The Healing Memoir

Planning your memoir, dealing with the psychology of memoir writing, handling the dark stuff, and organizing the narrative arc are steps to completing our healing memoir. But first let’s understand why we want to write our memoir: to gain a deeper understanding of our life, to heal the past and create hope for the future, or to create a healing legacy for your family.

The healing memoir helps us sort through memories and experiences and create a structure to the chaos of our memories. By sharing our stories we deepen our understanding of our family and develop insight into the history and meaning of our lives. It also helps us recognize writing as a necessary tool in helping to create a new perspective about the past. It’s about exposing the unconscious patterns that keep us stuck, and it offers new inroads into creating a different story for us to embrace. And in regards to legacy, think about the kinds of things your children or grandchildren will never know that you can pass along such as important events, dates, ideas, and feelings.

I was broken and then I broke some more, and I am not yet healed but I have started believing I will be.

Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

It’s easiest to begin with freewriting to see what key topics your mind wants to uncover. Wrestle with the nature of truth and the muscles of your story’s structure. String together treasures of memory. Reveal deep secrets and long-buried thoughts, feelings and events. It is a very liberating thing to do: allowing burdens to rise to the surface.

Perhaps start with eight reasons why you want to write the healing memoir. A thought-provoking trick is to imagine the family members who might discourage you from writing your healing memoir. Then write about them anyway. Make a list of your inner voices. List eight significant events in your life. Maybe list some family stories that always got your attention as a child. What drew you to the story or who told it? Remember the sights, smells, sounds that emanate from the history of your life. Research old photos, listen to old stories, interview family members, uncover the hot button issues then do internet research because it can fill in the gaps that you need to know to create the story you want to tell.

In many cases, people hold on so tightly to their past pains to avoid letting go of the “excuses” and the fear of having to be accountable for their life.

Yvonne Pierre, The Day My Soul Cried: A Memoir

Start the structural planning by listing turning points such as births, deaths, mentors, new relationships, artists or musicians in the family, disasters, illnesses, or significant travels. Chart these turning points on a timeline. Look for the overarching theme that develops such as significant relationships, our emotional life, our dream life, miracles, yearnings but paths not taken, or objects or symbols that had significant meaning. Follow either a linear or a life stage development model to structuring your story.

Woven through these events is our family, the most significant influence on how we develop psychologically, mentally, and spiritually. There is no way to underestimate the power of family dynamics in writing out healing memoir. Think about family roles, rules, and myths. Don’t forget those secrets. Perhaps, think about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and how we relate to it. Think of writing our healing memoir as a development path for self-actualization. Explore generalized patterns of unwritten rules, punishments, various roles family members played, ethnic and cultural influences that affected your family. Was there a balance between autonomy and closeness in the family?

If you bring forward that which is within you, then that which is within you is your salvation. If you go not bring forth that which is within you, then that which is within you will destroy you.

The Gnostic Gospels

Onto the dark stuff that a healing memoir is made of: pain and abuse, family rules and taboos, and dealing with our inner and outer critic. We need to take into consideration to balance the dark and light stories, like maybe baking cookies with family, learning how to ride a bike, winning an award or ribbon, learning to drive, falling in love for the first time, and births. If you get stuck, ask whether what you’re writing is stuff that you remember or stuff that others told you, whether or not our version agrees with our family’s version, whether you hear a threatening voice ordering you to stop, or whether or not you want to heal or simply wallow in those painful memories much longer. Writing is releasing the memories from the torment they cause you. The goal of healing is release: regaining balance and allowing the body and mind to return to a steady state where you can relax again have restful sleep, normal thinking and functioning.

Now for the importance of choosing the scenes from your life that you gathered from your turning points. Your story has to have a beginning, middle, and an end. Have something significant happen in each scene. The main character—you—has to be significantly changed by the course of events in your healing memoir. All stories must have conflict, rising action, a crisis, a climax, and a resolution that by the end of the story, the reader sees where the protagonist—you—began and how you were transformed, in our case, healed since your writing a healing memoir. In deciding your climax, look for the moment of greatest change or insight when your life shifted irrevocably. After that comes the culmination that ties tother the end pieces of your healing story. Voila. You did it.

Families that feel together, heal together.

Christina G. Hibbert Psy.D.

Until my next post, why not check out my YA novels about mental illness, memoir writing, or even my Native American mystery series on Amazon, or follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Bookbub , BookSprout, or AllAuthor.