Copyright 2024 Alexandra Gratsas
Navigating the deep waters of sorrow is difficult because they are filled with stories.
Stories that often don’t belong to us but get mixed up with our story – imprinted on our psyche and in our genes. Stories that belong to our family and our ancestors that we pass along unknowingly from generation to generation. Many of these stories hold unexpressed trauma, which makes them even heavier to carry. When traumatic experiences are not released, they can take on a life of their own and hijack our stories yet to be written.
Sorrow is the weight of all we carry, all we cannot release.
Sometimes, we can’t release it because it’s all we have left of something long gone. Or we try to release it, but the pain is so great we fear we will die. Sometimes, we push the memory of it far down, trying to erase it from our lives. But sorrow is liquid. It cannot be erased. It just flows into somewhere else.
When I started slowly losing my dad to dementia, a process that’s been going on for many months, I began to feel the depths of all the sorrows I carry – the sorrows he and I carry together.
I write a lot on Medium about how storytelling can provide a release from trauma, transforming it into something that can be shared. I call this process “Creative Experiencing.” When I became frozen in the fear of losing my dad and all the losses it brought up for me, I decided to put Creative Experiencing to the test. I sat down at the computer to write, and I was surprised by what came out – a story I knew only in pieces, filled with many holes and no ending.
It was a story my dad tried to tell me once about when he was a child during the war. He and his friends climbed up a hill to their schoolhouse only to find it had been blown up and the teacher gone. Even now, I can feel his presence in my writing. As I wrote the story, it didn’t feel like I was the one writing it. I was transported out of my body to a different place and time, yet feeling that place and time with my full five senses. I was Creative Experiencing. When it was finished, I cried tears of sorrow that were not mine but somehow belonged to me. I could feel my dad’s presence in every word. I felt a release.
Through Creative Experiencing, we can connect to the internal forces that rage and bang up against our chest and harness our ability to feel and know. We move out of freeze mode into integration and fluidity.
We let go and evolve. Most importantly, we reclaim our narratives.
Storytelling is the most potent form of rebellion against the paralysis trauma often induces. No longer are we frozen, disconnected spectators of our lives. Instead, we become active participants in the dynamic flow of existence. This flow is where healing begins as we connect with the tumultuous internal forces that demand motion and expression.
Creative Experiencing provides a natural way to navigate the rugged and often painful terrain of the trauma system, offering a path through the liminal spaces. It’s there, in those in-between states, that Creative Experiencing becomes a guide, leading us toward our innate capacity to tell stories and, with that, heal and evolve.
Trauma can be transformed. An unuttered scream can become a sound or vibration of our choosing. We can alchemize.
By getting into this flow, we become the creators we are meant to be, and our trauma no longer keeps us frozen and disconnected from life but delivers us into its dynamism. We can shift from a state of immobilization to one of fluidity, where we no longer fight the tides of sorrow but are one with them.
If you ever experienced sorrow, please join our community to follow my series on Creative Experiencing: