I often find myself writing about my life experiences in almost all of my creative writing projects. My characters and their thoughts, feelings, and experiences are all inspired by mine. At one point, I thought to myself: what would happen if I wrote out my life story without the guise of a fictional character? After some research, I discovered that there may be some benefits to doing so.

Writing your traumatic life story can also be referred to as a trauma narrative, which is where you write your traumatic experiences down to help you try to compartmentalize your feelings and thoughts. This way, you can make sense of it while also allowing yourself to genuinely feel every negative feeling you have repressed. Writing your trauma narrative can help you come to terms with your experience, thus helping you heal.

Narrative Exposure Therapy, another form of narrative therapy, is typically targeted towards people who experience post-traumatic stress disorder as it can help you put your trauma into context. This narrative can be created both mentally and physically through writing. The goal of this therapy is to think about your traumatic experiences on a timeline. By doing so, you are able to recognize 1.) what happened first, 2.) how you felt afterwards, 3.) what changed because of it, and 4.) what trauma responses or triggers have occurred as a result of it. However, you are also able to see everything else outside of it. This therapy encourages trauma survivors to focus not just on the bad that has happened to them; it is meant to help survivors change their perspective on their life.

When patients view their life as a whole, without completely singling out traumatic events, they are able to rediscover who they are and recognize that they are not their trauma—they are so much more. Narrative Exposure Therapy can encourage healing because, by contextualizing trauma and viewing it as negative experiences surrounded by other positive or neutral experiences, trauma survivors begin to stop defining themselves only by what they have gone through. They start to see that they are not the victim they once thought of themselves as—they are a survivor, and they are an overcomer.

I encourage you to write your life story. Who are you? Where did you begin? Where are you now, and where are you headed? Write about your experiences: negative, positive, neutral, traumatic—write about them all. Free yourself by allowing yourself to freely express what you have been repressing. As you write your story, you will begin to see that there is so much that you do not acknowledge on a daily basis. There are memories, good and bad, locked away in the back of your mind that you never unlock. Take a moment to write about it all. This experience is so healing, humbling even. You begin to see yourself and the life you live in an entirely new light. Why do you make the decisions you make? Did it have to do with the time you failed a math test in fifth grade? Heal from the things you don’t even realize you haven’t healed from and write your life story. You owe it to yourself to heal.