Writing As A Form Of Therapy

Hello, @BlueBay

I guess that is the thing with our mental health challenges - each of us is biologically different, and each of us arrived at the point of being broken via different life paths.

For me (and I can speak for no other as I have no lived experience of being anyone but myself), step one of my slow path to recovery was realising that I had a problem with myself.

My fragile delicate formative years as a child were turbulent, traumatic, terribly lonely, and mostly lacking in any form of love from my parents. They say that the inner voice that we have in our heads as an adult is strongly influenced by the voices of our parents to us when we were children. I can dredge up many painful memories of hurtful things said to me by a father who I now know was (and still is) a narcissist.

And that was the problem - the memories of that were always at the forefront of my mind, and coloured all of my thinking, my ways of viewing the world, and most importantly, my ways of viewing myself.

As a child, through the ignorant accident of my parents' poor parenting, I was never shown how to love myself. The inner voice that developed was always hyper-critical of myself, and I developed a strong self-hatred that lasted decades. I hated looking at myself in the mirror.

Fixing that broken wiring has been the greatest challenge of my life. First, I had to learn to forgive myself for being who I was, instead of constantly blaming myself. Then, step by step, I had to find ways to nurture a love for myself, to stop listening to that angry nasty inner voice that was always trying to tear me down no matter what I did. Then, slowly and painfully, I had to learn to retrain my inner voice.

And that was one of the hardest tricks of all. CBT helped a lot with that, making me aware of all of those habits that my inner voice had - always seeing the negative, always focusing on past pain, always lost in memories of what once was instead of seeing the reality around me, always misreading other people's motives and intentions, seeing things in the worst possible light.

How can innocence be reborn?

My answer is through love.

Learning to love yourself is one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself, and in fact to the rest of the world. Sure, the traumas and the pain are still there in my mind, but they no longer have the power to write the story of my present or to affect my choice of paths on this life journey into the future.

Love is ever the great healer, the nurturer. And the beauty of love is that even if you have never been shown love by others, still you can find it within yourself.

This poem flowed out of me very easily. It is written on several levels of interpretation.

I have been reading Dante's Divine Comedy, and in it the ancient poet Virgil guides Dante through hell. To me, hell is not some abstract thing that lies beyond the veil when one is judged. To me, we can each be responsible for bringing our own hell to Earth whilst we are alive. To me, one of the greatest evils that we perpetrate is to respond to pain by passing it on to another (either deliberately or ignorantly). That is the main message of the poem - love and compassion should always be the response to pain.

Thanks for reading.

Virgil Was A Snowflake

I walked through all the circles of Hell
Rubbing shoulders with all the others that fell;
I suffered each measured torture as it was applied
To all who in life compassion and love denied;
I screamed with the knowledge that this was eternity,
Not even the ending of death would help to set me free;
And as I was tortured the question was ever asked,
Would I step up and be a torturer if with that I was tasked?

I met the gaze of the demon delighting in my pain,
Certain in the knowledge that it had not yet driven me insane.

3rd July, 2020.

I always love reading your replies @Silenus

i can understand it so clearly and resonate with it

trouble with me is that i don't love myself, i struggle to find love within me

is it because of my childhood sexual trauma at such a young age?

is it because i didn't get the love and care from my mum?

i hate looking at myself in the mirror

how do i believe iin myself? how do i love myself?

yeah i have that nasty angry inner voice also, how on earth do i retrain that, where do i start??

there is still so much learning about me that i am tired already.

gee i get so damn angry at the past at what happened, and not getting support from the ones who should have supported me

and the future - well theres anxiety around that too

so much i need to do ......

Personally, I think the secret lies in a paradox... we have to stop listening to ourselves before we can start listening to ourselves...

A lifetime of patterns isn't going to disappear overnight. It doesn't even disappear after years and years of conscious aware effort. I may sound like I am on top of my game when I write on the forum here, but I am far from it. What I write about is an ideal that I strive for. Often, I fall way short of that ideal in practice.

