Introducing Our Patron

Hello Survivors and SpeakOut readers. I would like to introduce myself as your new patron. I am delighted to be involved in such an amazing organisation and can’t help thinking how it could have helped my own healing journey. Twenty-five years ago you got on with suffering on your own, in silence, in secret; it’s still mostly like that, but I am thrilled that Survivors Network volunteers are now here to support, advise, help. And if you are reading this, you know you are not alone.

My work for the last twenty-five years has been encouraging people to be able to speakout therapeutically about life experiences. I have worked, among others, with people who are very sick and suffering, often dying, people who are troubled or in mental hospital. And I have written quite a lot about how people can help themselves through writing about their experiences. You can find out more from my website www.gilliebolton.com. I am just about to start writing a book which will help anyone write to heal their lives.

I am now brave enough to speakout about my own experience, which might be similar to yours. Hopefully I can begin to help people who suffered abuse. My own way through to discovering, understanding as far as I can, and tackling my own childhood abuse has been through journal or creative writing. Thirty years ago I didn’t know why I was perpetually anxious, afraid, and suffering from various unexplainable symptoms. On a chance suggestion I started writing an autobiography: a nice tidy little story about an idyllic country childhood. When I finished it I started again.

My writing became wild: scrawled haphazard on huge sheets of paper with felt tips (mostly red); scribbled minutely on scraps. I wrote on a rock on the top of the moor clutching paper against the wind, curled in the duvet in inaccessible house corners, in a borrowed office twenty-odd storeys up like an eagle’s eyrie. I often wrote in the middle of the night while all was quiet and I was alone and felt safe. My writing, to my horror, told me what had been done to me as a little child: sometimes one’s writing hand can speak truths one’s mouth cannot utter. And it brought deep healing: a hard lonely path on which I had to face and confront many many demons alone. You see I could never have trusted a counsellor or therapist with these terrible things. But the paper was quiet and accepting: never horrified or disapproving, never questioning. And it didn’t have a human memory. I could destroy my writing and no-one ever knew I’d expressed such things.

I suppose I discovered journal and poetry therapy for myself. It wasn’t long before I realised I could read over what I’d written, redraft it and redraft it: trying to get closer and closer to that image buried in my mind. These redraftings turned to poetry. Once they were poems I could separate them from myself and ask other poets to help me with them in a confidential group. They saw things I didn’t see in my poems, and so the work continued – deepening and clarifying. Here is one tiny poem. It expresses that sense of wanting to hide totally from the world, to be left alone, to be silent and still: as still as the nail which holds the hands in the middle of a clock (look at a clock to see what I mean). I wanted so much not to be pushed around and around tick-tocking like clock hands any longer.

Safe

she drags
darkness over her head
and arms curled
around knees folded to breasts

the clock ticks
but she is in the centre
where a still nail pins the hands

If you would like to start writing, choose materials you like: book or nice paper, pen, or like me a soft pencil with a rubber on the end. Choose where seems a safe place to write – keep trying different places and times (very early in the morning is good for some). Allow yourself to write whatever comes in the knowledge that NO-ONE else need ever read it. YOU must be the first reader of your own writing. And even you don’t need to read it: you can destroy it or store it unread. Think of it as a gift to yourself even if it’s a hard gift to unwrap sometimes: it’s worth it! As a dying child I worked with recently said: ‘Writing is a way of saying things I can’t say.’

Gillie Bolton
www.gilliebolton.com