Archives | Writing and Healing

Emily’s Story: Reframing Anorexia

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 15, 2007 in A Different Perspective

The thread this week (which, again, may or may not be apparent) is how looking at something in a different way can shift things. And perhaps one of the clearest instances I’ve seen of this shift happened with Emily, a young woman with anorexia who I’ve written about here before. She had severe anorexia, weighed only fifty-two pounds when I began seeing her. And she had, when I first began to see her, a definite point of view toward her body. She viewed her body as the problem—disgusting actually—a stance that only became accentuated after a meal. Her stomach would protrude a bit after a meal—and she would see and feel this protrusion as disgusting. The body was seen as the problem. The body, in her point of view, was disgusting. And the antidote? It began with horses. Or some part of the antidote began with horses. Horses helped her reframe the story of her own body. It started like this. Emily began to imagine a safe place where she could experience healing. She imagined herself at a barn among horses. Then, with time—and this was a surprise to me—something I didn’t foresee—she began to realize that it was easier to have a stomach when she imagined herself being around the horses. She felt freer among the horses. She felt free to eat a meal and have a small pouch of a stomach afterward. She didn’t feel so disgusted by her own stomach—so disgusted by her own body. And all of this had something to do with the fact that she felt the horses weren’t judging her. It had something to do with taking a respite, for a while, from human eyes. It wasn’t that all human eyes that looked at her body looked upon it with judgment—but some did—and some had in the past. She’d had some shaming experiences as a child and into her teen years. And, perhaps because of this history, it seemed, at least for the time being, all human eyes were suspect. All human eyes put her at risk. But the horses’ eyes. She felt safer with them. This went on for a while, imagining herself at the barn among the horses. And as she practiced imagining herself the way the horses saw her she began to imagine that her pouch of a stomach could be a kind of pregnancy. The pouch she’d once perceived as ugly and shameful began to transform when she began to see it from a new point of view. She didn’t think she was literally pregnant. It wasn’t delusional like that. It was subtler, and more in the imaginal realm. She told me that she could sometimes hold onto the thought that the pouch of her stomach was a pregnancy, and inside it she was carrying some new kind of life, and, sometimes, she told me, this made her feel something like hope. A pregnancy. New life. She was beginning to imagine her body as nurturing—as potentially good. And it was one of those moments—I can remember thinking this—it was a moment that had the potential to change things. If the body is potentially good, then maybe, just maybe, it would be okay to nourish that body, to feed it, to offer it sustenance. The moment, if truth be...

Writing and Healing Idea #23: What If the Moon’s a Balloon?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 13, 2007 in Healing Poetry, Writing Ideas

There’s a poem by e.e.cummings—“who knows if the moon’s a balloon” It begins like this: who knows if the moon’s a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky– The poem can serve as a kind of springboard for making a list of questions that begin by asking: WHAT IF? For instance—— What if the moon’s a balloon? What if the balloon pops? What if the moon is a hot-air balloon and the Wizard of Oz gets into the balloon and floats away, and all of this before you can get into the balloon with him, and you have to find your way back home on your own? What if. . . what? Consider making your own list of questions. Write as fast as you can without thinking. Begin with a single question—with e.e. cumming’s question if you like—and then just keep going. Don’t worry about the questions making sense—or the questions being clever—or even interesting. Just write them. Try to write fast without thinking too much. When you have come to the end of something—a pause—look back over the questions you’ve written. Circle the ones that you like–or that surprise you in some way. Save the questions—especially the circled ones. Who knows? One of them could become the beginning to a poem—or to some other whole new...

What If?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 11, 2007 in A Different Perspective

In his most recent book, Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene, a physicist with a particular gift for translating physics into plain language, tells about a game he used to play with his father, walking through the streets of Manhattan. It’s a game that may have uniquely prepared him to be a physicist, a game that involves shifting perspective. It’s also, I think, a potentially wonderful game for a writer—or for someone who is interested in looking at something—anything—in a new way. It’s like playing “I Spy”, but with a twist. In this game Brian Greene or his father would spy an object on the street, describe it from an unusual perspective, and then the other one had to figure out what was being described. For example, this from Greene’s book: “‘I’m walking on a dark, cylindrical surface surrounded by low, textured walls, and an unruly bunch of thick white tendrils is descending from the sky.’” The answer? An ant walking on a hot dog while a street vendor is dressing it with sauerkraut. You can probably think of other examples. Here’s one: I am repeatedly diving into a hard invisible barrier while an enormous four-legged white creature chases after me and makes high-pitched sounds. (That’s a fly at the window while our dog—a whippet—tries to catch it.) Greene says this game did two things for him. It not only stretched his brain to consider different viewpoints. But it also led him to consider each of these viewpoints as potentially valid. Here’s another example: an ant resting on an ice-skater’s boot. To a spectator in the stands, it appears as if the ice skater, along with her boot, is spinning. But what about to the ant? And which point of view is more valid in regards to absolute space? This is the kind of question that can give me a bit of a headache. It’s also the kind of question—having to do with motion and relative motion and absolute space—that physicists wrestled with in the early part of the twentieth century. And the key to beginning to resolve this kind of question, according to Greene, had everything to do with being able to ask a new question: what if? What if the way we’re looking at things now is not the only way to look? What if we look at things from a different perspective? And what if this new perspective is potentially valid? I’d never thought about it in quite this way before, but this, Greene says, is what Einstein did. Einstein asked, What if? And he came up, among other things, with the special theory of relativity, which says, according to Greene, that space and time are “in the eyes of the beholder.” Einstein didn’t so much answer the pressing physical questions of his time, Greene says. He reframed them. And Greene describes reframing like this. p. 39: Some discoveries provide answers to questions. Other discoveries are so deep that they cast questions in a whole new light, showing that previous mysteries were misperceived through lack of knowledge. You could spend a lifetime—in antiquity, some did—wondering what happens when you reach earth’s edge, or trying to figure out who or what lives on the earth’s underbelly. But when you learn that the earth is round, you see...

Sweetness

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 8, 2007 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry

One of three places that I’ve come across Mary Oliver’s poem, The Wild Geese, in the last month or so was as a kind of epigraph—before the table of contents—to the poetry anthology, Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley. The anthology, first published in Britain, is one I would recommend, and I’ll probably get around to writing about it more here on this site one of these days. Meanwhile, today, I wanted to draw your attention to one particular poem that I found in the anthology—a poem called “Sweetness,” by Stephen Dunn. The poem is freely available on the web, this because of a project–Poetry Out Loud–which encourages high school students to memorize and recite poetry. But back to the poem, Sweetness—the first seven lines— Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it. . . Nice, huh? The poem makes me think, among other things, of that bag of tomatoes and that rotisserie chicken in Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer. But any way you look at it, I think maybe he’s onto...

Four Ways of Looking at Healing, in No Particular Order

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 7, 2007 in Uncategorized

Purple tulips in the window A photograph of purple tulips in the window A woman whose daughter has died, sixteen years ago, and, still, the grief, it catches her unaware—that raw fresh ache. This is more frequent in January. How do you do it? I ask her. I really want to know, how does she do it. I picture her getting up every morning, making breakfast, walking the dog—it’s wet some days and cold—and then there’s all that has to be done next. How do you do it? She says she knows that she will see her again. When she dies she will see her daughter again. She tells me this as if it is the most obvious thing. Remembering to refill the bird feeders on a winter afternoon and then looking out the kitchen window—finches—swooping in to the feeder as if to some busy midtown diner, where inside it’s warm, there’s a waitress inside refilling coffee, and voices, that sound of forks against...

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