identity will allow her to more knowingly explore herself in her writing. I would like to further delve into the idea of chosen and unchosen identity, and how writing can aid in the deconstruction and reconstruction of who we are. 

Personal Experience

I've always been terrified of being abducted. I've envisioned it more than once: in high school self-defense classes and in dreams. I turn around every fifty steps when I walk alone late at night. I have a rape whistle on my keychain. Despite the fear I held onto, I  always pictured myself as a fighter. I'd see myself grappling and struggling, clawing and kicking. But when it actually came down to it, I didn't fight; I froze. 

It wasn’t my first music festival—it was already my second one just during that particular summer. I’d been going to concerts, raves, dances, and music festivals for years. I started partying young—around seventeen— so dealing with the occasional inebriated, obnoxious or ill-intentioned creep was nothing new. I knew all the rules: stick together; go nowhere alone, stay aware of your surroundings. But when unlucky timing mixes with getting a little too comfortable, anyone is vulnerable. 

* * *

It’s nearing the end of the first night of Moonrise, a two-day electric music festival in Baltimore. I’ve danced for ten hours straight, running between multiple stages with my boyfriend, Adrian, and another couple, Luke and Erin. But by this time in the day, I have the satisfying mix of feeling happy and exhausted. We’re toward the outer edge of a large crowd when I tell them to keep dancing without me, that I’ll be sitting against the fence that was in their direct line of vision. 

As I sway to the beat of the music, eyes closed, enjoying the moment, I feel something indescribable, like being watched. I open my eyes and there he is: a forty-something, greasy man, with a nasty five-o’clock shadow. He stands over me and sticks out his hand. 

“Hi,” he says.

“Hello,” I say hesitantly. He shakes my hand, but doesn’t let go of it. 

“Come with me,” he says, tightening his grip on my hand. He starts pulling me toward him. His free hand grabs my forearm. 

* * *

It  was like those dreams when you need to run but your legs only move in slow motion or the dream when you want to scream but you can’t utter a sound. I wonder what my face looked like as he pulled me farther off the ground. I was barely able to make out the word “Adrian." My boyfriend didn’t hear me say his name; it was entirely too loud and I practically whispered it, but he happened to look over at the same time, ran over, and quickly diffused the situation. 

Nothing actually happened to me. I walked away without a scratch, took a moment to collect myself with the support of my friends, and we made our way to the closing show. But what did follow me after that night was exactly that: what didn’t happen: my ability to fight back—how if no one turned to look at me, how easily I could have been taken. 

"Whose Voice is it Anyway" Response

What I found most compelling about Gere's essay is the idea of voice in general and how an individual's is incredibly susceptible to influence from community and authoritarian figures. This led me back to the book's introduction which talks about the crucial importance of community acceptance of sufferers who need healing. However, talking FOR someone who has a softer voice, or difficulty expressing themselves has an adverse effect from the people intending to help by translating. This is because when you tell someone else's story for them, it becomes your story instead of theirs, and it makes the softly-spoken that much more voiceless. I would like the class to focus on how we, as allies, can create a space for these kinds of people to speak for themselves without taking the reins of the conversations.

Writing and Healing: An Introduction

1. Anderson and MacCurdy shed light on the ways in which people can develop mental illnesses, such as PTSD, that form from suppressed traumatic life events. It is important to recognize the social implications of the suppression of traumatic experiences; Society is wont to discourage public dialogues about trauma, impose shame on one's experience (especially those of a sexual nature), and certainly stigmatizes mental illness. Anderson and MacCurdy explain how this societal lack of acceptance perpetuates harm and delays the healing process of the individual.

They claim that having an open, safe, and accepting space for the stories of these people to naturally unfold is crucial to their healing process. People who have experienced trauma also need to be able to grieve--to truly feel their sadness--before they can make sense of it. That is why denying or ignoring feelings of grief (especially due to the lack of community acceptance) lead to shame and isolation, thus stalling the healing process.

In terms of writing and healing, a writing teacher needs to create an open-ended space in which a student's story can unfold on its own (not by forcing him or her to write about a traumatic experience) in order for the student to learn from whatever understanding of that experience that is presented.


2. Personally, I found most interesting the connection between the individual and his society as a huge (if not the largest) determiner in the healing process. I enjoyed the first example Anderson and MacCurdy provide with Vietnam War veterans. The authors explain that because the veterans were "in a culture that could not or would not understand or accept them, veterans' symptoms only intensified" and that "one's recovery from PTSD is directly related to the response of the community to the sufferer" (Anderson, MacCurdy 3-4).  This shows the importance of the environment created in a writing class, and whether or not it is conducive to the sufferer feeling understood.

3. I would enjoy for our class to review the first half of page 6. It reinforces the idea of community as a determiner for how well a sufferer is able to recover. It also infers the specific type of environment that must be created within any writing classroom or community. I think it's necessary to talk about how we, as writers in a writing class, can act and change our own perspectives to nurture and encourage the healing of others.