No! While the experience of writing and being witnessed in your pain can be healing and therapeutic, this is NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR THERAPY, not should it be construed as group therapy.

Of course you can. It’s not about crafting a perfect story, or about the quality of your writing, it’s about your self-expression and using words to frame your experience.

Your experience was painful, and yes, writing may bring that pain into focus, but the purpose of the workshops and consultations is to reframe your experience and help you to find a way to co-exist with your pain. Telling your stories and having someone bear witness to your experience is powerful and it changes the way you experience that pain. It gives you a framework for your experience and allows you to see that it is not all encompassing.

Part of the process of reframing is acknowledging, validating and honouring the reality of our experiences. You cannot change the past, you cannot pretend it didn’t happen.

What we can do is look at the way we see and speak about ourselves and our lives as a result of that negative experience. The stories we tell about who we are and have become as a result of those experiences.

These are the stories we are reframing.