Write to Restore: A Step-By-Step Creative Writing Journal for Survivors of Sexual Trauma (Writing Therapy, Healing Power of Writing, Fans of The Complex PTSD Workbook)

By Jen Cross

OUR WORDS RESTORE US is a companion text to Writing Ourselves Whole

#metoo has raised awareness around issues of sexual trauma, which has impacted our collective conversations about how survivors live in the aftermath of this trauma. Writing is one of the healing and transformative practices nearly everyone has easy access to.

While #metoo has had a profound (and primarily positive) impact on our society, many survivors describe walking around in a constant state of being “triggered;” we need a place to explore the nuances of our stories, outside of a twitter feed or instagram post

This journal can be be used by those writing alone or along with a writing group, support group, or other healing community.

Publicity events will give the author the opportunity to discuss #metoo, healing from sexual trauma, and creativity as a tool for individual and social change

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mango
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642501070

Jen Cross

Jen Cross is a writer, performer, and writing workshop facilitator based in Oakland, CA. Her organization, Writing Ourselves Whole, founded in 2003, focuses primarily on sexuality writing workshops and writing with survivors of sexual trauma. Jen's writing appears in more than thirty anthologies and periodicals, including The Healing Art of Writing, Nobody Passes, Visible: A Femmethology, Best Sex Writing 2008; she is also the co-editor of Sex Still Spoken Here (with Dr. Carol Queen and Amy Butcher). Jen is currently an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Introduction

Week One

Beginnings

Week Two

Conversations with the Body

Week Three

Myths and Truths

Week Four

Reclaiming Voice

Week Five

Writing into Spirit

Week Six

Welcoming Our Desire

Week Seven

Reaching Back Through the Fire

Week Eight

Radical Self-Care

Additional Prompts

Further Reading About Writing and Transformation

About Jen

Introduction

Our words restore us, and our writing can re-story our lives.

In a quiet morning bedroom, on the bus or subway on the way to work or school, in the laundromat while waiting for the spin cycle to complete, at a kitchen table, at innumerable cafes—over and over, throughout the country, around the world—people are sitting down to write.

Early morning, over lunch breaks, during the wee hours of the night: we who have experienced something that interrupted our sense of self, we who have been irrevocably harmed or violated, we who experienced something so outside our normal, our understanding of ourselves, that we lost even the language to try and express it—we are turning to the page. We who had language taken from us, we whose words were ignored or denied, we who were hurt even before we had the words for what was being done to us—we reach for words anyway.

We are a species made of words and stories. When we are without language for ourselves and our lives, we often feel profoundly disconnected from our communities, even from the rest of humanity.

Writing can be:

•a way to release images and experiences that have been held in our bodies for years

•a way to discover what we didn’t know we knew

•a way to re-story ourselves and our lives

•a way to regain trust in our