Thankful Thursday

Friends, I want to comment on how happy I am that Stacy Jensen, one of the Writing the Heartache online workshop attendees, featured me on her blog. What a treat to read her post last Thursday. I hope you'll take the time to head over to her site and learn what she did. Stacy writes: I found the Writing the Heartache workshop through one of those rabbit holes I fall into while online. I'm grateful I had time that day to read Alice's post and follow the links. All you have to do is click here. The next workshop starts April 2! I hope you can join me! Sign up at this page on my website.

Write with us!

August 21 is a significant date. It's the day that my son Daniel was due. He didn't arrive that day. He clung to the womb and waited another four days, pressing heavily against my sciatic nerve. When he was born on the 25th---a healthy nearly ten pound baby---all my pain went away. Joy and excitement filled my heart.

Four years later, the pain would be back---a different pain---consuming me both physically and emotionally. On February 2, 1997, Daniel left Earth for a journey to Heaven. His body had weakened due to a small blue cell tumor, and from all the treatments involved to rid his little body of it.

This year on the 21st, the second Writing the Heartache All Day Workshop will be held. I'm looking forward to welcoming all who join us to write through the funny memories as well as the painful ones. I anticipate hearing the stories of each participant as we write poetry, essays, letters, and learn how to cope with sorrow. We'll learn to write from mementoes and photographs. We'll see the value of journaling and writing for publication and advocacy.

Please head over to my website to read more about the day and to register for the course.

I hope to see you there!

The Daniel Journal

I embraced it; I loathed it. It was a cloth bound book with blue and red swirled flowers on the cover. Inside were the raw words from my heart and soul.

Once it was filled with crisp, lined pages. That was the day it was gifted to me by my three-year-old son Daniel’s oncology nurse. That day it was just a pretty journal. Daniel smiled as I thanked this nurse for her thoughtful present.

Months later, this object contained sentences no one wants to ever write.

Never far from me, I lived for moments when I could take respite from my days to visit with this book. No longer clean and white, it was stained with tears, full of questions, anger, agony, and sorrow.

I’d kept a plaid-covered journal when Daniel was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. That was a journal where hope lined the pages because I was certain that with faith and prayers, chemo, surgeries, and radiation, my son would be cured of his aggressive tumor.

After Daniel’s funeral, I knew that the blue and red journal would never hold hope. Life, as I knew it and wanted, had ended. With Daniel gone, I only wanted the floor to open up and swallow me, taking me away from pain and misery.

The floor never opened. But the journal was there every day, allowing me to deposit whatever I needed onto the numerous pages. I wrote under a weeping willow tree at a local park, at a secluded booth in my favorite coffee shop, at stop lights. I wrote when I was frustrated with those who didn’t care about my brokenness, and when a stranger sent a card to comfort me.

When the pages ran out, I purchased another journal, and then another. I never expected one journal to be able to contain the entire volumes of my heartache.

My journals of the early years after Daniel’s passing sit in a bag in my closet now. I know that at anytime I could open one, and read. Yet, I don’t. Although much stronger now, thanks to my journal-writing, I still don’t want to face that woman who didn’t want to live.

The blue and red journal is more than a journal. This gift I received became a gift to myself and my sanity whenever I opened it to release parts of my torn heart.

While I often hated having a reason to have to write in it, I will always be grateful that it was there for me-never judgmental, never belittling, never preachy. Writing made me a believer that putting pen to paper is one of the best resources we have as humans for healing.

Because as I wrote, this journal provided me with something I didn’t think it ever could or would. Hope.

~ Alice J. Wisler
[Reprinted from Open to Hope and AliceWisler.blogspot.com/]

A testimony of the power of the pen

Mourning the Death of a Relationship Through Writing the Heartache

Those words are not a dramatic statement, but are a beginning of acknowledging the loss of someone who lives yet acts as though you are dead.

For those who have experienced the loss of a loved one who has not died, there is hope and relief in the form of the Writing the Heartache workshop. For years I thought I was crazy; having assumed that the grief that never seemed to end was all in my head. Writing the Heartache showed me that the assumption was wrong; I wasn’t crazy, I was continually grieving.

For years I have been beating myself up for the choices made by another over which I had no control or influence. I had been blaming myself for causing the whole relationship to collapse. I had believed the lies, the tormenting taunts that if I had been a better sister, if I had done more to help her, if I had been there, if I had been more mature, if If IF. When you let the “ifs” take over, they conquer your whole life. If is only a possibility, it is not the truth, it is not an accurate reflection of what was nor is a suggestion of what will be.

The workshop is just as powerful when you are grieving the loss of a relationship as when you are grieving the loss of a person when you open your heart to the ministry of writing, open your mind to seeing another perspective and open your spirit to the ministering of God through the gift of writing what is in your heart.

When I first signed up for the workshop, I hoped it would help. Throughout the workshop I discovered a whole new reality than the one that I had believed in. I was able to see truths about myself, my sister, and my situation that I was not able to see before; as well as putting the past into perspective which I could not have done otherwise.

Pouring out the grief onto paper brought more healing than talking allowed for me. The words flowed freely and by releasing them, they lost their sting, their power over me and any affect they once had.

The assignments given were not complicated, but asked you to look into your heart, to see beyond the obvious and let go of those things that hindered you. When you put your heart in black and white you can see a whole palette of possibilities you could not see before. It is as though you are seeing the situation for the first time in Technicolor.

This workshop does not guarantee that you will share your epiphanies with the one who is gone from your life. There is no guarantee it will ever be made known to anyone but you. I do not plan to show these writings to my sister. This is something I did for me. It was worth every hour spent, every tear shed, and every heartache rending me again to gain the freedom and self-forgiveness. At the end of this workshop I can see my sister more clearly, I have a new perspective about what really happened, but more important I know myself better and can see a deeper truth about who I am.

This workshop is a gift you give yourself. It will continue to make a difference in your life long after you stop remembering you ever completed the assignments. Five weeks are an investment in yourself that never ceases to give rich dividends.

~ Written by one of the attendees of my Writing the Heartache online course and used with permission for this blog.

A little about why it works

I've been writing my pain out in one form or another for thirteen years now. I have journals, spiral notebooks, and computer files to prove my heart brokenness. In addition to writing, I've taught, shared, gone on retreats, led seminars and workshops. I've told women and men across the country that writing is an essential tool for healing as I've encouraged grievers to put pen to paper.

It works. And I continue to be amazed that a narrow pen and skinny notebook can serve as therapist, instructor, and healer. When we write from our pain due to loss, we release the bottled-up agony and let it loose on the pages. And what we learn is that the emotions are no longer loose, wandering about, uncontained. For once we spill them onto the page, they become clearer, believable, and we even gain understanding of why we feel like we do.

Writing from our heart's deep core is some of the best therapy there is.

It sounds simple, almost too simple. But I am one of its most avid advocates. As Alice Walker once said, "Writing saved me."

I want others to experience the benefits writing gives us---a gift, ready to be untied. And like many gifts, when you use it, it not only blesses you, but has the potential to be a blessing to others.