Thought Paper

            I am interested in the use of personal writing in the practice of cognitive behavioral therapy. This sort of therapy is based on the idea that by enabling persons to cognitively interpret and therefore react to a situation in a positive way, they can combat disordered thinking and feelings like anxiety, depression ect. Personal writing seems to me to be a perfect exercise in this type of therapeutic practice. This reminds me of what Julier discusses in her chapter “Voice on the Line,” in which she discusses the power of language through informing forward progress. This is exemplified by a tee shirt included in the Clothesline Project, which said “I have strength / I have control / I have self-esteem / I have Power,” linguistically moving victim from past to future in which one has all these attributes that allude to the idea of being healed. This kind of self-talk falls along the lines of the idea that if you can tell yourself you can do something, you can. Often, this positive, future-driven self-talk is essential to replacing the kind of blaming, negative self-talk victims often find themselves engaging in.

            Additionally, I am very interested in the power of this kind of negative self-talk, which can also take the form of writing, and how we can be sure to keep this out of our personal writing when attempting to heal. When I was active in my eating disorder, I used to write journal entries in which I would scold myself for eating too much food or not meeting my goal weight. This kind of writing actually furthered my very dangerous behaviors, clearly the exact opposite of what we hope to achieve with writing for healing. Many times this semester while reading chapters in the text on bringing writing for healing into the classroom, I worried about the idea that a student, consciously or unconsciously, could practice this personal writing in a negative manner like I once did, further perpetuating things like depression, anxiety or low self-esteem.

             Finally, if I can find a way to tie this in to my ideas above, I would like to look into fictional writing as healing. About 5 years ago now, I read a book titled Wintergirls, in which the author wrote a fictional piece from the POV of a teenage girl with an eating disorder. While the author had never suffered from a disorder herself, she claimed to have done research and interview of people who had and attempted to write the piece from that perspective. One could view this piece as a form of writing for healing, especially seeing that the main character does confront her unhealthy ways and ends up “healed” in the end. However, the book was a huge trigger for me, and instead of seeing it as a manuscript for healing, it ended up fueling a lot of my already present negative thoughts and feelings about myself, food and my body. I can see this being the type of text that a professor might be interested in complimenting a writing and healing-based class, however this could be problematic for students as it was for me. This brings me to the example of the student in chapter eleven who was enrolled in the class on suicide and found their once-dormant depression triggered by the work of Sylvia Plath as she described her experience with depression. The author of this chapter included this information, but proceed to sort of glaze over it, stating that this was the only student in the class who had expressed having this kind of experience, and that he ended up coming back out of the depression by the end of the semester. I think we need to be much more cautious about such situations when dealing with writing/text that could be triggering to students. 

Chapter 11- Writing About Suicide

This chapter reviews a graduate course called "Literary Suicide," run by Jeffrey Berman in 1994 at the University of Albany. He opens with a bold and beautiful claim: "it is possible to create the pedagogical conditions in which students write about traumatic subjects and achieve important insight into their lives." He goes on to explain the general success of his course, naming personal writing/journaling as the corner stone of this success. In fact, when he has taught the class two years earlier without the journal element, he found the class had seemingly less complete and less valuable interactions with the texts, which comprised the work of Woolf, Hemingway, Plath and Sexton. But in 1994, according to Berman, "students, by contrast, viewed [them] not simply distant authors writing about a theoretical problem, but as fellow human beings who were struggling bravely to transmute personal conflicts into art." In a final anonymous questionnaire, the class unanimously declared their experience of diary writing as valuable. In this way, Berman seems to argue for a relationship between understanding of the self and understanding of others and their work. 

In 2011, The American College Health Association reported that 31 percent of college students "have felt so depressed in the last year that they found it difficult to function" (NAMI). Furthermore, according to the National Alliance on mental illness, "seven percent of college student have 'seriously considered suicide' within the past year." And finally, the number one reason people claim to not seek help for depression and other mental health issues is the stigma surrounding it. As an advocate for reeducation of mental health, any class that can potentially give students insight into depression is valuable, and this goes hand in hand with suicide. Any class that encourages the deromanticizing of fictional suicide engages in important scholarly work. Writers' suicides seem to be particularly romanticized, as is their alcoholism and general mental health. My brain flashes a mental image of my creative writing TA in my study abroad program: a tall, blonde, talented poet with a whiskey bottle stuck to his hand and a cigarette permanently resting between his lips, rumored to have a Hemingway complex. No poem is worth that pain, but someone somewhere down the line made him think it was so. 

