{"id":5763,"date":"2016-07-08T21:10:37","date_gmt":"2016-07-09T04:10:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=5763"},"modified":"2016-07-08T21:10:37","modified_gmt":"2016-07-09T04:10:37","slug":"does-your-heart-hurt-prompt-269","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/does-your-heart-hurt-prompt-269\/","title":{"rendered":"Does your heart hurt? Prompt #269"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Broken<\/a>Does your heart hurt?<\/p>\n

I’ve been hearing “My heart hurts” from\u00a0 several friends these past few days. And when I hear their stories, my heart hurts, also.<\/p>\n

What to do?<\/p>\n

I believe in healing through writing. So, let’s write.<\/p>\n

Write about:<\/strong> Does your heart hurt? \u00a0\u00a0Write all the details you can about this.<\/p>\n

What happened?\u00a0 Write all the details that you know. If you were directly involved: Be as detailed and as explicit as you can.<\/p>\n

When did it happen?\u00a0 Day of week? Time of day? Where did it happen? Who was involved?<\/p>\n

What were you wearing? Were you standing or sitting?<\/p>\n

If you weren’t directly involved: Write as many details as you know. Then, focus on why you are affected. What connects you to what happened? Why are you affected so strongly?<\/p>\n

Read the next part after you have written about why your heart hurts and how and why you are affected.<\/p>\n

Okay, I know, if you are like me, you will read the whole thing now and write later. That’s fine. Go ahead and read the next part.<\/p>\n

Louise De Salvo, Writing As A Way of Healing<\/em>, says by writing our stories fully, we can begin to understand what was formerly unclear.\u00a0\u00a0 By writing, we can understand what we didn’t previously understand. What we’re writing is called a narrative.<\/p>\n

In order to come away with this as a learning experience and with a good feeling, we need to make this writing a healing narrative.<\/p>\n

A healing narrative is a balanced narrative.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This type of narrative uses negative words to describe emotions and feelings \u2026. Probably what we just did in our writing about a hurting heart. A healing narrative also uses positive words.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Take a minute now to rethink your experience that you just wrote about and see if you can find something positive and hopeful about your encounter.<\/p>\n

Even if your event was traumatic and extremely unpleasant, is there anything positive you can add to your narrative?<\/p>\n

Write:<\/strong> Take a few minutes to write about something good — anything — that came from that experience.<\/p>\n

For example, after writing about my difficult situation, I realized I was right to pay attention to my intuition.<\/p>\n

How are you feeling now? Take a few minutes to jot down what you are feeling now.<\/p>\n

Go ahead. Write down your feelings. Even if you didn’t write on the prompt. . . take a few minutes to jot down your feelings. Later, when you write on the prompt, compare your feelings then with now.<\/p>\n

You can use writing to shift your perspective. Sometimes you can\u2019t change the situation that\u2019s causing you pain. You can change how you look at it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The key is to write about events and the emotions<\/u> surrounding those events.<\/p>\n

James Pennebaker describes this in his book, Opening Up<\/em>.\u00a0 Healing starts when you write about what happened and how you felt about it then, and how you feel about it now.<\/p>\n

And in order for our writing to be a healing experience, we need to honor our pain, loss and grief.<\/p>\n

As we write, we can become observers. It is not what you write, or what you produce that is important. It is what happens to you while you are writing that is important.<\/p>\n

So, that’s why we write . . . to understand ourselves, our emotions and our world.<\/p>\n

Please, if you are feeling completely overwhelmed, seek professional help.<\/p>\n

For more details on how to write about difficult topics: please click on How to write without adding trauma<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does your heart hurt? I’ve been hearing “My heart hurts” from\u00a0 several friends these past few days. And when I hear their stories, my heart hurts, also. What to do? I believe in healing through writing. So, let’s write. Write about: Does your heart hurt? \u00a0\u00a0Write all the details you can about this. What happened?\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[965,6,964,934,105,342,10,11],"class_list":["post-5763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prompts","tag-does-your-heart-hurt","tag-freewrites","tag-how-to-write-about-difficult-topics","tag-how-to-write-without-adding-trauma","tag-just-write","tag-the-write-spot-blog","tag-writing-freely","tag-writing-prompts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-1uX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5763"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5768,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5763\/revisions\/5768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}