I just found this after going through my uni things. This was one of the last subjects I took before graduating, so if it's crap, I don't really have any excuses now do I.. Personally, I have absolutely no idea whether it is rubbish, genius or somewhere along the line between the two (probably a safe guess :))
If you happen over this blog, I assume you like reading. I hope so, otherwise you'll never make it to the end of this essay.
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addicted to therapy
A meditation on scriptotherapy and the multiplicity of styles available in life narratives.
My life’s lowest point coincided with takeoff, as the 747 lifted its wheels and disconnected itself from the Indian subcontinent. All the frustration of the previous 18 months suddenly and violently found a release valve. I wept openly, tragically, causing much consternation and discomfort in the passengers around me. I was not normally capable of letting my feelings find full force around so many people, but for the first time in my life, I was oblivious to everything but my own pain. The genie was loose and there was no way of putting it back in the bottle.
After we had reached cruising altitude, a stewardess came and gently put her hand on my shoulder, and with her touch, I found I could put my tears away. I became quite self conscious and aware of what I had done. In the place of my tears, a fog of self hatred, self pity and seething anger descended on me, and I sat staring blankly at the headrest in front of me. My countenance brooked no invitation, and the surrounding passengers gratefully accepted my signal and turned to their novels and films. Finally I slumped back against my own headrest and collapsed into an unsettled slumber. With each passing second India was receding further and further into the past.
I woke slowly, dreamily, unsure of where I was. In the moment before I opened my eyes, the soft jolting of light turbulence reminded me of long trips I took as a child in our family’s station wagon, when I would lie in the back looking up watching the clouds go past. But then reality slotted into place. I was no longer a child. Those days had left us all behind. I was heading back to Copenhagen to my wife. I had failed for a second time at my task, and I had no choice but to suffer the ignominy of abandoning my missing brother to mother India, to her timeless embrace. Untold millions had suffered and died at her hands; it was an ordinary enough fate. And my brother surely no longer cared. But for me, it was the culmination of the hardest few years in my life, and I felt like I’d been taken apart and poorly reassembled.
I let my mind wander back to earlier days, trying to see if there were any portents I should have noticed, trying to see if there were now any reason to reconsider my disbelief in fate. Fate was an illogical concept to grapple with, as it could be applied in retrospect. To consider ‘that which came to pass’ as being one’s fate was a common enough interpretation but was just too facile for my sensibility. To believe that something ‘was meant to be’ took a leap of faith much more considerable and faith was anything but my strong point. Nevertheless I trolled the depths of my memories for any sign of what was to come. Strangely enough, I saw omens in every corner, unheeded warnings that had now come home to roost. Ignoring these as the result of my unbalanced psyche, I tried to empty my mind and sleep again, but the past would not yet let me rest.
Greg was on his way to visit my wife and I in Denmark when he disappeared, his two-week stopover turning into an eternity. He was thirty four.
This is how the story might begin; one version of it at any rate. For there are many possible versions; many approaches to take. For me, it began six years ago with a short story. A structured re-telling with a beginning and an end – and a conclusion that I didn’t have in real life. Then came several clumsy attempts at starting larger projects, in both non-fiction and fictional formats. These were followed by a dark piece of poetry, a journalistic piece, a hypertext, a ficto-critical essay and finally the beginnings of a more considered, longer piece, using a creative non-fictional approach. All had their origins in the disappearance of my oldest brother in 1995. All had him, or more correctly, myself in relation to his disappearance, as the subject. Collectively, they form my literary attempts at self therapy. They are what Suzette Henke, in her book Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, calls scriptotherapy - the “process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic re-enactment.”
I had been writing about my brother’s disappearance for six years before I ever heard that term used, but as soon as I did, recognition that therapy was indeed one of my writing’s most useful functions promptly asserted itself in my mind. Connecting with others had been a more collateral bonus, in that a few of the pieces were published in various forms on the Internet and had inspired many people to contact me with their feelings around my writing, and the events depicted within. But I had never set out to write about my experiences for profit or to affect people emotionally. It was always something I felt I needed to do. In the back of my mind I knew its main function had always been to try and help me understand what had happened in my world. Putting it on paper, in concrete, and perhaps more importantly, completed form, has helped me come closer to understanding and slowly accepting what has happened. I have come to think of it in the terms that I have been slowly writing myself into a position where I can accept the unacceptable. Anaïs Nin puts it in similar terms: “I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live” .