Chapter 12- Teaching Emotional Literacy

After reading this chapter, which follows one professor's journey attempting to teach emotional literacy at the university level, I had the feeling that there needs to be some kind of conversation about what the goal of an undergraduate education, specifically in English/Literary Studies or Writing, should teach. Furthermore, where are our programs outside of the university to help foster mental health and emotional healing?

The first person I thought of when reading Bump was my most recent ex. He came from a very tight-knit, upper middle class conservative family in which excess of emotion were seen as weakness. In fact, his communication skills regarding his emotions, as well as his emotional wants/needs, were so poor while we were together that it became one of the most emotionally abusive relationships I have ever been in. He would scream and yell when I altered my appearance - getting a new hairstyle or tattoo - and threaten to never talk to me again. The next day he would tell me he blacked out because he was so angry. He left broken chairs in our residence hall lounge. When he found out one of our friends had aborted his child, I held him while he wept for hours on end. His family didn't "believe in therapy" and his mother's response to my mental health was to stay away from people like me. In fact, one of the biggest divides in our relationship was his family's opinion of me and the fact that I was on medication and seeing a therapist for depression.

We both go to college now, but you would not find him in a class on emotional literacy. Emotional illiteracy is a huge cultural norm, and therefore needs to be tackled on a larger scale. It is upsetting to see the way the author of this chapter was attacked for his attempts, with worries about student safety and grading procedures. I think, possibly, this kind of teaching needs to find space outside the academic world before it can be discussed and analyzed academically.

Chapter 14- Voices from the Line

This chapter analyzed The Clothesline Project as a healing, social text. This is the first chapter in the fourth section of the book, titled "Writing and Healing in the World." This deviation away from purely academic text is important to consider, especially when dealing with topics of trauma and healing, and I was engaged throughout the chapter by Laura Julier's reading of the Clothesline Project.

Julier starts off by comparing Clothesline Project (in which shirts are strung on a clothesline, each created anonymously by an individual women about her experience of violence against women) to the Vietnam Wall and the AIDS quilt. She says, "..each project points to the complex relationship between individual pain or grieving and a collective social responsibility for the problem...some claim that individual healing occurs because in these projects the individual experience is recognized as part of a larger social problem." I can't help but think of the why I need feminism project that's happening this week on Ithaca's campus, where women and men are asked to have their picture taken with a small whiteboard on which they fill in "I need feminism because..." 

While many of the text created by this movement is, I believe, more filtered and less striking as some of the shirts referenced in this chapter. This adds to what makes the Clothesline Project so powerful. Some of the shirts that Julier sites remind me much of Audre Lorde's recognition of her experience of violence against her as a woman in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Similar to my experience reading Lorde's story, I physically cringed as I read these women's stories, as little or much as I did come to understand the logistics of them. But that is not the goal here, as Julier reminds us by drawing the line between statistics and a physical army of women, "almost flesh," standing at a radical intersection between public and private speaking. One caretaker of the Mid-Michigan Clothesline Project reminds us, "We must never forget, for every statistic, every theory, a woman, a life" (379). The shirts act as physical and emotional reminders for both participants and on-lookers.

The most provocative part of this project for me is the singular specification for the creation of this social text: "A woman will have complete control over her speaking, its form, its content, its audience, and its purpose, her speaking out will be protected, and her text will join others and will not stand alone." Reading this, it is disturbing to think about how often that is not the case for women, as arguably as it is for men, in our current shared, public spaces. The specification of the woman's voice joining others brings me back to the second chapter of this book, in which Anne Gere speaks about the individual voice not as autonomous but rather in a relationship with other voices. This idea of community support and understanding is a reoccurring theme in the idea of writing and healing, and I find it very telling of how alienating and isolating the silence of struggle can be.