S8 E2: Therapists Are Using Creative Writing to Treat Complex PTSD—and Build Resilience

Stephen [00:00 – 00:12] – I do think it’s a privilege to be a therapist. Actually, I’ve called myself a midwife. So, I’m a midwife. I’m privileged to be there at the birth of a person’s new self.

Jasper [00:12 – 05:54] – This is the Seed Field Podcast, the show where Antiochians share their knowledge, tell their stories, and come together to win victories for humanity. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk, and today we’re joined by Stephen Southern for a conversation about trauma, complex PTSD, and whether expressive writing might offer an effective and long-term treatment for people experiencing these ailments. I myself am a creative writer. I have an MFA in creative writing, and that’s what I do in my spare time. So, I’m naturally really interested in the potential that writing can actually have therapeutic qualities. But maybe even more relevant, I recently experienced, with my own body and mind and soul, a big collective trauma. And I’m definitely still processing that in my body and mind and soul. I live in Los Angeles, and a few months ago, right at the beginning of 2025, we experienced the most destructive wildfires in our city’s history. It started for me early in the morning. I was actually meditating, of all things, when the Santa Ana winds finally arrived. They’d been in the news. Oh, big Santa Ana wind event. But I just remember the sound of them suddenly whistling through our neighborhood. And a few hours later, I actually was sitting right here in the office where I’m recording this podcast, and I looked out the window and I saw a giant smoke plume. And it wasn’t even in the news yet, but within an hour, they were talking about how there was this giant fire burning in the Palisades, ended up burning thousands and thousands of structures. So, I just remember when I saw that smoke plume, I just started cursing, and just over and over again was cursing. And then I had to sit back down and try and finish my work day. That night, the winds kept whipping through our neighborhood. There was smoke everywhere. And I just kept waking up every hour or two and looking at my phone to see if we were still safe. And at that point, chunks of the city, both to the east and west of us, were on fire. I could go on describing it kind of hour by hour. I’ve definitely spent a lot of time reliving it. But I’ll skip ahead to the following night, when we actually had friends who came to stay with us. They had evacuated, and I was making up their bed with fresh sheets when I looked out the window and I saw that the hill above our house, about a half mile away, was engulfed in flame. It looked like this volcano just burning into the sky. And as it turned out, that fire, the winds weren’t quite as high. There was a reservoir nearby, and they were able to put that fire out within a couple of hours. Our apartment is safe today. I’m sitting here. But when we saw that, that was our kind of breaking point. We decided to evacuate. And so, if you’ve ever, over the course of like 45 minutes, thrown everything that you feel like you need into your car and driven away, and in our case, we had a two-year-old and a cat, it’s a really dramatic thing to undergo. And we drove all the way to San Francisco that night, where a friend took us in. And we got there at 3 a.m., just like totally frazzled. And we ended up staying away from LA for over a month. We were able to stay with my parents, which we were super lucky in a bunch of ways. We were able to evacuate. We had a place where we could land. We were able to work remotely. And our home didn’t burn down. So I have a lot of gratitude. There are people in our bigger Antioch community who lost their homes. So we were lucky in a lot of ways. But also, we were definitely traumatized. And being back in LA now, I can feel the lasting effects that this super traumatic event had on everybody. And at the same time, life goes back to normal. People don’t talk about it very much. And there could sometimes be also like this feeling of unreality where you’re like, “I, just a couple months ago, was packing everything into my car and fleeing in the dead of night. And now we’re just kind of going about our days.” So there could be this feeling of unreality. But I definitely know that the effects are still lingering for me. And I was already preparing for this podcast when last night, my partner and I were talking about some big, scary possibilities in our own future. And I felt myself slip back into the way that I felt directly after the fires. I felt really sad and scared and drained and exhausted, but also just ready to keep fleeing if need be. And ultimately, I just recognized, I feel so bad. And I went to bed really early. So all of this has been maybe an unusual intro, and I don’t have our guest on here to have like a full therapy session, but I do think that I’m not alone. Many of us in this dangerous and warming planet are having experiences like this. And I’m super curious to know more about the work that Stephen Southern, today’s guest, is doing in treating these conditions. So today we have Stephen Southern in the studios with us. He’s core faculty in our clinical psychology programs. He started the low residency MA in clinical psychology on Antioch’s Los Angeles campus. And this quarter he’s teaching trauma counseling in the MA in clinical psychology in Santa Barbara. He also teaches in the PhD in counselor education and supervision out of our Seattle campus. Stephen is a practicing academic as well as a working therapist, and he’s published really widely for many years. In recent years, his work has shifted to really focus on expressive writing and its therapeutic power. And that’s what I want to talk with him about today. So with that big intro, Stephen,welcome to the Seed Field podcast. 