Particularly for me, in the specific circumstances of dealing with the open ended loss of a missing person, in which there is no closure, I also feel that the writing of narrative helped me by way of its very structure. No matter how ambiguously I ended my pieces, at least they all had one. It was more than I had. Writing again and again gave me the chance to finish Greg’s story, providing me the smallest amount of closure, however ‘literal’. Another effect it had on me was that through the years, it helped me assuage my feelings of guilt. When I was writing, I felt like I was doing something; that I hadn’t just abandoned my brother to a cold grave on the side of a mountain. In a drawn out missing person case, any feeling of ‘doing something’ is therapy in itself.
Henke’s ideas on scriptotherapy initially came from an interest in psychoanalytical theory. She argued that if one accepted the basic premise of Freud’s talking cure – “a psychoanalytic working through of repressed memories brought to the surface and abreacted through the use of language and free association” – a question arose whether the analyst was even necessary. Might not the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis “reside more in the experience of ‘rememory’ and re-enactment than in the scene of transference posited by Freud?” This question led her to a detailed analysis of life writing, in particular women’s life writing. She stumbled across the fact that trauma and testimony played a large role in many of the autobiographical works she examined. This was evidently more of a re-discovery than an original thought, but led to Henke producing a detailed theoretical analysis of the functions of autobiographical writing as seen from a psychoanalytical perspective. As she articulately summarises in her book:
“The connection between writing and healing is an ancient one, as is the notion that narratives often evolve from the impetus of psychological pain. One could return to Aristotle's principle of dramatic catharsis or consult more recent texts like Arthur W. Frank's The Wounded Storyteller. As fragile human beings, what can we do with our pain but write it, sing it, or talk about it? Although writing may not provide a panacea, it does seem to offer palliation for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder by giving the survivor an opportunity effectively to reformulate traumatic memories in the shape of coherent autobiographical testimony.”
Other theorists support her thesis. In Opening Up, James Pennebaker concurs that the very process of articulating painful experiences, especially in written form, can in itself prove therapeutic. "Writing about the thoughts and feelings associated with traumas . . . forces individuals to bring together the many facets of overwhelmingly complicated events. Once people can distill complex experiences into more understandable packages, they can begin to move beyond the trauma". Another influential theorist, Shoshana Feldman, speaks of how life writing becomes much more than just words: A "life testimony is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life."
From my perspective, the theory surrounding life writing, and in particular trauma writing, is like a light being shone onto something I already knew was there. I had never thought of the many facets and implications of my recurring literary flirtation with my traumatic past, but in retrospect it clarifies what has been happening within me for many years. It is somehow reassuring to find a text such as Trauma and Recovery, in which Judith Herman identifies the fundamental stages of recovery as a “tripartite process that involves establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and regaining a sense of community”. It makes me feel very human to have responded in the way proscribed by the experts. I am however still in the process the last two phases, in some ways hopelessly so, in that the reconstruction of my trauma story is an arduous, recurring process that does not feel to have found its right form; rather it feels to be something that I might continue to tackle for the remainder of my adult life. Regaining a sense of community has also been a complicated task, one hampered by our decision to leave Denmark for my homeland two years after Greg’s disappearance, and less than a year after the initial stages of any recovery from the depths of my depression. I was only just beginning to find my feet again in Denmark when we threw ourselves back to a land that had become nearly foreign to me. Added to this dislocation was the regret we experienced after we had children, when our decision to leave behind an extensive network of family and friends for a life in the Antipodes, with isolation and strained family relations the hallmarks, seemed to have been revealed as a decision of utmost folly. Community then is still on the list.
I lurch upright as I wake, eyes wide and heart pounding. I fall out of bed into the hall, tripping over something and stubbing my toe. I wrench the back door open in a combinatorial flourish of bolt, deadlock and knob, and fall outside into the cool night air, huge, gulping breaths filling my lungs, slowly bringing some sense of stabilisation. This rush of oxygen brings me back – I suddenly know where I am and when it is. My wife and children are asleep in the bedroom, and it is May 2003. My brother has been missing for nearly 8 years, despite the fact that he was just there in my dreams, so close, close enough to touch, crying out to me as two men held his arms, and another drew a large blade across his neck...
