There’s a particular frustration that comes from trying to explain how you feel and coming up blank. Your mouth and your mind seem to be working from different scripts. For people living with the effects of complex trauma, especially those who dissociate, that’s not a loose description. It’s biology.
When the nervous system is under threat, the body’s primary aim is survival. Long before you can name what’s happening, your brain may have already decided to shut down, freeze, or disconnect. In that moment, the verbal parts of the brain go quiet. Which is why, when someone asks what happened, you might say: I don’t know. You’re not being difficult or avoidant. In that moment, you genuinely don’t have access to it.
And yet something happened. Your body knows. You just may not have the words for it yet.
Writing into the silence
This is where writing can help. I don’t mean writing a memoir or keeping a gratitude journal (though those are fine too). I mean scribbling a few words on the back of an envelope, texting yourself a thought you didn’t realise you had, or writing a letter to someone you’ll never send. Writing without pressure. Writing without an audience.
The psychologist James Pennebaker’s research showed that people who wrote about emotional experiences for just 15 minutes a day had better immune function, lower stress levels, and fewer GP visits. But more than that, writing helped people make meaning out of things that previously felt chaotic or unspoken.
In trauma therapy, writing can become a bridge, a way to connect different parts of the self, particularly when verbal expression is difficult. Dissociation can leave us feeling fragmented, like different versions of us are living in different rooms of the same house. Writing lets them leave each other notes.
You might write something down and think, “I didn’t know I felt that way.” But it was there
all along. Sometimes, the hand knows before the mouth does.
Let it be messy
Some of the people I work with worry they’re doing it wrong. “Should I be writing about the trauma? Should it be positive?” There’s no correct way to write your way back to yourself. It doesn’t need to be tidy. It just needs to feel like yours. It’s also okay to write things that don’t make sense. Your writing doesn’t have to be legible to anyone else. In fact, it might feel safer if it’s not. Writing can help bypass the inner critic, the part that says “don’t say that” or “you’re being dramatic.” It can give voice to things your body already knows but your conscious mind hasn’t caught up with yet. And sometimes, reading something you wrote last week, you might laugh. Or cry. Or think, “Wow. I’ve survived a lot.” That, too, is healing.
If talking feels hard, or like you keep arriving at the same wall, try writing. A sentence, a fragment, a page of words that makes no sense until it does. It’s a legitimate way back to yourself, and one that works at your own pace, without an audience.
Writing Alongside Therapy
Therapeutic writing works particularly well as a companion to therapy rather than a replacement for it. What you write between sessions can be brought into the room if you choose, or it can simply do its own quiet work. Some people find that writing loosens something that then becomes speakable. Others find the writing itself is enough, that the act of putting it on the page is the processing.
If you’re already in therapy and wondering whether writing might add something, it’s worth raising with your therapist. If you’re not in therapy but the writing is bringing up material that feels significant or overwhelming, that’s a signal worth paying attention to, and a conversation with a therapist may be helpful.
My work draws on therapeutic writing alongside relational psychodynamic therapy, particularly with clients for whom language has been difficult to access or for whom trauma has disrupted the connection between felt experience and words. If that sounds relevant to where you are, I’d be glad to talk it through. Get in touch at samanthamerry.co.uk/contacts.
Resources worth exploring:
- Opening Up by Writing It Down by James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth, the research foundation for expressive writing and its effects on health and emotional processing, readable for a general audience
- Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, the most direct and unsentimental guide to free writing practice, useful for anyone who finds the blank page more frightening than useful
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, not a writing guide but one of the most powerful demonstrations of what it means to find language for experiences that were previously unspeakable
- Lapidus International (lapidus.org.uk), the UK body for writing and wellbeing, with resources and a directory of practitioners working at the intersection of writing and mental health
Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist in private practice in Bromley, South East London, and a doctoral researcher at the University of Chester. She has a specialist interest in therapeutic writing and its role in trauma-informed practice.