Stephen [05:54 – 05:58] – Well, thank you, Jasper. Good to be here.

Jasper [05:58 – 06:50] – We always like to disclose our positionality right at the top of an episode. And we especially like to do this when it’s relevant to what we’re talking about. And I know that trauma is distributed unevenly in our society across class lines, racial lines, and many other aspects of identity. So I will go first. I am white. I’m a cisgendered man. I’m queer. I’m not living with a physical disability, but I do experience anxiety and depression, including last night. I’ve experienced those since I was a kid, and I’ve actually had a fair amount of therapy to try to address those things. I have a college degree and a master’s. I have steady housing and steady income. And I’m also a parent. I have a two-year-old, like I also mentioned earlier. All right. I’ll throw it over to you, Stephen, just as much as you’re comfortable. Where are you coming from? 

Stephen [06:50 – 08:05] – So I’m a white cisgendered man. My name is Southern, and you can probably tell from my accent that I’m actually from the South. So I’m a product of growing up and going to school in the South. And of course, you know, I was exposed to a lot of racism and oppression and very difficult circumstances, which fortunately we’re able and willing to address today. And that’s very important in this topic today, because I view expressive and therapeutic writing as being one of the means by which that we can detoxify and decolonize the psychotherapy profession. Because psychotherapy frequently is very hierarchical, you know. So there’s a therapist. I’m a psychologist myself. And then there’s the so-called client or patient. And it creates a state of imbalance that may actually intensify the suffering of someone who is a trauma survivor. So we have to work toward collaborating and using natural and indigenous kinds of practices that people have found to be helpful in dealing with trauma over many years, even before psychotherapy existed. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from. I like the idea that people can heal themselves through their writing.

Jasper [08:06 – 08:34] – Yeah, I love that. And I also love the idea of interrupting the dynamic that can emerge where the therapist is sort of the one in control or hierarchically above the patient. That makes a lot of sense. But I want to pull on one specific word that you use there, which is trauma. I used it in my introduction too, but I think sometimes we can use this word to mean a whole bunch of different things. So within the psychological context, how would you define trauma? 

Stephen [08:34 – 10:00] – Well, and that’s part of the social justice issues with psychotherapy is a group of experts get together and decide what is trauma. And they include certain criteria and leave out others. But in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, PTSD, it has a number of, or post-traumatic stress disorder has a number of different features. One of the main ones is that you’ve experienced a really intense, potentially traumatic stressor, either directly or by witnessing, or sometimes even vicariously by hearing about it. And of course, all of those things happened with the wildfires in Southern California. And in addition, then it affects your arousal pattern, your physiology, the way your body reacts. It makes a person a lot more likely to be startled or fearful. There begins to be some intrusive thoughts and recollections. A lot of times in dreams and nightmares, which are very prominent in the case of wildfires, some of these irrational thoughts have to do with guilt or blame or shame. And then there are other features like having emotional upheaval, becoming angry, being irritable, having trouble remembering or concentrating, forgetting even lots of time in one’s life. 

