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Emily’s Healing Place: A Place to Heal from Anorexia

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 18, 2006 in Healing Places

[Please note that, as with any patients I write about here, unless otherwise stated, names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.] Writing about a healing place can offer the kind of moment that changes things. In fact, simply imagining a healing place can sometimes change things. I’ve seen this happen. One particular place that comes to mind is a place that a woman named Emily imagined. Emily was twenty-seven years old, and weighed, when she first came to see me as a patient, fifty-two pounds. She’d tried and failed at several different treatment programs for anorexia and was under the care of an internist who was monitoring her physical condition. She was referred to my practice of mind-body medicine by a family friend who suspected that her condition might also benefit from being considered at the interface of mind and body. Emily concurred. And so we began. After a few weeks Emily began keeping a journal. It was, I believe, a few weeks after this that I invited her to imagine a healing place. One of her fears about beginning to eat again was the risk that any food she took in would make her stomach protrude—something she’d come to believe was ugly. She told me she’d like to imagine a place where it would be okay to have a stomach—a place where she wouldn’t feel ashamed of having a stomach. When she began to imagine such a place—a place where it might be safe to gain weight—she began to imagine herself at a barn among horses, this a place she’d loved as a young girl. She imagined brushing the horses, stroking them, placing her cheek against their flanks. She imagined mucking out the stalls. She wrote about this place in her journal. As with most good writing, it was the details that brought the place alive. The stroke of the brush against the horse’s hide. The warmth against her cheek. The horse’s breath. The sharp sweet smell of the stalls. The place became real through the details. With practice, she became able to summon the barn in her imagination when she felt anxious. She imagined stroking the horses, and brushing them. She imagined—and then experienced—the feeling in her body of her body being accepted. “The horses,” she told me, “they wouldn’t judge me if my stomach was pooching out. They wouldn’t care if I had a stomach or...

Writing and Healing Idea #2: Freewriting

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 16, 2006 in Writing Ideas

If you’ve ever read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones or if you’ve ever written morning pages in the style of The Artist’s Way, or if you’ve ever run across freewriting in one of its thousand other permutations, then you may already be quite familiar with the process of freewriting. If not, the gist of the matter is that when you choose freewriting you really do have a free ticket: you can write whatever you like. And you can write in whatever style you like. Freewriting, at its essence, is about reclaiming permission—permission to write a lot of words and sentences that no one else ever needs to see, and then beginning to notice, gradually, that something is beginning to emerge. Meaning perhaps. Or insight. Surprising words. Surprising sentences. Small nuggets of value. Gold of a sort. Jewels. You can choose a time when you know you will have fifteen or twenty minutes of uninterrupted time. The first thing in the morning?. The last thing in the evening? You can make a mug of tea, or coffee. You can find a comfortable chair. And then you can, simply, start writing. You can, for instance, write in response to the invitation to design a healing retreat. You can, if you’d like, write in response to this whole notion of writing and healing. What are some of your secret hopes for writing and healing? What are your secret fears? And what in the world is writing and healing anyway? If you can, as you write, try to keep your pen moving as much as possible. Worry not about spelling or punctuation or grammar, or whether what you are writing makes any sense for that matter. All of this is a part of the permission that freewriting offers. You can write that you have nothing to write about. That you have no clue where you’d go for a healing retreat. That you wish you’d bought a different pen. You can begin with your secret hopes for writing and healing, and then in the middle you can stop and switch directions and you can write about. . . what? The ants in your kitchen? Your aunts? The street you lived on as a child? The sky’s the limit here. And beyond that—stars, constellations, galaxies. You can make a list of all the constellations you know, and some you’ve never heard of but you wish they existed, and then you can if you like, come back to this notion of writing and healing and you can write about what in the world the stars might have to do with it. You really can’t do this...

Month One: Creating a Healing Place

Posted by Diane Morrow on August 2, 2006 in Indexes

TABLE OF CONTENTS Writing and Healing Idea #1: Designing a Healing Retreat Writing and Healing Idea #2: Freewriting Emily’s Healing Place: A Place to Heal from Anorexia Writing and Healing Idea #3: The Body as a Healing Place The Shelter of Poetry Terabithia and Tangalooponda Writing and Healing Idea #4: The Easiest Writing and Healing Exercise Ever A Clean, Well-Lighted...

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