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

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