Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode Thirty-Four
Strategies for Navigating Traumatic Memories In Your Memoir with Deborah Svec-Carstens

Lisa [0:00]:
Well, hello, Deborah. I am so glad that you’re on the Writing Your Resilience podcast. Welcome.

Deborah [0:05]:
Well, thanks, Lisa. I'm so glad to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Lisa [0:08]:
Well, thank you for being one of my newsletter followers. I’m really excited to dive into this question, but before we get to it, can you tell us a little about you and your writing project?

Deborah [0:28]:
A little bit about me? After a 20-year career as a government lawyer, I returned to graduate school, earned a Master of Theological Studies, and I’m now working as a writer, freelance editor, and spiritual director. I often get asked the question: What is a spiritual director? The brief explanation is that I offer a non-judgmental space of deep listening, where others can explore their questions and make meaning of their life experiences. I work primarily with women who have experienced trauma or are in transition, whether that’s due to some kind of career change, loss of a loved one, or children leaving for college—things like that.

My project: I have written a memoir called Tour Delight: A Year in Paris, and it focuses on the beginning of healing after trauma. When I was 22, I was a recent college graduate, living with my parents and feeling directionless. I decided to escape small-town Iowa for a year-long adventure as a nanny in Paris. Two months after my arrival, a stranger sexually assaulted me after my morning run. I was isolated and alone in a foreign country in the early 1990s but unwilling to admit defeat or abandon the family I worked for. So, I chose to stay in France and begin again, seeking healing and transforming myself in the process.

The book invites readers along on my search for meaning, community, and connection in the months following the assault. I’m currently in the process of querying agents. I’ve had writing published in the Des Moines Register and have been named a finalist for the Women on Writing Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest. I’ve had an essay named a notable essay for a #MeToo contest in Memoir Magazine, and earlier this year, I appeared before an audience of about 1,200 people as part of the Des Moines Storytellers Project and shared my story of creating community in the aftermath of sexual assault.

Lisa [2:28]:
First, congratulations on all those awards and accolades! That is wonderful, and kudos for such a great description of your project. It’s so hard for writers to figure out how to do this, and you just did it marvelously. Bravo! Also, I want to say thank you for the work that you do in the world. You know, a lot of people have been damaged by organized religion. They’ve had very difficult experiences. A lot of harm has happened. And yet our spirituality, which to me is how we make meaning, where we find hope in the world, and really, how we see things, is so important. We need to be able to talk about what that is for us in a non-judgmental space where someone’s not going to say, “Oh, join this, do this,” whatever. I love that that is part of what you do in the world.

Deborah [3:22]:
It’s something that I really enjoy, and I get as much out of it as, hopefully, the people that I’m working with. I do think it’s important for people to have that space to question and just wonder about what is a meaningful life for them and where they find meaning.

Lisa [3:40]:
Absolutely. A lot of what we do on this podcast is figuring out how to make meaning, and we address people’s questions to figure that out. You have a very important question for us today. Would you like to share it?

Deborah [3:58]:
Sure. My question is that, in my writing, when I share it with other people, I routinely receive feedback that my writing needs more emotion. I’ve heard this throughout writing my memoir and now, as I’m focused on writing essays. So, I’m wondering, what are some tips and tricks to bring more emotion to the page, especially when you’re writing about trauma or other challenging life events?

Lisa [4:18]:
Yeah, thank you for that question. So many people have it. You are definitely not alone on that one, and it was something that I had to figure out myself. My heart is connecting to yours as you share that because it’s really tough. I want to begin by giving an overview of some of the very common ways that this struggle shows up in writing and why we struggle with it.

Sometimes, for some people, we don’t have the language to describe our emotions. Maybe we never learned it. Maybe we grew up in an invalidating environment where emotions weren’t talked about. Sometimes people who are neurodivergent don’t have the language to talk about emotions. So, when people ask us to do this, it can feel like a foreign language. I know that may not be your issue, but I just want to go through the ones that happen.

Then there can be events that happen in our life, whether in childhood or adulthood, that are traumatic. They affect our nervous systems. When we go through really difficult things, the brain does this magnificent thing—it shuts things down so that you can focus on survival. Feelings are often not needed in the midst of survival, so if we have divorced ourselves from an experience for the sake of survival, but then later, it can be difficult to add in what we were feeling at that time because it’s possible we were feeling nothing.

Then sometimes we don’t have memories of the event. That’s a third thing that can happen. Maybe we remember the event completely, yet there are no feelings associated with it. And sometimes there are gaps in the experience where perhaps the feelings might have existed, or parts of the experience aren’t there. That’s because when we go through traumatic experiences, the brain does not record everything. It records what seems most important to survival, so it’s very common, especially if you’re dealing with what would be a flash memory of something that’s traumatic. You remember vividly one, two, or three things, often in the beginning, and then there can be this blank spot.

It would take me too long to explain why all that happens in this podcast episode, which is meant to be shorter, so I won’t get into that today, but I just wanted to offer some of the most common ways this can show up. Is any of this ringing a bell for you, or how does this show up when you’re getting feedback?

