Write Your Self

This course will run on Mondays, from 19th May to 7th July, 6.30 - 8.15 pm

Write Your Self is an 8-week trauma-sensitive foundation course which supports you to find and use your voice. Writing can be an important part of how you begin to identify, explore and process your experiences. It can help you to connect more deeply and fluently with yourself and find new ways of relating to the self in your stories.

We will focus on the process of writing rather than on what we produce. This enables you to pay attention to how it feels to write and getting to know yourself as a writer. Writing exercises provide 'ways in’ to our sometimes hard to reach inner worlds and help you begin to tell the stories that are already there.

Throughout the course, you are invited to write about whatever appears in you and wants to be written. This course does not require you to write about trauma or define your experience in a particular way. Whether you write regularly or not at all, the course will meet you where you are and support your self-expression.

There will be opportunities to share the experience of writing with others in the group. This can deepen the benefits of writing and for some, it can be powerful to have others witness their writing or a part of their story. You will not be expected to share your writing unless you decide you would like to do so.

Write Your Self was developed by a team of educators in Sweden and is worked with around the world. This course is a fusion of the original methodology and my own therapeutic and writing experiences.

Each week has a broad theme as follows:

Mapping and Making Space: We’ll connect with what has brought us to this writing course and introduce ourselves to each other. Responding to different writing invitations, we’ll explore what it means to find space in ourselves and create a map of our relationship with writing.

Writing as a Way of Listening: In this session, we’ll experiment with stream of consciousness or free writing as a way to write and not edit or censor. We’ll explore different approaches to facilitate this kind of writing.

Sustenance: We will consider how we sustain ourselves by exploring the language of our self-care and the changing nature of our needs. We’ll connect with the vulnerability of telling real stories and practice taking care of ourselves before, during and after writing.

The Writing Body: We’ll consider our bodies as a place where our stories live. We’ll explore the life our hands have lived and connect with a part of our body that holds meaning for us. We’ll think about our rhythm and movement and how this can help us as writers.

Different Ways of Writing: We will experiment with aspects of craft such as changing the perspective we write from and writing fiction about ourselves which can support us in telling our stories.

Finding our stories: In this session, we'll think about what we are drawn to in a piece of writing and what this can tell us about our own storytelling instincts. We’ll catch the pieces or fragments of our stories, not requiring them to be whole or fully known. We'll develop and give form to one of these pieces. 

Creating Wholeness: We will consider what makes writing healing and apply one of these ideas as we write. We’ll experiment with changing tense and writing as a foundation for action, and we’ll write about our desire.

Expressing the Wordless: In our final session, we’ll explore ways to write when we don’t have the words or can’t speak them. We’ll spend time gathering, sharing and reflecting on the course.

Practicalities

The course will run on Mondays, from 19th May to 7th July 2025, 6.30-8.15pm. NB to book you select one date of the course - don't worry, you are booking the entire course!

The course fee is £240 with two sliding scale points at £210 and £180. If the course is unable to go ahead, you will receive a full refund, otherwise the course fee is non-refundable.

The Salisbury Centre is fully accessible and there is a shared kitchen with tea and coffee available.

Previous groups have run with between 7-12 participants and there will be a maximum of 12 people in the group.

You can read what previous participants say about the course on my website.