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Becoming Whole:
Writing Your Healing Story
Linda Joy Myers is a licensed psychotherapist with a practice in San Francisco. She has been an Associate Teacher with Soleil Lifestory Network since 1998. Her book, Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story, has been called a "fascinating mix of cutting edge research and ancient wisdom." Myers approaches memoir writing as not only a way to recapture and preserve lifestories but as a means for the power of words to bring about healing and personal growth. She asked Denis Ledoux to write the foreword to her book, which is reprinted below:
There is a healing power in the very writing of our stories, whether they are read by others or not. In the years since I began doing life story workshops in 1988, I have witnessed many times how this writing brings peace and resolution to writers who have been tormented and undermined by stories they have kept within them.
I am not the only one to take stock of this. Many times, my workshop attendees have said to me, "This is like therapy, but it costs a lot less and it's a whole lot more fun."
As I write my autobiography," one woman said, "it became obvious that something was happening to me. I was feeling a peace with my life that I had not felt prior to writing. As I continued to write, I felt more and more acceptance and consolation."
As Linda Joy Myers explains so clearly in the following pages, the writing of a life story creates an observer self whose empathetic listening presence brings validation and acceptance to the writer. And as James Pennebaker has demonstrated over the years with various study groups it is in the writing of the story even more than in the speaking that this healing occurs.
I have always felt that this was so because in the speaking the story remains evanescent, easily lost, enduring somehow only as long as the memory of the hearer endures. As such, speaking a memory offers little consolation to the speaker that his or her memory will last as a witness to what was lived. When a story is written, however, its memory has the promise of survival that is as long as the writing itself.
Healing is a process of becoming whole. And people cannot become whole until they know how and where their existence fits into the human experience. Otherwise they are left with the question, "Why?" Writing life stories is an important personal experience because it can answer the "why?" In the past, people sat with their families and told them stories, perhaps sitting in their kitchen rockers around the fireplace or woodstove. There the old people told stories of their youth and their parents' lives, and the children took the stories in even if sometimes only by osmosis, sometimes without even listening carefully. And the stories became part of the way families thought about themselves and interpreted their experience.
Now, however, with families scattered all around the country and the world, it has become increasingly difficult to tell these stories because too often there is no one to hear them. The storyteller who now wishes to tell the family stories has to put them in writing and disseminate them to the family in printed form. A different way of telling a story but an effective way. And one that brings healing.
Today, more than ever before, people are writing their stories to celebrate their lives and to create a way to break through the silence that envelops us all.
Now, Linda Joy Myers has written a readable book in which she brings to the topic of life writing as a healing art her years of psychotherapeutic experience coupled with her training and experience as a writer and teacher.
I am proud to say that she has been part of our Soleil Lifestory Network since 1998, teaching people to write personal and family stories. During that time, I have talked with her often about her work and have witnessed her dedication and commitment to bring the art of lifewriting not only to the therapeutic community but to the average person who may never have thought of himself or herself as a writer.
The beauty of this book is that it not only explains why the process works but shows the reader how to make the process work in his or her life.
This book deserves to have a wide readership and to know a long success. It offers an important access to healing.
This book is available on amazon.com
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