Writing Ourselves Whole: Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma

Jen Cross

Aug 2017 · Mango Media Inc.

About this ebook

The author of Write to Restore shows survivors of sexual abuse how to heal through journaling and personal writing.

Writing Ourselves Whole is a collection of essays and creative writing encouragements for sexual trauma survivors who want to risk writing a different story. Each short chapter offers encouragement, experience, and exercises.

When you can find language for the stories that are locked inside, you can change your life. Talk therapy can only go so far for the millions of Americans struggling in the aftermath of sexual abuse and sexual assault. Sexual assault survivors can heal themselves. Sexual trauma survivor communities (and their allies) have the capacity to hold and hear one another's stories—we do not have to relegate ourselves solely to the individual isolation of the therapist's office.

What you’ll learn inside Writing Ourselves Whole:

How to reconnect with your creative instinct through freewriting

How freewriting can help you reclaim the parts of yourself and your history

How “restorying” the old myths about sexual trauma survivors can set you free

If you have read books such as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, or Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing, you will want to read Writing Ourselves Whole.

Praise for Writing Ourselves Whole

“A raw, powerful, necessary, wise and practiced guidebook to the revolutionary practice of finding the words, language and voice to transform suffering.” —Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues

“Rich, intelligent, passionate, intimate, honest and encouraging . . . This book is a treasure trove!” —Ellen Bass, author of The Courage to Heal

About the author

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.Dr. Carol Queen [www.carolqueen.com] co-founded the Center for Sex & Culture [www.sexandculture.org] in San Francisco and is staff sexologist and Company Historian at Good Vibrations, the women-founded sex shop, where she has worked since 1990. A noted cultural sexologist whose work has been widely published, she's written, co-authored or edited several books, most recently The Sex & Pleasure Book: Good Vibrations Guide to Great Sex for Everyone. She has been speaking publicly about sexuality for over 40 years; she frequently speaks to conferences and academic, general and specialized audiences.Pat is a poet, playwright, librettist, and author of ten books of poetry and non-fiction. She was born in the Ozark mountains of Missouri where she became intimate with fossils, creekbeds, grasshoppers and box turtles. After a search for work took her single mother to St. Louis, from age ten Pat lived in tenements and in an orphanage until she was given a scholarship to college. Those early experiences have deeply influenced her writing, and fueled her passion for those who have been denied voice through poverty and other misfortunes. Pat?s libretto, ?The Lament of Michal,? was performed in Carnegie Hall by Phyllis Bryn Julson and the Atlanta Symphony directed by Robert Shaw. Her poetry has been read by Garrison Keillor on National Public Radio?s Writer?s Almanac sixteen times. There are more than three hundred recorded productions of her plays for community theater. A film about her work with women in low-income housing, titled ?Tell Me Something I Can?t Forget?, is included in the DVD companion to her book, Writing Alone and With Others. Amherst Writers & Artists, founded by Pat in 1981 and directed and managed by Pat and Peter for thirty years, is now an international network of workshop leaders who use the writing method described in Pat?s book, Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press. Pat?s newest book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice, was released from Oxford University Press.