Jasper [10:00 – 10:27] – I appreciate you bringing up a big grab bag of potential symptoms by which we might know that we’re experiencing PTSD or complex PTSD. And I always think that it’s interesting that things like irritability or memory issues can be linked to these psychological experiences of a trauma that is unresolved because we often in our society take these traits and assume that somebody who is themselves irritable or has bad memory, that that’s almost a personal failing.

Stephen [10:27 – 10:32] – Oh, good point. 

Jasper [10:32 – 10:42] – Yeah. So it’s always interesting for me to reflect like, “Oh, when I’m being irritable, there might be something deeper going on rather than just like, I’m a bad person or I’m a crank.” 

Stephen [10:42 – 12:55] – Well, and that’s part of the decolonizing therapy is to stop locating problems within a person. And then something else we do, in our society is like with trauma survivors, we assign the diagnosis and sometimes use medication, possibly even excessively, as though there’s something wrong with that person. And it’s actually a very natural response to these horrific events. One other feature with trauma is that PTSD is usually isolated in its individual event specific in time or it’s circumscribed, but complex PTSD could even start in childhood. And then you accrue a lot of adverse childhood experiences. Maybe you have violence in the home. Later on, there’s difficulty in relationships, maybe violence in the community. A person could suffer a physical or sexual assault. There could be natural disasters happening later on. But the idea there with complex PTSD is it kind of accrues over time. So there’s a set of techniques for treating PTSD and most of them are very effective and they focus specifically on processing emotionally the event because most survivors do everything they can to avoid all that pain and shame that might be associated with a traumatic stressor. But in complex PTSD, it’s much more complicated because there’s a accumulation. It’s a developmental kind of process. So I wanted to throw that in. That’s why I’ve come to focus much of my attention now on complex PTSD. I think actually circumscribe specific kinds of PTSD incidents, maybe mostly natural disasters, automobile accidents, things that are very specific, but lots of other people are suffering symptoms, sometimes silently, maybe blaming themselves, avoiding their circumstances. If they go to a physician or a caregiver, possibly they end up with medication or they’re self-medicating, through use of alcohol or drugs or some other ways to cope.

Jasper [12:55 – 12:57] – Oh, yeah. And why not both?

Stephen [12:57 – 13:17] – But your point was really right at the heart of the matter is we don’t want to locate that problem inside of the person because it occurs as a part of a whole ecology, a whole system. And that’s very important because otherwise trauma survivors will suffer silently or get ineffective kinds of treatment.

Jasper [13:17 – 13:55] – It makes me think about the history of PTSD as a diagnosis, going back to these war veterans who had been near explosions and other very specific physical traumas. And a lot of the early treatments for PTSD were specifically designed around treating veterans who are experiencing these psychological ailments that kind of line up with what you’ve described. But complex PTSD very much widens the type of experience that might lead to it and also how more deeply ingrained it might be to untangle.

Stephen [13:55 – 15:38] –Yeah, that’s why I’ve come to define it all as life trauma. So for me, the diagnostic categories don’t matter so much. Life trauma is a state of imbalance then between the demands of the environment, for example, again, the wildfire. So that’s just the most horrific types of stressors that no one can really escape. And it has all of the hallmarks of producing trauma. So you have state of imbalance between the demands of the environment and then the coping resources of the person. And those resources are based on one’s developmental level, access to resources internally and also community support, and then their previous history of trauma. You could have two people, let’s use again, veteran. Two veterans come back, they’ve been exposed to similar environments, bombs, warfare, and so forth. One person has acute stress and maybe some other kinds of adjustment symptoms. And the other person comes back with very severe PTSD and depression and et cetera. So what is it that makes the one person more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder? And the key ingredient is a previous history of having been traumatized. So that previous history makes a person more vulnerable to experiencing more of the symptoms of PTSD. And that’s why this cumulative complex PTSD concept goes a long way to describing how people are trying to adjust and cope and deal with these massive kinds of upheaval. 

