Sometimes it's too big

The dam wall in the Ealn valley, Powys

I was in the conference room at the County hotel in Chelmsford, Essex. It was a weekend at the end of January and I was at a business event where I was learning about marketing. We were having an afternoon break and nearing the end of the second day. The light was fading fast and I had already decided I was heading home after I’d finished my tea. I’d had enough.

I was standing just behind the flip board. I was probably hovering there to see if I could grab a selfie with one of the presenters, but no opportunities arose. There was a loud hum of undecipherable talk, the tea was lukewarm, sharp but not thirst quenching. A fresh, flowery fragrance made me turn around and I nearly knocked into Emma. A woman, who had joined our small Herefordshire posse for dinner the night before and who sold a well known brand of skin care products. I commented on her lovely perfume and she gave me a slim glass vial. ‘You help women write?’, she asked. She told me that she was writing her memoir and how it had been going very well until she reached the point where she would have been about eleven years old. She found she couldn’t write any more. It was like a steep dam wall, which  had been built between her ten year old self and her teenage self. Her mind would go blank and she would find even the most trivial of tasks far more urgent and important to do than writing her memoir. She was blocked.

I felt a tingle of excitement and my senses were alerted straight away. I asked her if she’d like to have a chat with me about it - she would. By this time I was anxious to leave and the last part of the event was about to start, so I said I’d definitely get in touch and we exchanged LinkedIn profiles. 

I went to the toilet, refilled my water bottle and left.

Just as I was crossing the outdoor patio to the car park, Emma called after me, gave me her card and told me she was really looking forward to chatting to me. The next morning I sent her an email inviting her to make an appointment with my Calendly link.

I was feeling really quite excited about exploring what was happening to her and hopefully suggesting some strategies to help. 

Usually when we find something hard to write about, it can sometimes be because our nervous systems are protecting us from going back into an event that was traumatising in some way. I’m not a counsellor and I would never delve into the event, but I have some tools that might have helped and I was very happy to share them.

Silence. Emma didn’t reply. Maybe I was too pushy; I don’t think so. Maybe her nervous system didn’t want her to break through its dam wall or maybe it was a myriad of other reasons. I didn’t have the opportunity to help her nor do I know whether she ever managed to work through, over or around her eleven year old self block.

One tool I am finding useful as I slowly write about my mum’s journey with dementia is not to attack the concrete wall with a pneumatic drill but to pick a route around it. I made a timeline of different events during the period with time along the horizontal axis and amount of emotional charge on the vertical axis. I picked the events that have a low emotional charge; writing about the small, trivial things that happened rather than the big ones. Hopefully, I’ll find my way to the big ones. Try it and let me know how you get on.