Post #4 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing and Healing – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Finding Healing through Writing
We invite you to send us your story of how writing has been a form of healing for you. Just email between 200-600 words (or longer if you contact us first) to: Matilda (at) WomensMemoirs (dot) com. We are interested in publishing your thoughts on writing and healing on this website — either with your name or anonymously, your choice. Today’s story comes from Patrice Rancour.
USING WRITING FOR HEALING IN MY PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL LIVES
Patrice Rancour
As a health care professional, I am all too familiar with the occupational hazard of compassion fatigue. We are often reminded that it is an error in judgment to believe that being exposed to suffering does not affect us. Unless we find ways to be responsive to the pain of others, we have bleak rather than peak work experiences.
I’m a mental health clinical nurse specialist working with people diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses and have long used journaling with patients who faced body image problems due to illness or its treatment. I’ve assigned people to write their own obituaries to face down personal mortality and write letters designed to help them address the mending of relationships before precious time got away from them.
Arthur Frank observed that “Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going…People who tell stories of illness are witnesses, turning illness into moral responsibility.” Sue Heiney pointed out that storytelling “allows the unconscious mind to hear a therapeutic message.” And AA folk wisdom has traditionally held that “in the hearing is the learning; but in the telling is the healing.”
It was only when I penned the first two volumes of the Tales From the Pager Chronicles
Writing of my relationships with the people I have been privileged to serve helps me to personally rise above the mean and often banal details of their suffering by helping me see the often existential and universal in their particular stories. This elevates the meaning of the suffering in such a way that I can look upon the illness experience as a heroic journey. My participation in that journey then also lifts me out of the seemingly banal as I am humbled to watch people quietly transcend suffering in such ways as also lift me up.
Had I not written about the psycho-spiritual teachings I observed in between the vomiting episodes and pain medication titration, I think I would have missed them. And missing them would have been a shame on two levels; not only for the sake of the patients, but for my own as well. Writing about my experiences has helped me pay attention to the countless choices that are incumbent upon each of us to make in order to live and to die consciously.
Yet in our society, many people work hard to stay unconscious. Writing is the one activity I know counteracts that, allowing us to hold up, examine, and begin to understand what is otherwise the ignored experience, restoring us to a state of wholeness, thus fulfilling the meaning of the word healing — “to make whole”
References
Bolen, Jean Shinoda, Close to the Bone, Illness as a Soul Journey, Red Wheel/Weiser, San Francisco, 2007.
Frank, Arthur, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, 1995, University of Chicago Press.
Heiney, Sue, “The Healing Power of Story,” in Oncology Nursing Forum, Vol. 22, No 6, 1995, pp.899-904.
Rancour, P, et al, “A Matched Set: A Case Study in the Use of Letter-Writing as a Means of Integrating an Altered Body Image in a Patient with Recurrent Breast Cancer,” in Oncology Nursing Forum, Sept/Oct, 2003.
You can follow Patrice at: http://patricerancour.com
