Dear Reader,
I have started written blogs for you, to continue learning about my life’s trauma and how Story Telling has helped me to heal and overcome them.
I am a survivor of torture and trauma, and I was forced to fleet my motherland and seek refuge in a western country, Australia.
I have found healing by writing my history of my lived trauma experiences, I had back home. For a while, after re-settlement, I was comfortable with my new identity as refugee, but years later, I realised that I needed to evolve and I did not want to be a survivor, but I needed to strive and reclaim meaning and purpose back in my life, as part of my healing journey. This drive to thrive and overcome my traumas was the motivation and helped me to achieve my personal and professional goals.
Narrative therapy has helped me to write words that described my lived experiences, and with them to finding human connection. My book “Openness and Visibility A Memoir: A History of Hope and Healing and Embracing A New Life” has helped me with my healing journey and regained meaning and purpose back onto in my life.
Since I arrived in Australia, because of my lived traumas, I felt for longtime, lost between two cultures, Salvadorean/Australian. It took me time to come to terms with my identity through self-reflection and healing. But now, I have realised, as part of healing and gradual recovery process, I needed to embrace and accept who I am, I have been given a gift, to decide to take the best, from each cultures and embrace to become an Infused Person, that celebrates both, my own ancestry, as Mayan indigenous descendent, and as an Australian. Witten my book has helped to embrace my identity as an Infused Person living everyday life between interface of two cultures.
I have learned that written words through Narrative Therapy, are powerful to emanate and process survivor’s’ thoughts and memories of their traumas, to cluster and organised their fragmentation and reduce disjointed or overwhelmed recollections. Story telling has helped me as for my healing journey, by written in chronologically and organise manner my recollections of fragmented trauma memories, to a more coherent narrative, making my trauma experiences more manageable and less emotionally charged. *
I will continue sharing my learned experiences, with you the reader, and how Narrative Therapy can be helpful in supporting healing and recovery for survivors of trauma to regain a sense of meaning and control back in their lives, from both, a personal lived experience and professional counsellor perspective.
Thank you visting my website today and for your supporting in reading my blogs!
Mayan Goodwill (Pen name)
Author and Writer
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