Writing as Therapy
General Romeo Dallaire was depressed. In fact, he was more than depressed-he had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and had tried to kill himself several times. He was taking prescribed drugs for depression, but the Army doctors said that he was not responding to treatment. He had begun drinking too, a dangerous thing to do when taking medicines. At one point, his lowest point, the mixture of psychoactive drugs and alcohol put him almost into a coma. His medical report had judged him incapable of commanding troops in operations anymore, and so his career-an illustrious one that he had devoted nearly his whole life to-was down the drain as far as he was concerned (CBC News In-depth web site). Dallaire had been assigned in 1993 to Rwanda as Force Commander of UNAMIR. His mission was to oversee the peace accord between the country's two main groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis and "to supervise the peaceful transfer of power to the new Rwandan government" (Allen, 2002; and Wikipedia web site). The commander of the Rwandan Army led Dallaire to believe that the Rwandan Army was getting ready to demobilize and integrate. However, on the night of April 6-7, 1994 Hutu extremists shot down Rwandan President Juvenal
Part of his traumatic memories involved near-unbearable ethical dilemmas. For example, he had learned to see the enemy as "devils," that is, no longer human beings. After all, they had mercilessly slaughtered 936,000 human beings. How do you negotiate with the devil, he struggled? Perhaps it is better to take out your gun and shoot him between the eyes. But at the same time he wanted peace for the people that were left. The conflict was so great that at one point in negotiations he says, "I wasn't sure if my hand would go take my pistol out or would move to shake their hand. It was that strong..." (CBC News In-depth web site, p. 2). The other part of his painful memories involved nightmarish images of thousands of people, real people, dying violent and brutal deaths. Bodies filled the streets and rivers. In his book he described images of a village he had hoped was still intact, but found demolished and devastated with the dead lying everywhere. Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning (1947) wrote about his experiences at Auschwitz. He observed that those people who felt their lives were meaningful, who had tasks they thought were important to accomplish in the future, were the people who survived. Just before he was arrested, he had completed a manuscript for a book that he believed was going to revolutionize psychotherapy, a book he believed would benefit mankind. When he arrived at the camp, he and the others with him were taken to a large room where they were forced to undress and give up everything they had brought with them. He had brought his manuscript with him. He showed it to the guard and said, "This must not be lost. It is a very important book." The guard looked at it and said, "Shit!" and threw it in the wastebasket. At first, Frankl was devastated because his life work had been destroyed, but then it occurred to him that he could write his book over again if he could live long enough. Whenever death seemed imminent, he clung to that hope. He found small scraps of paper in the yard and wrote notes on them to help him remember ideas he wanted to cover in his book. Writing and the knowledge that he could do it again in the future actually sustained him in inhuman conditions of starvation, sub-zero temperatures, serious sickness, and unthinkable abuse. If, as Frankl believes, man's deepest and most profound desire is to search for and find the meaning and purpose of his or her life, writing is a way to do that. It helps a person to discover the significance of what has happened. Writing about life experiences helps you find out what you already know. In setting a scene, you remember all the details, good and bad, of the event you are recording. Writing about your life helps you to develop a perspective on life that is consciously recognized as your own, unique perspective, and to see how experience has shaped your emotions and responses to life. That's real therapy. Besides an outlet for her feelings, the diary functions as a place to learn about herself, what she wants to do with her life ("I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good..."), and what she most values ("I want to go on living even after my death"). She also says, "Anyone that doesn't write doesn't know how wonderful it is... And if I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself" (p. 197). Of course, she did have talent. Dallaire blamed himself for everything that had happened. On the day when he mixed alcohol with drugs, he was found underneath a park bench in Ottawa, and the police took him to the hospital (Allen, 2002). It was after this terrible episode that he decided to try writing. In a sense the decision to write was a decision to save himself from what had happened to him. He began to write a book about the experience of genocide. His audience was the world, which needed to know what had really happened there. He fo
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3158
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)
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