Thankfully, dreams like this are now few and far between. But there was a time when they were the norm. The event of my brother’s disappearance was traumatic enough, but the two trips taken to India in the company of, respectively, my brother and my mother, were just as traumatic. Apart from dealing with our own complicated feelings (in retrospect it is clear we were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), the hardships and complexities of India and the suddenly very complicated inter-personal relationships between us meant that they were nightmare trips in the truest sense of the word. I think I slept an average of about three hours a night in the entire six weeks. Without going into a detailed discussion of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder it is useful to note some of the symptoms documented by the American Psychiatric Association, including "self-destructive and impulsive behaviour; dissociative symptoms; somatic complaints; feelings of ineffectiveness, shame, despair, or hopelessness; . . . hostility; [and] social withdrawal." I am intimately familiar with most of those symptoms, and equally convinced that my writing has quelled their fires quicker than what otherwise would have been the case.
One thing has always been clear to me, if also a little puzzling, from the outset. I have always had most interest in telling my own story as opposed to that of my missing brother’s. In many ways, that is understandable enough. From my perspective, I can’t see his story. That is the mystery. His life is like a book, the pages of which have suddenly gone blank. But more importantly, what is concrete for me is not so much his disappearance, but the effect his disappearance has had on my life and that is the story I tell and retell.
My brother is just dead; I am the one that has been traumatised.
So instead of expensive therapists, I punch at the keyboard, slowly knitting coherency back into my life. As Herman notes in Trauma and Recovery, the object of autobiography as scriptotherapy is to "reassemble an organized, detailed, verbal account, oriented in time and historical context" out of "fragmented components of frozen imagery and sensation.” She continues: “In the very act of articulation, the trauma story becomes a testimony, a publicly accessible ‘ritual of healing’ that inscribes the victim into a sympathetic discourse-community and inaugurates the possibility of psychological reintegration." All hope, it seems, is not lost.
It is useful to note that at the time of his disappearance, I was living in Denmark, nearing completion of an advanced computer course, and finding myself finally well placed to gain employment and feel like an integrated member of Danish society. I had spent two years learning the language and improving my job skills, and I was on the verge of being offered an interesting job in a large Danish publishing house. Greg’s disappearance rudely interrupted all that, and on my return from India, after our first fruitless search, my life suddenly collapsed. The event had an appreciable effect on my emerging Danish identity, and the social construct I had been building buckled under the weight of stress. I suffered severe depression for many months, unable to face my life in any meaningful way. My one and only attempt at traditional ‘therapy' was a farcical tragi-comedy in its own right, and I lost all nerve to try again. It was first a year later, with the act of writing a short story, that I began to feel I might be able to heal myself. It was painful to work with the material, to force my memory into areas I had no joy in revisiting, but from the start I felt that it was the right thing to do. I had to do something. My grief was overwhelming, my identity in total disarray. Apart from having to totally renegotiate what it meant for me to be living in Denmark, I also had to cope with the position of experiencing my loss in isolation. My family were on the other side of the world, and denied any support from the familial quarter, or being part of any collective position on our loss, I felt myself fracturing from them; a split that has never quite healed to this day. My in-laws as well, though while very supportive, were at a loss how to more than superficially understand my situation. It was here that I found my writing to be more than just cathartic. Used as a starting point for discussion, my writing served, as Herman suggests, as a conduit to understanding, and the beginnings of healing.
By degrees, my writing on Greg, in its various incarnations, became more than an end product. It also became a journey, a place in which I could work on the re-imaginings of myself, constructing, through an analysis of my positionality in relation to this traumatic event, the bones of a new post-Greg identity. It is a process that I have still not completed. As Stuart Hall writes, identity is “a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” Over the last six years other events and perspectives have come to figure more in my ongoing production of identity and Greg has slowly faded from having a central position. But considering the confluence of events; my total cultural re-imagining that was already well underway interrupted by another, even more traumatic experience, it doesn’t surprise me how central to my identity his disappearance has been.