Jasper [15:38 – 16:19] – That’s so obviously unfair. It’s such a, I mean, to look at it from a social justice lens, it’s obviously unjust that the way that humans are set up is that those of us who have experienced the most trauma in our lives are also the most vulnerable to re-traumatization, the most vulnerable to deepening experiences of trauma. I guess on the flip side, it makes a strong case that we should be treating these as soon as we can. And we’ve talked a lot on this show with counselors who are working in schools, but it strikes me that the sooner you can interrupt that process, the more you could give people tools so that they can address their own complex PTSD.

Stephen [16:19 – 17:27] – Yeah. That’s why if we could look at the underlying trauma issues, if someone say presents depression or alcohol use disorder, or maybe some other diagnosable condition, then we can begin to address that vulnerability. And also, as we begin to address the trauma, I’m just going to use trauma in a very broad sense today, as we begin to address that life trauma, then as the person works through it, they gain a lot of psychological muscle. So they become more resilient. And so the flip side of the vulnerability situation is that someone who is successfully addressing underlying trauma, they become a lot more resilient and they’re less likely to be traumatized in the future. So like you say, early identification and offering some effective support or treatment, or recognizing that people have these resources within themselves or within a community, like the therapeutic writing. Yes, we want to get that underway as soon as possible.

Jasper [17:27 – 17:41] – Yeah. So let’s talk about that, the therapeutic writing or expressive writing. What does this look like and how does that fit into a therapeutic process undertaken under supervision of a professional?

Stephen [17:41 – 19:39] – Well, in dealing with trauma, there are nearly always, at some point in the treatment, there’s what’s called a trauma narrative. So a person’s going to usually write down the specifics of what they can remember. A lot of times it’s kind of sketchy to start, some of the details are lacking. So every effective evidence-based technique, you expose yourself and reduce the fear through extinction to facing the reality of what went on. And it’s usually through writing, but the writing was never viewed as important. It’s just, “Hey, I need you to write out what happened to you, the trauma, and bring it to the next session.” But fortunately, along the way, some professionals began to recognize, “You know what? I think this writing itself is very therapeutic and may actually be the key ingredient.” That’s what I’ve been thinking about myself. As a therapist, we like to think of how skilled we are, maybe how effective, but back to that social justice issue, we collaborate with people who have tremendous resources and talents and abilities. They’re gifted. And so I feel like it’s a privilege to work with a trauma survivor who may begin to write on their own. And the other night I was talking with the Antioch Community Therapy Services, our ACTS clinic in Los Angeles, about dreams and nightmares of survivors. And if folks will just write those down and bring them to their therapist, we’re connecting, we’re collaborating, and they’re using a natural, innate form of healing, which goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years. It’s so powerful, recording one’s thoughts, feelings, and remembering interactions with others through writing and sharing it with another person.

Jasper [19:39 – 19:52] – Yeah. And there’s such an emphasis on somatic approaches in, I think, a lot of psychology today. We’ve certainly talked with some somatic therapists, and I know that there’s one popular approach, EMDR, eye movement. I can’t remember what the D stands for.

Stephen [19:52 – 19:59] – Desensitization and reprocessing.

Jasper [19:59 – 20:31] – Yeah. So in that, you’re specifically moving your eyes from side to side while you’re recounting these traumatic incidents so that you can re-experience and reprocess, reprogram the memories so that they’re fully processed. I’m sure I’m giving the most non-expert summary here. But it strikes me that when you write something down, that also involves not just the mind or speaking, but also the body, and that this also has a somatic component. Is that right?

Stephen [20:31 – 22:03] – I believe that. The research is mixed in that regard because I strongly encourage the persons with whom I’m collaborating to write with a pen and paper because I think there is something important in being able to use the eye and hand and to write things out. And I practice what I preach. This is my journal here, constantly writing in it, reflecting, and hopefully growing even though I’m a little older now. And then there are writing prompts and techniques that definitely use the body, like sensations in the body, pain, tingling, awareness of different sites that are very useful in accessing information about one’s previous trauma. So it’s kind of, you can blend the two. The best approach to therapy nowadays, it’s called integrative. So we don’t want to be one-sided or only have one way. So maybe you could put the somatic along with expressive writing. And there certainly are techniques available in the professional literature. But again, nothing new under the sun. I mean, these are born out of thousands of years of spiritual traditions. Shamanism, for example. So remembering and reciting one story, putting it into a narrative structure, speaking with a shaman, a priest, a holy person, or with a community of somehow supporters and believers, that telling of one story, I think that’s the heart of psychotherapy. We just play like we discovered it.

