I recently had someone request more information about the Trauma & Grief Writing Group that I facilitate each Fall and Spring.
What an awesome request! And I decided to share it here on the blog, as well. Here’s what I wrote:
One of my missions in life is to build community. About a year (or two? Oh, menopause, you have eaten my memory), I decided to put together a writing group focused on building a safe and compassionate community of people who want to share and process through their trauma and grief stories. This is a powerful witnessing exercise, and trauma and grief need a witness.
Typically, about 6 of us will gather in a zoom room. We chat for a while, and then I do a grounding exercise to help us settle in.
I present a list of prompts that people can either use or NOT use. Sometimes individuals come to group having an idea of what they want to write about, and sometimes not, but you can write about anything you want (one time I thought I was going to write about a specific trauma memory brought up by a dream that I had, and it turned into a humor piece).
Then we write for a good hour, followed by a short body break (bathroom, snacks, etc).
When we come back together, we take turns reading what we’ve written out loud. After a person reads, the listeners have an opportunity to express how they related to the work / what resonated – this can be a word, phrase, paragraph, idea, connection. People often have similar connections, and it is a very validating process.
There are two primary rules – one is that this group is confidential, so you can share your own writing wherever, but otherwise please keep everyone else’s stuff in the group. The other is that there is no criticism allowed (this is not a critique group).
We have a text group where we share things every once in a while between Fall and Spring sessions.
Here are the policies and procedures for the Fall 2024 group, too.
Interested? Fill out this form or email kelly@mapyourhealing.com with questions!
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