If you find yourself in the shower “Singing in the Pain,” then you have discovered one way of using words to express your wounds. However, if your words are from other people’s songs, then you haven’t yet transformed your wounds into your own words. In order to do this, you must first describe your wounds.
Are your emotional wounds from physical disease or injury? Are your wounds solely from emotional trauma? Certainly, major emotional wounds could benefit from sessions with a therapist of your choice. However, describing your wounds from a writer’s perspective and finding the right words to express them at the right time may be helpful as well.
“’Telling our story’ is how we make sense of the world and ourselves. Some people – victims of trauma, for example – have difficulty articulating what they have experienced, yet storying and sharing the trauma can weave those threads into a stronger fabric, a more inclusive story” (The World is Made of Stories by David R. Loy, p.27).
If you think of your life as a story, what are its elements? (Watch for my upcoming article “Viewing Your Life as a Drama.”) What role do your wounds play in your life story?
“Our joys and sorrows, laughter and tears, pleasures and pains, epiphanies and despairs – all are storied. They are meaningful within the context of a narrative” (ibid. p.24).
You can choose to transform your wounds into words which can lead to greater self-understanding as well as greater joy and satisfaction. It’s not a quick-fix or cure for suffering. Transformation through writing can be a gradual but deeply meaningful process if you are called to undertake it. Eventually, rather than “Singing in the Pain” you could find yourself singing “I’m happy again.” And if through grace and hard work, transformational joy appears, sing it to the world. Sing your words onto paper and commune with the eternal and sacred song of life.
Photo Credit: Photo by Curt Fleenor at Flickr Creative Commons.
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