On the podcast today, we shared about a disaster with the family therapist, where we froze up at simple questions and couldn’t speak or respond… but so much was happening so fast inside.

We said we were able to draw about it later, and wanted to share it so that clinicians could see what the experience is like for survivors, and so that other survivors would understand they are not alone in the experience.

This is raw and vulnerable, and somewhat triggering material, so please care for yourself, as always, before and during and after looking and listening to the podcast.

If you listened to Episode Four of Season Two “Unboxing Ourselves”, Sasha shared our new experiment in journaling!

We always use simple spiral notebooks for journaling because we write so much that we go through one or two notebooks a week. We take the notebooks to therapy, leave them with the therapist, and then fill up one or two more during the next week. I don’t know how many pages we have filled up since finding our therapist about a year ago!

But this was a new experiment. We wanted a communication notebook specifically, rather than only journaling. One thing we remembered was THIS VIDEO from Power to the Plurals, that included the suggestion of making some kind of orientation page at the very beginning of your journal so that any new insiders could know what was going on a bit if they needed help remembering the present time. Here is what our orientation page looked like in this new journal experiment:

Then we made a list of 14 questions we thought would be helpful toward getting to know each other, and wrote them on the next page as you can see. Then we just left the journal out, and let people respond when they could. We left pages between each response, so that we can respond to each other a bit or ask follow-up questions if we want or leave any comments.

Now, remember, this was not just magic or easy to do. We have been working toward this for a whole year, or twenty, as Sasha explains in the podcast. And then intensely for a week, and got about 23 responses. You can hear this “unboxing” on Sasha’s podcast. But here are a few pictures, since we had also recently talked about different handwritings… this is not everyone who replied, but a few examples that we could share without revealing too much content or anything too private.