As I look back on my various writings through the years, it is interesting to trace the changes. There are literary changes, as my writing slowly improves (albeit too slowly for my taste) and an increase in sophistication coming from my enhanced understanding of the effects of loss and grief. But there are also more subtle changes; perspective changes, changes in how I have remembered and what I have remembered. The complexity of memory in autobiographical writing is something I am only beginning to understand, and a much better understanding of the issues are needed for me to analyse the deeper meaning of my literary choices and omissions. It is clear though, that memory plays a major part in my recollections. Perhaps another reason I have felt so drawn to my dark project is that it also helps me remember Greg (lest we forget). That remembering may change over time, as the context and circumstances change. But a methodical working through of any ‘remembered’ story will uncover many forgotten details, which can then be recorded and remembered for posterity. It is my only way of keeping him alive. It is interesting to note how connected I have become to the few material possessions I have of Greg’s. His letters to me have top spot on the pyramid, followed down by old suitcases, collections of old toys, pictures and even fabric. Everything he owned, or even admired, has taken on significance far greater than its material value. For now, it is only the symbolic that matters. It is often through these objects that memory best serves its function. From the folds of a sarong float memories of summer days long passed, and in the lilting tones of a Cowboy Junkies song, many nights of reflection and camaraderie are retold. Music particularly, has the ability to awaken both deep pleasure and trembling loss. It was with some surprise a few years ago, at a Cowboy Junkies concert, when a particular song, so evocative of Greg, had me both smiling broadly with tears streaming down my face.
Poppy, by Drusilla Modjeska is a good example of the type of (auto)biography I might one day write. It is ostensibly a biography of her mother, Poppy, and the narrative is basically a record of Modjeska’s attempts to slowly unravel the mystery at the heart of her mother’s life. But Modjeska cannot avoid it being partly autobiographical. Positionality and subjectivity play an important role in her book, and unlike traditional biography she does not attempt to hide her authorship. Her subjectivity is a central part of the narrative, and this method is closest to the way I have best managed to approach my own writing. Many options exist, and if decisions were to be taken with the thought of publication and sales in mind, then a fast paced journalistic approach to the disappearance and subsequent searches might be the way I would go. But obsessed as I am by my inner life and by the silky thin threads of cause and effect that join this one event to my whole life, it is not likely the path I will take. I am more interested in analysing my over-protectionism of my first born than I am in recounting the apathy of the Indian Police Force or the resistance of suspicious villagers.
The Fog Garden by Marion Halligan and Unless by Carol Shields are examples of totally different ways of writing trauma. My knowledge of these books is limited to extracts, but their formats seem clear enough. The Fog Garden appears to be thinly veiled autobiography, an approach said to give the benefits of distance and the freedom of using creative techniques. For me though, such an approach simply loses authenticity. My attempts at thinly veiled fiction were the least successful of all. They felt farcical. Unless takes a different approach. Shields writes a fictional story, but one using themes that draw deeply on her traumatic life circumstances at the time. This approach feels to have much more validity to me, in that it is what fiction writers do all the time. Experiencing trauma personally will just give the writer’s portrayal of the same themes so much more depth and resonance. The subject of writing itself features heavily in the novel, as Shields discovers her own form of scriptotherapy:
But more than anything else it is the rhythm of typing – and – thinking that soothes me, what is almost an athlete’s delight in the piling of clause on clause. Who would have thought this old habit of mine would become a strategy for maintaining a semblance of ongoing life. ... On days when I don’t know which foot to put in front of the other, I can type my way toward becoming a conscious being.
Some days I don’t think I will write a book about Greg until I am fifty or so, with a doctorate on my wall and a wealth of theoretical tools to understand exactly what it is I am trying to do. On other days, I think I will write many books, each one with a different approach, but all with Greg’s disappearance as its subject. On yet other days, I don’t think I will ever publish a book on Greg at all, keeping my many and varied efforts of scriptotherapy locked firmly away in a filing cabinet, to be released only to my children so that they may understand the course of my life and the things that were important in it.
Published or not, some things will always remain important.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xviii.
Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976, p. 12.
Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xi.
ibid
Suzette A Henke, Trauma and Narrative Recovery, Online
http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/english/projects/ModernLit/TraumaandNarrativeRecovery.htm, Accessed 21/05/2003
James Pennebaker in Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xi.
Shoshana Feldman in Suzette A Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life-Writing, New York: St Martin's Press, 1998, p. xii.
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p.3
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, 4th ed., rev. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 425
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p.177
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery, New York, Harper Collins, 1992, p.181
Stuart Hall, in Sidone Smith & Julie Watson, Reading Autobiography, A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis 2001, p.34
Carol Shields, Unless, London, Fourth Estate, 2002, p.109.
