In my asphasia group sessions, the topic for the spring semester has been on using writing for healing. There has been a lot of research on how writing and then rewriting your personal narrative can heal you.

Some excerpts from one lesson plan.
"We are born into stories about our conception, our history, about who we are disposed to become, about our parents and our families, about our world....The skill of storytelling begins with the first moment we try to navigate our safe passage through turbulent life....We all carry a " master identity narrative", our version of the story we tell to explain our selves. ....This master narrative is a synthesis of many stories we have accepted and repeated about ourselves....We can remember the point and forget where we got the story....By the time we are young adults, we no longer aware of the depth and complexity of the woven field of stories we inhabit, and we think our stories are simply "the truth." This sense that they carry some kind of absolute weight leads us to think that they also are a condition for "the way we really feel." This can lead to suffering that we may not understand. Illnesses unfold in us in the context of these stories. ...The stories that underlie our ideas are mutable....Once we accept that they are raw material from which we draw, it takes away the constricting parts of our personal relationship to the story, the sense of its "truth," and allows us to consider if we need more raw material from which to create our lives, more examples of how things are and can be created."

Best of luck in your search, writing, and rewriting! You are moving along in a good way to resolve your identity! Rewriting is as important as the original writing!!

__________________
Wherever my mind isn't
Jim