One of the greatest gifts I have found so far in my journey is being able to not beat myself up too much when I do fail. It was not an easily found gift. It took years of wandering through the wilderness, of searching within myself and failing to find what I was looking for, of almost giving up again and again because I wasn't making progress. And then when I made a bit of progress, I would backslide and fall into the same old reliable predictable self-harming habits.

I wish there were easy answers. I looked for them for years, but I never did find them. Instead, there was hard work and, eventually, a growing light at the end of the tunnel. Everything we do to improve ourselves is a step in the right direction. We didn't have any say in the trauma and the hurt that was done to us by others and by the circumstances of our lives. The worst thing we can do is to double down on that hurt and blame ourselves for what was never our fault to begin with.

Sending much love and healing vibes to you, @BlueBay

thank you @Silenus

at the moment i am at war with myself - my thoughts, behaviour, patterns, everything

if only i was strong

if only i was able to speak

if only i could run

if only ......

if i could erase my childhood i would

to lessen the pain i am in

if i could have told someone

maybe i would have been protected

but danger came and went

danger hit me

danger changed me

and now i feel dead

i sometimes wonder why me??

i sometimes why you??

but these are questions

i cannot answer

time has moved on

but part of me is frozen in time

because now i can see how

you changed and shaped me now

i wish those flowers would bloom again

because for now they are dead and gone

they have wilted just like my heart is aching

wilted right down to the roots

it aches, it hurts, it screams

i just don't get it

it hurts me to know it was you

and you were not there for me

i often wonder what my life would be like

if none of this happened

but i will never know anymore

because you took that away from me

if only i was strong

if only i could speak

i wonder what would have happened

and it's not just me

you took away my life

and others my sister

you ruined our lives

but she doesn't know

for i have protected her for 40 years

i haven't told her my memories

of what you did to her

because i love her

my fear, my guilt, my frustration, my anger

is all bottled into one

and one day the cap will explode

and so will I ........

@BlueBay

Thank you for sharing your poem. What powerful imagery you paint with your word. Creative activities like writing poetry can really help us process our feeling and emotions sometimes and I hope that after writing this piece you're feeling a sense of release. Not that it makes everything better, but sometimes it can release just enough pressure to feel like you can keep going.

Please reach out to the our Help Centre through phone or chat if needed.

thinking of you during this tough time and it is empowering to see your constant resilience and support to others in this forum, even during a hard time for yourself.

Take care and reach out as needed

Radius

Thanks a lot @Former-Member

I use poems to express my thoughts feelings and emotions

I'm not great at it really but thankyou

im having a tough day

I'm scared I won't get better

anxiety is high

might use the online chat service

@Owlunar above is another poem I wrote earlier. Xxx

Finally I found

A reason to stand

Trembling and fearful

I reached out my hand

I hoped that together

A bridge we could build

A bridge of compassion

Each holding one end

Though my steps faltered

I pushed through the pain

Hoping you’d see

I’d grown through some shame

Instead you rejected

The gift that I brought

Your silence spoke volumes

Your message I heard

I guess I’m just lucky

My heart knows this pain

Ive known of it breaking

Again and again

But deep in my heart

One truth I know

A humble Jew walks

Wherever I go

Unnoticed by many

In pain I do stand

But he is extending

His gentle hand

If no reward waiting

Would you still have your faith

If only to love

For loves sake

I think the reward

The humble Jew sought

Was to sit with the lost

Unwanted unheard.

Standing in the edge

I often wonder why

the breeze is blowing my hair

and wiping the tiny tears

the sun shines on me

trying to make me feel

but then all I want

is it all to stand still

the view from right up here

the mountains I can see

for all the little butterflies

flying right past me

I often sit and ponder

what is this all about

for there is no winner

but lots of little doubt

I see across a rainbow

the sweet bright colours above

I sit and ponder again

what's life all about