Deborah [7:01]:
All three of those things you mentioned: identifying the feelings is hard, identifying or describing how it feels in my body, and just putting words on that is hard. Memory is an issue because, especially in writing my memoir, I’m writing about things that happened years ago, and remembering some of those things is difficult. And now I’ve forgotten what the third thing was that you said, but it resonated as well.

Lisa [7:27]:
That our minds shut down?

Deborah [7:30]:
Yes, that resonated as well.

Lisa [7:38]:
It’s hard to pull up those emotions.

Lisa [7:41]:
Absolutely. I have lots of tools, and I’m going to share several of them today. What I want you to do as we’re sitting here is note which ones seem to speak to you, like, “Oh yes, that’s it.” You may feel this in your body, it may feel like a little “bling” in your brain—it doesn’t matter where it happens. It may just be a thought like, “Oh yeah, that seems like it could work.” Notice that. This is part of the process of connecting with your emotions: figuring out what you like and what seems like it’s going to work.

When it comes to developing the language of emotions, sometimes it’s important to read about emotions and just get a primer. Brené Brown has an excellent primer, The Atlas of the Heart. It’s almost like an encyclopedia of the different emotions you can experience. She talks about the nuances, like the difference between envy and jealousy, or what compassion actually is, or what anger is. She talks about what it looks like, how it feels, the cognitive expressions of it—all these different things. Reading things like that can be really helpful.

Then, reading other people’s manuscripts—think about best sellers, especially things that speak to you, where you feel like, “Oh my gosh, this person knows how to navigate this.” Read those sections and look at the kinds of language they’re using. I’m going to suggest you get a practice copy of the book, or you can type this out. Sometimes I think typing it out can be better because you can make the font bigger, right? You’re not going to type out the whole book, okay? What you want to do is type out a section that is emotionally charged, then get out a few different highlighters.

First, I want you to highlight in one color all the physical things that happen: the facial expressions, the way the body position changes—anything that the person does physically to express emotion. Then, I want you to have another highlighter and point out what they say, what’s happening in the dialogue. And then, I want you to have another one that looks for emotionally charged verbs. For instance, I can pick up a pen, or I can wrench a pen from somebody’s hand. Notice that just that word, “wrench,” that active verb, has an emotional charge. Sometimes a way to add more emotion to our work is to think about the verbs that we’re using because that can be helpful. I’m going to share more tips, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts just from that.

Deborah [10:35]:
Well, Brené Brown’s book is sitting on my shelf. I’ve read part of it but not all of it, so that’s something to pull off the shelf. I love the idea of typing something out and using highlighters. As a former lawyer, I love highlighting, especially in different colors. I think that’s a great idea for really seeing how a writer is using emotion on the page.

Lisa [11:00]:
And there was one last thing I meant to add in terms of, you know, the things that I want you to look for. And the last one is interiority—what is the protagonist or the narrator thinking, right? So, what are their thoughts? And you can also highlight, if you want to add another one, feeling words. And if you don't highlight a lot of feeling words, that can also be information. Maybe you don't need to talk about how sad you are, or you don't need to cry so much. I'm not talking about you in general, but just, you know, everyone. But maybe what you need to do is say, "Okay, I'm not going to cry, but what else expresses sadness? How else does this show up?" And pay attention to what writers are doing.

So, once you've done that, another thing you can do that can help, along with having the language, is to see what it looks like. And YouTube is fabulous for this. So, if you know of different movie clips where someone is angry, or really sad, or you know, there's a lot of conflict, pull up the clip on YouTube and watch it. Pay attention to these things, you know, just one at a time—like, watch the clip and look for facial expressions. Watch the clip and look for what happens in the body. Watch the clip and look for the dialogue. So, you know, you want to pick something that's maybe five minutes, and you may watch it four or five times to pay attention to all the different ways that emotion comes up. Because when you can see it, and you have the language for it, that can help you put it all together.

So that's if it's just a language or "I don't know how to talk about it" kind of situation. But if it's "I don't know what it feels like, or I don't remember," those are different things, and they're very common for people who've experienced traumatic events and people who are trying to write about those traumatic events. So, if the situation is "I remember vividly what happened, but there are no emotions attached to it," you can say that once, but if your life is a life of dissociation where there are no, you know, there are no feelings, you can't say every time, "This happens, and my brain shut down," or "And now my feelings ended."

Sometimes what's important for the reader is to know, well, how might you have been feeling? Because even if you dissociated to a certain extent, and your brain, you know, shut down to a certain extent, feelings were still happening, right? There was something behind the curtain that maybe you don't have access to that was still happening, and it was happening in your nervous system. Because feelings are just energy moving through your nervous system. There are neurochemical things that are happening. So, if you feel a certain scene is such that you need to be able to talk about it, think about how you might have been feeling, or how you feel about that experience now, you know, if you've worked through this in therapy. But if emotion showed up, it's likely that whatever shows up in therapy, or when you're talking about this at another time, is what was behind the curtain at that time. Or you can think about, you know, how might a person going through this have felt? You gather this data so that in the moment, you can say something like, "You know, I didn't have access to this, but if I did, it probably felt like this." So, you can speculate about what you might have been feeling. Speculation is a great tool.

