Your Write to Health

INNER CORE

This week in our journaling group, we worked with the adaptation of a German folktale about “Bundles”. This adaptation by Allison Cox is on the http://www.healingstory.org website. In this story a woman is trying to figure out how to deal with all of her troubles. She is told to seek assistance from that part of herself that is connected with all things. Through the story, she learns that the bundle of troubles that she is carrying is precisely the level of “troubles” that she can deal with and that her experiences and talents, both current and yet to come, will provide everything she needs to deal with her troubles.

How empowering--this belief that we are not given more in our life than we can handle, especially if we rely on the parts of ourselves that are connected with all things to help us find the solution. We can tap into the imagination and creative force of the universe to deal with all our challenges. Jung spoke before about a “universal unconscious”. As a writer I believe in the breadth of the creative force. Whether we think of it as a visit from a muse or from the collective unconscious--when you open yourself to the Universe’s creative potential, new ideas can spring more willingly into your mind.

We use metaphors to try and describe ideas and issues—a gray bundle of troubles; a silver and gold bundle of experiences. Some individuals, however, find it difficult to accept these images. They try to analyze or explain everything. Sometimes the creative force just wants to be—it doesn’t want to be understood. Just accepted for what it is.

Last night my daughter and I were reading from Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I had a bookmark stuck in a previous section and so we looked back at a quote that I was saving. The main character talks about what her core would be if every other part of her was melted away. I asked my daughter, “What would your core be?” And I tried to answer the question in my own mind because I knew it would get turned back on me. My answer was “love.”

My daughter told me that she wasn’t sure she understood the question. And sometimes that’s the point, you don’t need to completely understand, just be open to the images, the answers, and the creative flow. I asked her to not think too much, but just tell me the first thought or image that came to her mind when she focused on what her “core” was. She replied, “A fierce tiger.”

Now there’s an image.

“That’s your core,” I told her. “When you’re struggling with things, just know that inside you is a fierce tiger, ready to battle on.”

So….

1. What image do you have of your core? If everything else was melted away, what would be left? This does not have to make sense! It might mean more if it doesn’t. Just close your eyes, sit with the question and don’t dismiss an answer because it doesn’t make sense. Sometimes life doesn’t make sense.

2. Then visit Allison’s story if you’d like to read it all and think about your bundles of troubles, but also think about the experiences and talents that the universe has available to help you get through them. If you don’t have the experiences now, what do you need in order to get through your challenges? If the image in your mind is a “fierce tiger” that doesn’t mean you need to visit a zoo. What do you need to nurture your fighting spirit? What do you need to help get your voice heard—make you able to roar? What do you need to sharpen your claws so that you can fight ED? Don’t expect “perfect” answers—take the images that are given to you and write about those. It doesn’t have to make sense to start with. You might learn more about what you’re struggling with or what you need as you free write. Often writers have to write many drafts just to learn what their characters are trying to tell them. You might need to write a lot of pages to discover what you inner core thinks or feels.

So what are you waiting for?

Write On!

Martha Peaslee Levine, M.D.

ALL POWERFUL

This past Saturday, I returned from a writing conference. When I arrived at the airport, I tried calling my family but got no answer. I figured they were out having fun. When I drove up to my house, I was surprised to find all the lights off. Then I noticed some garage doors were open, my husband’s car was in the garage, and my garage door wouldn’t open.

Yes, the electricity was out.

Luckily, I had a flashlight easily accessible in my luggage—the conference was in the New Mexico desert. (This, of course, was the flashlight my family had been looking for just a few hours earlier.) I grabbed the light, turned it on, stepped towards the darkened garage and—as if by magic—the lights came on.

This led me to two areas of thought.

First was the sense of how I brightened my family’s life by coming home.

The physical display of the lights turning back on as I stepped towards the house illuminated this fact. People can often downplay the impact they have on others. Individuals with eating disorders can, with their perfectionist tendencies, believe that they always disappoint others, or that they are not good enough. Critical of themselves, they often underestimate their role in families and in friendships. This can also be true for individuals who struggle with depression. But often the presence of just being there is enough. Witness the exhilarated barking the dogs brought to my homecoming. They were happy just because I was home. I didn’t need to do anything special, be anything special, just being me and being there was good enough.