Jasper [22:03 – 22:46] – Before Freud, no one had ever thought to tell their own story before. Yeah, I love what you bring up about the integrative approach. And a small aside from my own life, a couple years back, I was looking for a therapist. And I had one session with one therapist where he spent most of this session telling me about all the different steps of dialectical behavioral therapy and spelling out like, oh, and then eventually we’ll get to this step. And then he was telling me about the final step. And he said, but I’ve actually never gotten to that step with any of my clients. And then he said, and we’re about out of time. And I said, yeah, I don’t think you’re the right person for me. I think I need someone a little more holistic than this.

Stephen [22:46 – 22:50] – Right. Well, and probably people drop out before they get to that last step.

Jasper [22:50 – 23:20] – I would not be surprised. I mean, the idea of sort of like being marched through steps did not sound appealing to me for some reason. But speaking of, I guess, the more formal elements here, I’m curious, is this something that your clients are doing when you’re meeting together during like a weekly meeting or are there daily prompts that they’re supposed to be working on? How does it work out in practice?

Stephen [23:20 – 26:16] – Well, it really depends on the particular person and their needs, their timeline, and so forth. But I would like to meet with someone weekly over X period of time, whatever is viewed as being helpful. And the thing about expressive and therapeutic writing is it can really catalyze a healing process rather quickly. So therapy can be time limited, certainly could be offered within, let’s say, 10 to 15 sessions. There are some self-help techniques where you can get benefit in even dealing with some pretty serious trauma within as short a period of time as maybe even two weeks. And so it really varies. But I like someone to be able to do some weekly writing and to bring it back or to send it to me in advance. And if we’re doing some type of exposure treatment, then we have to build up to that because we’re going to deal for a concentrated period of time in essentially reliving the traumatic event. So we have to make sure there’s safety, security, that there’s a high degree of trust, that we have a good relationship, that there are plenty of resources to support any kind of upheaval that might be produced by reliving. Because mostly survivors of complex PTSD, they’ve gone for years and years and avoided dealing with it. So it’s not like we’re going to be able to immediately jump into this and resolve it. But I’ll want them at some point to definitely be recording some of the details of this traumatic stimulus or event, and we will process it during the session. There’s a narrative exposure-based treatment now. It’s, again, time limited, and it appears to be evidence-based. There’s outcome research to support it, and they’re able to get good results in treating trauma, again, within about 10 to 15 sessions. And it was initially applied to PTSD and war veterans, so a pretty traumatized group overall. So it can be rather time limited. The naturalistic approach where you have somebody who is a writer, whether or not they’re, you know, have studied or they’re an actual professional writer, but they just they engage in a lot of writing. I don’t want to constrain them by giving them prompts or homework or exercises. I just want them to share with me what they’re writing, because I believe that our relationship will grow stronger, and I’ll be better able to help if they share the parts of me that they value the most. Some people are very insight-oriented and capable of writing at a very deep level, and I want to be patient, and I want to be supportive, and I want to have a chance to get to really know them in the way they know themselves. 

Jasper [26:16 – 27:09] – Yeah, that all is very beautifully put, and I feel like it raises a lot of interesting questions for me. I mean, I have written a fair amount myself of memoir-type writing and writing about different traumatic incidents in my own life, and one thing that I have experienced is that the proverbial can of worms is sometimes there. You start picking at something, and you come to realize that there’s actually a lot of pain or a lot of suffering that you maybe had blocked out. And so I wonder, I guess, what your experience is as a therapist working alongside people unpacking these things, or as a psychologist, and also what role the therapist has, why it might be wise for people to undertake these exercises with the assistance and the regular presence of a mental health professional. 