So, that's what you can do to fill in the gaps. You can also create speculative scenes. For some people, it feels very organizing—it helps them feel like they have control over the process. For other people, it can feel a little triggering, because you are reliving it in a slightly different way. And so, as you do this work, you would want to pay attention: How am I feeling? Does this feel like something I want to do? Does it feel true? Does it feel right? And if it doesn't, stop.

But investigating what those feelings might be, can be helpful. But sometimes, that's not the way to go. Sometimes, even if we investigate it, it still doesn't feel safe to us in the present, right? So, it may have been an unsafe situation in the past where your nervous system and your brain had a great reason for shutting down, but maybe now you feel like you're ready for it, but some part of your brain or nervous system—or maybe the wounded one inside you—says it ain't safe. So, what do you do in that situation?

Something you can do is write around the experience. That is something that Roxane Gay does in her memoir Hunger. She writes around the experience. She does not name the rape early on; she talks around it. So that might be a book to read to see how you can talk around something if you can't talk directly to it. If you want to learn more about speculative scenes, and if you might be thinking, like, "I'm not going to remember all of this stuff, because I'm trying to pay attention to what you're saying," and, if you're just listening, this is going to be in the show notes. So, fear not. I will add all this to the show notes, so you'll have it.

But you know, Acetylene Torch Songs, which is Sue William Silverman's new book, is amazing, and she talks about speculation. And if you want some great examples of what that looks like when there are no memories, where there's a gap, Sarah Perry's book After the Eclipse is a great one, and Melanie Brooks also does this at the beginning of A Hard Silence. And I interviewed both of them, so I will also link to those interviews so you can hear what they said about how they did that. So, I just shared a whole bunch of information. What's sticking out to you?

Deborah [16:44]:
That speculation part. And so, I'm wondering about, in the piece that you're writing, are you saying, like, "Here's what I think it's going to be like," or "Here's what I think it was," or is this speculation just part of your process, like getting to the emotions? I don't know if I'm posing that question in a clear way, but I guess the question is if the speculation ends up in your final essay or memoir, or if that's just part of digging in and trying to get to those emotions.

Lisa [17:17]:
It's going to depend on the circumstances. There might be some occasions where you embed the emotions into the scene, but if you're truly speculating, if it's a truly speculative scene, it's important for you as the writer to signal, "Hey, I'm making some stuff up. I'm guessing here." And so, you know, Melanie does this really well in her book, Sarah does this really well. Sometimes, also, people will use beautiful metaphors to illustrate what that dissociative state is. So that can be a beautiful and artful way to talk about it. But yeah, you want to be able to signal that this is happening.

Another book that does this well is Playing with Dynamite by Sharon Harrigan. She writes about scenes where she was not present, things that happened from her past, which is something that Sarah Perry does because they both did a lot of research to write these books. And so, seeing how they do that, even if what they're talking about isn't the same kind of speculation, but seeing how they do that and noticing what their triggers are for, "This is speculation," or "I'm getting into the research, I'm sharing something where I wasn't there," that might help you find some very artful ways to introduce this without saying the same thing over and over again.

Deborah [18:40]:
Yeah, that's really helpful.

Lisa [18:43]:
So what do you think you're going to take from this?

Deborah [18:47]:
What am I going to take from this? Well, definitely reading some of these other authors and seeing how they approach it in terms of the speculation piece, pulling out some novels or memoirs where writers have done a good job of talking about emotion, describing emotion, and kind of analyzing that piece. And then, like I said, going back to Brené Brown and pulling out that Atlas of the Heart.

Lisa [19:16]:
Well, Deborah, I can't wait to see how this opens things up in the essays that you're working on, and I can't wait to hear what happens with your querying process. It is a very exciting and daunting time for all of us. I know that personally. So, I always end with three speed-round questions that I'm going to ask you. So, what is the best piece of writing advice you've received?

Deborah [19:40]:
One of the best things is "Remember your why and start with your reader in mind."

Lisa [19:45]:
I love that. And how do you nurture your resilience?

Deborah [19:51]:
Journaling is a big way for me. It's been an important healing practice for me, and a place to reflect and process the thoughts and emotions that arise.

Lisa [20:02]:
And what's the best way for someone to connect with you if they want to learn more about you or your project?

Deborah [20:09]:
Yeah, the best way would be through my website. It's https://deborahsveccarstens.com/deborasveccarstens.com. You can sign up for my newsletter there, and I have links to my social media there as well, and just read more about me and what I'm doing.

Lisa [20:25]:
Beautiful. And so, if you want to connect with Deborah, you will find that also in the show notes. So, fear not. If you did not catch or were wondering, "How do I spell her last name?" you will have all of that in the show notes. Well, thank you so much, Deborah, for being on the podcast. It is a deep honor for me to have you, a member of my newsletter community, on today, and I am so excited for you and your upcoming journey.

Deborah [20:50]:
Thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure. I appreciate it.