Why do I write?

In the Script Newsletter they have a regular column which asks this question. Various ITAA members have answered it so I thought I would give it a go as well.

Over the years I have had people who are wanting to write an article ask me, “How do you start to write?” I just don’t understand that question. The problem for me is not how to start but how to stop.

I recall being 13 or 14 and I kind of got my first girl friend. I then spontaneously started to write her love letters because that is what you do, or at least I thought that is what you do. Over time however I discovered that my peers did not do the same. In fact I could not find one who did the same thing. I recall feeling that I was a bit odd and wondered, “Why wouldn’t you write such letters?”. However this, as I said made me feel a bit strange so I stopped writing them.

Then in late high school I studied literature and we had various writing exercises from time to time. I did them all in this exercise book which eventually never left my side and it became kind of my friend. It was not really a diary but a place where I wrote my homework exercises and would write other things that I thought about. I even wrote some fantasy short stories I thought up. Fiction writing has never really appealed to me. It’s OK but it did not really hold any great interest for me. But I can recall having that exercise book and it was kind of quite important to me at the time. I wish I still had it but it got lost some where along the way.

In my early twenties I began studying psychology at university and I discovered that I would get all these ideas about psychology and philosophical stuff. When I read something I would get lots of ideas about it. Different ways of looking at what I was reading or combining different ideas about the same subject to arrive at a different conclusion and so forth. Also I have never read a book from cover to cover, particularly psychology books. I only read sections at a time that are of current interest to me or something I have an idea about.  Then I will go to another book or journal article on the same topic and read what they have to say. I may end up reading the whole book but it is only section by section over time and in any order that interests me at the time.

After a bit of time I found that I was getting over loaded with these ideas in my head and actually went through a bit of a bad patch in this way in the very early days at university. So I started writing them down. These were not assignments I had to do for my degree or preparation for some exam these were outside the requirements for any formal study. I recall a few fellow students who saw some of this writing ask me why I did it to which I initially did not have an answer.

However I eventually came up with an answer of - Why do I write? It serves two functions for me. The first one is it provides me with some cathartic relief. The actual process of writing the idea out provides a sense of relief for me. It kind of gets the idea out of my head. 

Second it means I could then let the idea go. I don’t know if this sounds weird or not but I have this sense of a huge 3D spider web. Like a matrix type of thing and all the ideas are connected to each other in the matrix. Each idea has a number of links (like the 3D web) to other ideas. They are all categorized and each category is linked to other categories. 

When I first started getting these ideas I would not want to forget them because then I would have forgotten them and the link would be lost. So I got overloaded for a while as I said before. However I discovered that if I wrote them down then I had a record of them and then that part of the matrix would not be lost. I could always refer back to it as i do. Writing the idea down allowed me to let the idea go because it would not be lost. I did not have to try and keep it in my head.

So that is why I write but this created another problem. As time went on what I had written started to mount up. This was before computers so I started to get a pile of papers that I had written. What was I going to do with them?

Over the years they have been complied in different ways and presented to the public in different ways. But originally I created a seminar called the Loftus Street Seminar where I had my office. It involved a series of lectures on the ideas I had thought up and eventually this resulted in a book called  “New ways in Transactional Analysis - Proceedings of the Loftus Street Seminar (Volume 1)” which was published in 1984.

There ended up being 9 volumes

Volume	Title	Date
One	New ways in transactional analysis	1984
Two	Transference based therapy	1985
Three	Psychoseparation	1986
Four	Creative feeling	1986
Five	The treatment of character	1987
Six	Adolescence, anger and what to do	1990
Seven	Employee support programme	1991
Eight	Staying alive	1991
Nine	Psychotherapy and the art of being human	1993

Then the internet arrived and that was like leaving a child in a candy store. It’s all about writing and now what I write can easily be presented to the world.

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Natural trauma debriefing

Dena on facebook says

“Sounds like interesting work Tony, do you have a particular way of working with individuals returning from combat?’ (end quote)

I have always been somewhat bemused by the debate about how to treat trauma. I find it quite easy to work with and I think I have been reasonably successful in doing so. My view is that trauma debriefing is a natural human process anyway which makes the counselling process easier and more likely to succeed. 

Humans when they have been traumatized in some way will most often spontaneously engage in the reparative process of trauma debriefing. Hence the goal of the therapist is basically to make sure the natural process proceeds as it should. They are kind of just helping the natural process along and are a bit of a bystander in this way, unlike other counselling situations.

Once the shock has subsided and any serious physical damage is made reasonably stable then the person as I said will spontaneously engage in remediating their damaged psyche. The steps basically are.

1. The person enters into the relational. That is they do not isolate self and seek out others to engage in about talking about the traumatic episode. Here the therapist is looking out for things like a Be strong, Don’t trust or Don’t be a child script messages. People with these may falter at this first stage by tending to isolate self and not seek others out to talk about the incident.

2. They talk about what happened and this can be as basic as describing what physically happened in the event. What were their reactions to what happened and so on.

3. Cathartic release. Whilst doing number 2 most people will begin experiencing feelings and then one wants some kind of cathartic release of emotions. Some can falter at this stage because they have a Don’t feel message of some kind.

4. The get a sympathetic response of some kind by the other person they are talking to.

And that is about that. To me it all seems rather simple and uncomplicated. The person will do the same process a number of times over weeks or months and after that the debriefing is usually complete.

As I said before I think this is a natural human process. Watch people after a car accident. Most will automatically seek others out, want to talk about the event, show some emotions and want to get reassuring hugs which covers the four points I mentioned above.

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