Creating space for accessing the unconscious
When I began working on my Master of Fine Arts, I quickly came to experience writing as equal parts art and therapy. I entered my first non-fiction workshop tender and disoriented from a breakup that seemed to ripple to all corners of my psyche. I’d try to write about anything other than the breakup—making dinner, seeing the ocean, my deep love of Target—and still every essay would end up being about heartache.
So I’m not surprised that when I started my Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology that the frameworks I was drawn to most incorporated the concept of writing as therapy. There’s something about writing that gives the unconscious permission to speak, even when the words that we write are symbolic of something else. It’s like there’s a pathway from the heart to the page that bypasses speech, making the act of free writing a potent practice.
A few weeks ago I started a new gig offering mental health counseling to high school students. I ask them at the start of each session to spend five minutes free writing, which is a practice I’ve also adopted myself.
Similar to Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages, which invite you to write about “anything and everything that crosses your mind,” free writing is an open invitation, and a powerful one at that. One morning I free wrote about the fears I have surrounding my next workshop. Another morning I reflected on the freedom of having my partner in London and the pros and cons of being single and married. A third morning I attempted to find an explanation for my deep and simultaneous sense of belonging and unbelonging within my grad school cohort.
Free writing sounds like a way to fill time. (I’m pretty sure my high school English teacher saw it as an easy opportunity to check her email.) But a free write is more like a portal to what wants to be said—the things that are too awful, too painful, too self-centered, too petty, or too devastating to actually speak out loud. And that shit needs to be expressed.
Sometimes I wonder about the timing of unconscious release.
As a therapist, waiting for the unconscious to surface feels a lot like waiting for a whale to breach. You know they’re out there, hovering somewhere just under the waves. You know that at some point they want to come up for air. They need to. What you don’t know is when or where or if you’ll be there when it happens.
Free writing feels a bit like a short cut. Like that little high-speed raft that skids over the water and waits at the portal between sea and sky, knowing that at some point the barrier will be broken.
We have a few choices when that happens.
We can shift our attention to something more tolerable, repress what we witnessed, and go on with our lives. That is what we do most of the time. The unconscious isn’t convenient. It often doesn’t fit with the life we’ve imagined or the experience we want to be having. Working with the unconscious takes time and curiosity and the willingness to open to discomfort, which are some of the reasons we shove all of that information so far out of our thoughts.
But there’s more than one way to respond to the exposition of the unconscious. Another option is to witness what’s come to surface, to acknowledge that we may not know why or how or what to do next, and to make space for the lessons we have yet to learn.
I’ve been in a number of relationships since the one that haunted my early essays, but sometimes that heartache still surfaces—through scent and sound and dreams and stories, through connections that make sense and others I don’t see coming. But I’m learning to bear witness without being swept away, to appreciate the importance of bridging the seen and unseen and finding myself somehow pulled to expansion while also holding together.
So I urge you to open. I urge you to watch. I urge you to find the courage to put down a blank page, pick up a pen and see what is waiting to come to the surface.
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