How to Write Yourself Back Into Existence After Trauma

Tangible advice on using writing as a mental lifeline in the midst of trauma

There are times when my content hits harder than others, and this week’s open-access article feels like one of those times.

The majority of my readers are email readers (as opposed to in-app readers and commenters), and for the first time since I’ve been writing on Substack I received over TWENTY email replies thanking me, confessing traumas and ailments, or just simply acknowledging that you are also drowning in the sauciness of life right now.

And, one of you in particular, wanted to know HOW to actually use writing as your lifeline when you’re walking through tough moments of humanness. So, in this week’s advice segment, we’re getting into it.

The Truth & The Breakdown

The reason most people fail at using writing as medicine isn’t because they can’t write. It’s because they’re trying to write for an audience instead of writing for themselves. Because they assume that there is a purpose to writing that goes beyond deepening the relationship with the self, when in reality, there is no such thing.

They sit down with a blank page and immediately start censoring. What will people think? Does this make sense? Is this too messy? Too angry? Too much?

But writing, especially when being used as a form of medicine, isn’t about making sense to other people. It’s about making sense to yourself. It’s about getting the chaos out of your head and onto something outside of yourself so that you can actually see what you’re dealing with in real time from an external POV.

Traditional journaling tells you to write about your day or your feelings. But that’s like trying to perform surgery with safety scissors. You need sharper tools for the deeper work.

What you actually need is a way to write that lets you be completely honest without judgment, completely messy without shame, and completely real without performance.

Here’s my framework for exactly that.