All Faculty Excerpts

Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification

The following is an excerpt from Melissa Petro's nonfiction book, Shame on You.

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The Power of the Pen

Back then I had no one.

I did, however, have my journals.

For as long as I can remember, spiral notebooks served as safe containers for my most untamed thoughts. Even without an audience, putting pen to paper was good for our mental and physical health.

“Writing saved my life,” Michelle says. “It’s the rehearsal space I use to prepare for tough conversations. It gives me the courage and poise I need to set boundaries. My journal is a trustworthy vault for all my secrets.”

“Writing led to wisdom I never anticipated,” Tamara says. “It led to empathy for people and situations I’d been destroying myself over for decades, knowledge of how to balance boundaries, and insight into not just who I really am but what my true purpose is in this life.”

Jamie Schler reflects on her experience writing a personal essay for the Washington Post about her brother’s illness: “It took me a long, long time writing before I pitched it,” she says, but doing so “helped me confront the grief I felt from his death. Now I’m starting to write about my depression, panic, anxiety, and I hope it also helps me in the same way, facing it, thinking deeply about it from ­ there . . . I don’t know yet.”

“As much as I want the story out there because I think it will help others,” a different Jamie, Jamie Beth, admits, “the writing is healing to me because it’s allowing me to give structure to the mess of memories and emotions I have swirling in my brain.

“Before I started piecing the book together,” Jamie Beth continues, “thoughts in my head were very loud and often contradictory.

Now that I see them on the page, my mind has quieted a bit, and Ican see better how two seemingly opposite things can be true at once.”

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story,” author and humorist Terry Pratchel once said. From here, and with a bit of emotional distance, you can begin to reflect on the meaning of the events.

This reflexive process of integrating experience with reflection is pivotal in the process of “narrative therapy,” a therapeutic approach developed in the 1970s and ’80s by New Zealander David Epston and his Australian colleague Michael White. In narrative therapy, a patient is encouraged to conceptualize her past self as nonessentialized—­ to see herself in relation to her problems rather than defined by them. The same therapeutic process naturally happens when we write in memoir and personal essay. In those forms, the writer naturally appears in the story as two people: the ­ protagonist—­ that is, the character inhabiting the action (who you were then)—­ and an older, wiser narrator (who you are now), the voice telling the reader what happened and reflecting on what it all meant.

Memoir­writing workshops were my first experience sharing with a “safe container” beyond a notebook and a pen. Twelve-step groups came next. This term, “safe container,” was used by Judith Herman and refers to an environment where individuals or group members can feel safe to be themselves and tell the truth. Both writing groups and twelve-step programs are organized around the candid disclosure and sometimes critical examination of its participants’ experiences. Even when shared without comment, personal stories told in the first person illuminate for the teller the meaning of the transpired events. Telling a potentially shameful story to a group is better than sharing it with an individual, Herman says, because a group is stable enough to hold or “contain” what may feel too intimate to share with any one person.

The truth is never as terrible, or titillating, as shame makes it out to be. By writing and sharing my stories, I felt, for the first time ever, a certain freedom from a fear-driven mind. Shadowy sensations that had terrified me stepped out into the light and shrunk down to size. Eventually, I began to integrate these feelings, and their origin stories, back into the fabric of my everyday life.

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Reprinted with permission from G.P. Putnam’s Sons. You can learn more about Melissa and her writing here.