Stephen [27:09 – 28:25] – Well, I think that we can provide a lot of support that either adds to existing support for the person, or in many cases, because of the avoidance and the isolation and the escape that characterizes trauma, maybe a person really doesn’t have that type of support. So that’s where I have to remind myself, the treatment plan is not so specific that I have to push the person into the plan. I want it to unfold according to the person’s needs. And so I do think it’s beneficial to do this, to take that walk along with another person. I do think it’s a privilege to be a therapist. Actually, I’ve called myself a midwife. So I’m a midwife, I’m privileged to be there at the birth of a person’s new self. So I take it very seriously. I don’t want to minimize the potential significance of being privileged in that way. But the expressive writing itself, I think we’re coming to see that even for persons who may not actually participate in therapy, that they’ve done a lot of healing along the way through that modality through that exercise. 

Jasper [28:25 – 28:52] – Yeah, I appreciate the modesty or the kind of like humble curiosity that you approach this from where you’re not saying like, this is the only answer, which I think a lot of times, the reality of the marketplace of ideas, as it sometimes gets called, you hear people advocating, like, this is the way to understand this, this is the way forward. And I appreciate you bringing up all these other traditions that are working in a similar space, but potentially to similar ends. 

Stephen [28:52 – 30:15] – Well, and one thing that convinced me that the professional component, while it’s important and beneficial, and again, it’s a privilege, but that it may occur naturalistically, was I got interested in looking at the literature on what’s called autoethnography. And it was just serendipity or synchronicity. I had a person who was doing some of that work as a research method. And I said, that’s autobiography, right? Well, yeah, it is. But it’s more because you’re taking your story and then you’re putting it in a context of like culture or community or history or things like oppression. So you’re contextualizing one story in this greater, larger story. And that’s really how I understand autoethnography. So I started looking at the so-called research technique of autoethnography. And what I discovered was that for those published persons, it looks like they have a pretty good therapy process going. So I recently wrote an article. I think the concluding remark was, I think autoethnography may be therapy. And of course, that’s not a unique insight. There’s a lot of people who write memoirs and over time have unveiled their own life experiences and then shared that with the world. But I think it is a very healing force individually and then collectively for us as human beings.

Jasper [30:15 – 31:29] – Yeah. I have a story along these lines. My partner is a creative writing teacher, as well as a writer herself. And she was teaching a class at a little community college, a creative writing class for adults. And one of her students was in his 90s and he wrote, I think it was the first time he had written about it, about being a teenager in California and being hired to build one of the concentration camps where our nation locked up our Japanese American fellow citizens. And he wrote about his conflicted feelings that he had been proud to help in the war effort. Of course, World War II is held up as this crowning moment of American goodness. And at the same time, he felt very bad about having grown up in a community that was integrated and had Japanese American folks there. And then knowing that he had participated in their incarceration. And at the end of him sharing that piece, there was a somewhat younger, but still relatively old Japanese American person in the class who revealed that he had been interned in the camps when he was a boy. 

Stephen [31:29 – 31:36] – Oh my. 

Jasper [31:36 – 31:57] – I believe they ended up meeting up before class, the next session of class and just sitting for like an hour in one of their cars and having a conversation. And they both seemed transformed by that experience that they had suddenly been able to fit these dislocations that had happened within their communities and within their world. That really struck with me. I was like, Oh my God, this writing class produced this moment.

Stephen [31:57 – 32:34] – Right. Well, let’s see, that’s very powerful. And I consider that to be a very healing kind of experience. It’s like at the crossroads of their two stories, again, synchronicity or serendipity or happenstance brings them together. And then, of course, the teacher is there to hold the safe space and so forth to bring it together. But at that crossroads of their two story, it’s opportunity, at least for repair and restoration. So that’s why it’s so important that people look at this writing and contextualize it in terms of the life and times and all of those feelings. 

