11 Personal Essays about Overcoming Trauma
Women Therapists on Healing is a powerful anthology of personal essays from women therapists who know trauma from the inside out. This three-part collection braids lived experience with clinical wisdom, offering a compassionate lens on healing that crosses cultural, generational, and systemic boundaries.
● women recovering from trauma● healers and advocates seeking growth and guidance● health professionals committed to trauma-informed and anti-racist practices● friends and family who love and support survivors
The cicadas were noisy
where my grandmother’s white, metal Maytag wringer washer stood in the grassy
backyard next to the kitchen’s screen door beside the thriving vegetable
garden. On the front porch, I watched with my child eyes, the moment a slim,
young blond woman wearing a yellow cotton dress rumbled toward us in a shiny
and substantial car. She parked it on the red dirt driveway next to my
grandparents’ wooden house on Peach Street, which was on the other side of the
railroad tracks, near the big tobacco barn up the paved road. The young lady
stood in front of the house and my grandmother, in her blue housedress, seemed
much older as she approached from the backyard where the wringer washer was.
She was carrying a wicker laundry basket filled with pressed and neatly stacked
linens. The young woman handed my grandmother a dollar with an audible, “Thank
you, Sarah,” addressing her by her first name as she took the ample basket from
outstretched arms. She didn’t look my way. My grandmother’s honey-brown fingers
folded the worn dollar bill handed to her from the lady’s freckled hands in
half, with a look on her face that appeared to disapprove of the moment and the
woman. I hadn’t seen that interaction or look before.
The following chapter explores the
intersections of belonging, othering, its connection to trauma, and my own
narrative of the internal struggle of identifying self-worth as a woman of
color—and, more specifically, as a Black identifying woman in the world and in
the creative art therapy profession of drama therapy. These thematic
intersections are all aligned to self-esteem and how others perceive us as
women in our social and professional spheres. The intersections affect how we
stride on the planet and our overall health. The following exploration bade me
to act as a bricoleur, collecting and implementing the odds and ends—fragments
of the historical narratives that visit me; creating a collage of images,
implementing snippets of stories in order to form a larger landscape of
understanding—both for the reader and myself; a free-form approach inviting me
to scribe the lived stories that function as examples of our collective
vulnerability. Only when I pause, noting and re-collecting
the useful threads and seeds, like an invested mama bird building her secure
nest through writing, does the story I want to share come through. It is in the
collecting, forming, and then sharing of stories from which deep understanding
for self and others can occur.
As a parallel process, I share how a creative arts therapeutic
action of creating a narrative-based assemblage construction called the Poetic Home exercise can offer personal insight about such things related to
self-identity and trauma. Insight exists in the social constructionism
approach, in the courageous encounter where the process of making meaning with
others leads to self-actualization.
When I ponder the very pregnant and universal topic of
self-worth, there are two distinct landscapes embedded in bygone eras that come
to mind. This chapter began with the first, a scribed memory of my
eight-year-old self experiencing an interaction that illustrates the tone of
time, place, and relationship where much of my initial conscious awareness
about the circumstances of belonging, self-worth, and othering started. This
narrative inquiry praxis looks forward, backward, and considers chronology, place,
and the relational through an emic perspective—an auto-ethnographic unpacking
that situates lived data in story form for an empathic as well as intellectual
understanding.
The upcoming narrative landscapes feature my grandfathers within
those bygone eras; both men were worlds apart from each other and yet so
precise in the way they strode the planet upon which they thrived—at least when
I met them. Afuape (2011) mentions
the importance of reclaiming memory, arguing that as a result of the attack on
memory that comes with abuse, violence, and oppression, people who experience
emotional distress and psychosocial difficulties often experience life as
single-storied, predominantly featuring hopelessness and despair. Therefore,
reclaiming memory, as I do in the following pages, is a liberatory act and an
important part of resisting these felt abuses of power—that may be recent to me
or may have occurred generations ago to my ancestors. I am not absolute in
knowing how the fragments of my sharing will affect the reader or myself. Nor
do I claim the ensuing storied pieces complete the materials for a whole
narrative of an entire lifetime. Reclaiming storied and variegated fragments through
a bricolage practice (Denzin and Lincoln 2008) of story making and writing here
serves as the healing process of tending, mending, and witnessing in the role
of the griot, defined as the respected West African narrator of oral
traditions, poetry, history, and genealogy, which I hold from my ancestors—a
significant interactional aspect of the drama therapist and social
constructionist position I embody.
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