ANGER, SORROW, ACHES AND PAINS?

HOW WRITING REVEALS THE POWER

OF YOUR EMOTIONS

TO SHAPE YOUR ANATOMY

The nervous system is the ultimate anatomical vehicle

of consciousness, the channel for all feeling and thinking. 

It gathers all sense impressions.

Caroline Myss

Every thought or feeling you have, every behavior you act out requires a specific biochemical combination formed in the brain. Your attitude – positive, negative, or indifferent -- designs and activates your body's neurochemistry.  These expressions produce biochemical reactions that have dynamic manifestations. In other words, belief begets effect, thought precedes energy, you are what you think.

Biologically speaking, how does this work? Emotional reactions are produced either by the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), peripheral nervous system (the network of nerves that extends throughout the body), or the autonomic nervous system (the electro-chemical system the operates primarily on adreneline and is designed for spontaneous reaction, without cognitive appraisal, to any threat, real or imaginary).

Anatomy is the foundation for human relationship.

What happens in our interior, those connections that maintain the structure of personhood, eventually happens outside as well.....

Human relationships are somatic interactions of emotional pulsation and behavioral form -- inside us, outside us.

Caroline Myss

Feelings and emotions differ. Feelings are unconditioned, unprogrammed, generalized states, whereas emotions are conditioned programs of behavior with established neural pathways for action. Both feelings and emotions follow the rules of water, acting as messengers that signal behavior. Their fluid ingredients organize and categorize behavior according to “the flow of thought, the tides of feelings, the waves of intuition, the ocean depths of feelings, the waxing and waning of images.” Hormones are, in essence liquid anatomy, a watery form at the root of behavior in the animal world. Secreted by the brain into the blood stream, they are “liquid behavior” waiting to crystalize into muscular behavior. They keep the quick fires of epinephrine burning, the continuing heat of the pituitary, or the continuing transactions of the brain with the neural transmitters. In this way, life's emotional experiences create form and shape which, in turn, gives emotions, thinking, and feeling an avenue for expression and satisfaction or the opposite, inhibition and pain. “With our shape we interact with the world and create relationships. As we reach out to others for contact, love intimacy, cooperation, we may create relationships that serve to reinforce or compensate for our individual shape.”

How then can writing affect not only our cognition, but our anatomical form itself? Conscious self expression – visual, verbal, musical, physical – leads the light of awareness into our thoughts and alters the neural pathways by which the hormones are directed. Writing processes, such as RADICAL WRITING, which are concerned only with undirected, free-flowing expressiveness, restore energetic circulation to aspects of your neurological makeup that have been impeded by judgment and/or trauma. The healing key to such writing is the result of the pure acts of observation and listening. The power these actions generate promotes subconscious shifts which lead to physical and emotional balance. Such healing requires no external effort to fix or change anything. In fact, to attempt to fix a situation or to direct such change is to disrupt the innate subconscious mechanism for restoration.

Because the human body is a self-restoring organism at every level of biological organization, from DNA upward, there is no biological reason for allowing yourself to suffer. Carl Jung believed that disease begins when a personality’s story is denied. Similarly, symptoms can be interpreted as the initial notes in a story written on the body by suppressed responses to life events and surroundings. It is in the nonjudgmental telling of your stories that healing occurs, and writing in the way RADICAL WRITING teaches provides just such a mechanism for allowing the chaos and emotional blood of your life to move through your body as a conscious messenger rather than belligerent symptom.

Only by rediscovering your story with the dispassion provided by guided techniques such as RADICAL WRITING can you honestly retell the story, expose its deeper roots, uncover new meanings, and create conclusions different from the self-fulfilling prophecies that have been directing your unconscious script. There is no power greater than the truth. Its role in healing is fundamental. The courage to know the truth and allow its telling is the first step in recovering the wholeness that health represents.

For more information:

http://www.radicalwriting.com

http://www.lauracerwinske.com

 

WRITING FOR PERSONAL GROWTH

Liberty's Ladies    Laura Cerwinske

 

Modern psychology is based on the therapist’s recognition of the stories taught to us by our parents, teachers, clergy, and peers and of their effects on us. Out of this tapestry of history and values, we began, as children, to weave our own story, subconsciously accepting certain threads we’d inherited and rejecting others. Eventually the stories we swallowed and digested began living in us, governing our emotions and choices. They became the stage for enacting our beliefs. The more we identified with our stories, the more power they gained to shape our view of reality. With this power we continue to subconsciously enroll everyone we encounter into believing our stories just as we do.

Even Sigmund Freud likely recognized that what he was doing was very close to literature. He wrote, “Imaginative writers are valuable colleagues—[in] their knowledge of the human heart they are far ahead of (others) because they draw on sources not yet accessible to science. . . . With hardly an effort, creative writers . . . salvage from the whirlpool of their emotions the deepest truths, to which others have to force their way.”

Words hide the world.

They blur together elements that exist apart,

or they break elements into pieces,

bind up the world,

contract it into hard little pellets of perception.

But the unbound world, the world behind the world –

how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous.

At rare moments of clarity,

I succeed in breaking through.

Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known,

because nothing is shaped in advance by words.

There, nothing is hidden from me. 

            Steven Milhauser. “History of a Disturbance.”

It makes no difference whether the story we tell ourselves or the world is “true” or not, healthy or unhealthy, constructive or destructive, tragic or romantic, debilitating or liberating; as long as we are unconsciously immersed in it, the story runs our lives. To whatever degree others’ stories color our own, they too are running our lives.

The nature of the role in which we have cast ourselves is irrelevant. Regardless of how we see ourselves  -- as the good child, the happy wanderer, the loyal friend, the outlaw, the martyr, the perpetual parent, the perpetual child, the hard worker, the heroic survivor, the perpetual victim, the die-hard rebel, the serious thinker, the devoted lover, the responsible citizen, or the free spirit -- we have invested our role with tremendous power—the power to define us and guide us, the power to destroy us, and the power to heal us.

Scientific, logical, linear, or left-brain thinking, which is based on the objective weighing of fact and detail, calls on a mode of seeing devoid of imagination. Myths and legends, on the other hand, which are nonliteral, nonlogical, and imbued with imaginary color, texture, and detail, cannot fully be understood without entering into a right-brain or metaphysical state of mind.

The subconscious mind is purely literal. It stands ready to follow the orders our conscious mind sends it, regardless of their degree of emotion or veracity. For example, the subconscious perceives no distinction between jealous rage and simple doubt; both represent equal commands to annihilate.

We fear uncensored, wholly passionate expression when we subconsciously believe it will either irreparably disrupt our lives or bring harm to the object of our thoughts. We also resist writing out our raw feelings for fear of seeing them recorded in black and white. The very thought of making intense emotion—or even minor anxiety—concrete can easily deter us. Yet only the safe acknowledgment of our most repressed or unacceptable thoughts will free them from the subconscious and drain them of their power. When we write in an undirected way (i.e., using an explorative process such as I teach), we find not the facts, but the fiction—the stories—that lead us to the truth.