Jasper [32:34 – 33:00] – Yeah. I always think of the idea of moral injury and how when you become complicit in kind of an evil action, it’s injurious to the soul. Participating in the oppression of other people also carry that with them, that harm. So I think narrative making has potential also for us to reckon with the ways that we’ve been bad and like who among us has not.

Stephen [33:00 – 34:15] – Right. Yeah. Like your term moral injury. There was a psychiatrist friend of mine who’s involved in trauma treatment in the past, and he called trauma. It was like soul murder. And then ultimately in dealing with trauma and a person having a chance to tell their story, it’s deep existential spiritual meaning making. Yeah. That’s part of our DNA in our nature is to try to develop a sense of self and tell a story. And then in looking back on it, hopefully it makes sense. You know, it’s what older people do and reminiscence. Some of us who are older, we tell too many stories, but it’s like we’re trying to figure out how does all this fit together? And when I look back on it, did my life make sense? Again, something like writing, it’s a beautiful, practical, portable, and I think very, very natural way of polishing off all of those rough spots that have occurred at various points in time. And in doing so, it’s like sharing with the community and contributing to a greater sense of connectedness. And that’s why I think it is kind of a spiritual, moral, meaning making kind of exercise, very existential. 

Jasper [34:15 – 34:44] – That is so beautifully put. I always like to leave our listeners with something practical that they could potentially put into practice in their life, like this week, even if they aren’t currently able to go out and find an expressive writing focused therapist. And what would your advice be for how I or someone else could get started doing expressive writing and finding our way into these stories in a way that might actually help us on the other side?

Stephen [34:44 – 35:53] – Okay. Well, I can give like the first exercise that a psychologist named Pennebaker used in discovering this. He was actually a social psychologist. He discovered this technique and it’s very healing. I’ll give a question. What am I avoiding now? Write for 20 minutes in an unedited manner. You don’t have to show this to anyone and you’re not writing it for any particular audience. You’re only writing what you think and how you feel. And don’t go back and edit or try to improve or somehow change what you’ve written. Just write for 20 minutes. And at the end of it, make sure you save it because I want you to go back and read it. And then after you read it, write a very brief reflection on how does this thing that I’m avoiding somehow affect my life and what might make it change worthy. And then you just write a little bit more there. See if there’s any part of me that wants to speak to me about something that’s unfinished and that’s opening the door to all kinds of personal growth.

Jasper [35:53 – 35:57] – That’s a beautiful invitation, Stephen. Thank you so much for that. And for coming on the show today, it’s been such a pleasure. 

Stephen [35:57 – 36:00] – Well, thank you, Jasper. It’s good to be here.

Jasper [36:00 – 37:40] – You can learn more about Stephen Southern’s work on Antioch’s website. We’re going to link in our show notes to his faculty bio there and also to the webpages for the different programs that Stephen teaches in. We’ll also link to his most recent scholarly article. That one’s titled “Trauma Autoethnography as a Therapy Process” and was published in the Journal of Loss and Trauma. And one more thing I’m going to link to, my Seedfield podcast interview with Rachel Moskovitz from season four. We titled that episode “Using Somatic Therapy to Understand the Trauma in Our Bodies.” And I was really interested and kept thinking back to it when I heard Stephen’s thoughts about how expressive writing might complement other somatic approaches. There’s a lot to think about here and I love that this episode is in conversation with that previous one. To find these show notes, I invite you to visit our website, theseedfield.org, where you can also find full episode transcripts, prior episodes, and more. The Seedfield Podcast is produced by Antioch University. Our editor is Nastasia Green. I’m your host, Jasper Nighthawk. Jen Mont is our web content coordinator. We received additional production help from Karen Hamilton, Melinda Garland, and Lorian Alexandre. Thank you for spending your time with us today. That’s it for this episode. We hope to see you next time. And don’t forget to plant a seed, sow a cause, and win a victory for humanity. From Antioch University, this has been the Seedfield Podcast.