Second was the serendipity of the lights turning on as I walked towards the house. Part of me wanted to interpret this as the power of my homecoming. I arrive and—poof!—the lights come back on. Silly, right? But how many times do you take the blame for something that is larger than you? Apologize because someone had a bad day. Feel guilty because of situations outside your control. Criticize yourself because when someone is brusque in a store—it must be your fault. You must have made them cranky. Any of that sound familiar? People often take the blame for things over which they have no control. That would be like my taking credit for the lights coming on as I stepped into my house. Tempting. The thought of being all-powerful is seductive, but not realistic. And just as I couldn’t take credit for the lights turning back on, I shouldn’t take the blame for everyone’s moods, expectations or disappointments. Make sense?

So writing assignment time…

1)      Work on a gratitude journal. Sometimes people lose sight of things in their life that they are grateful for or positive influences that they have. Identifying these elements can help you see a broader and warmer aspect of your life. Are you grateful because the sun is out and you were able to smell blossoms on your way to work? Or if it was raining, rather than focusing on the gray clouds, are you grateful because gardens are being watered? Can you identify any ways that you know others noticed you and appreciated you? Did your dog jump up when you came home? Did a friend send an e-mail or exchange a phone call? Looking back on today, can you find something, even if it is little, that you feel grateful for?

2)      Is there a time that you took the blame for something that you couldn’t control? Or that was the result of someone else’s action? If I can’t take credit for the lights coming back on, I also shouldn’t take the blame because the dogs regressed while I was gone and were challenging to care for. I don’t control the dogs’ behavior. I can sympathize with the difficulties that my family faced, but I can’t rack myself with guilt. Are you racking yourself with guilt? Write about the situation--how much control did you really have?

Remember, we are not all-powerful.

So things you can’t control and ones that you are grateful for. That’s what we’re hoping to find—some balance in our lives.

So go…

Write on!

~Martha Peaslee Levine, M.D.

Continuous Past

When I’ve spoken about writing and depression before, I’ve had people say, “Yeah, I get depressed when I have to write.” That seems to be a leftover effect from diagramming sentences in high school English. People hear ‘writing’ and break out in a cold sweat.

The kind of writing that I’ve lectured on, practiced on my own, and used in groups and individual therapy is anything but drudgery. It is not stiff, stilted, follow the rules kind of writing. It is not having at least three lines in every paragraph kind of writing. It is not getting rid of sentence fragments kind of writing. Sometimes fragments rule! Like fragments of dreams. Fragments of memories. Fragments of fantasy. Or is that flights of fantasy? Fly me to the moon kind of writing is what we’re talking about. This is stream of consciousness, discover what I think, plumb my emotions kind of writing.

So how do we get started? Get a journal you love and a pen you like to use. You can use the computer if you want; although some studies suggest that longhand writing can help individuals deal more effectively with emotional material than typing. As a writer, I’m not certain about this. I have certainly plunged into a zone and dealt with emotional topics while typing away at my keyboard.

What will this blog offer? Writing prompts and exercises to use for your own emotional exploration and to use with patients. In the intensive day programs in the Eating Disorders Clinic at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, I run a weekly journaling group with our patients. We’ll check in on some of those prompts, touch on inspiration, and try to loosen some creative energy.

For the first prompt, discover your thoughts about writing. This can help you discover any hidden bias or fear that you might have as you start putting pen to paper. Or you can help your patients get loosened up with this prompt as they start to explore their thoughts.

What does writing mean to you? What memories do you have about writing? Did you have a pen-pal? Send postcards from vacation or fantasize about great adventures when you received postcards from someone else?

Pick a quiet place and set a certain amount of time aside so that you can drop into your thoughts—even if it is just five minutes. Try to turn off the inner critic or encourage your patients to ignore the voice that tells them that everything has to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be. There is even an imperfect tense in English or rather called the continuous past. As therapists we know that the past is continuous and affects the future! But I did promise that we wouldn’t get into grammatical rules so…..

Go Write On!

Martha

Martha Peaslee Levine, M.D.

Your Write to Health

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