I've finished three and a half chapters. I'm giving myself until late April to finish three and a half more. The act of writing is getting easier as my mind slides easily into the "groove"; the neural avenues of "writing behavior" lengthen and widen and make thousands more connections.
I no longer wake up at five a.m. with my brain saying "Write this, right now!" My brain seems to trust that I have 3-4 days each week for writing. It's mostly willing to wait for a writing day. When the day comes I sit down and read what I've written so far, tweaking and editing as I go. Then the words come and I find out what I know about the topic at hand. Then I read it over, tweaking some more, and adding more as the neurons connect to other information.
Most of my writing is taking dictation. (No, I don't think it's Ramtha telling me what to write. And I don't think I've got a dissociative disorder.) It's the writing voice that holds the information and the right words until I need them. It's the same voice that comes out during the 4-6 hours of consulting I do each week. Someone asks me, "How do you do EMDR with this client with this problem." And the answer, if I know it, flows out in spoken paragraphs. I redirect the voice to my fingers and the paragraphs appear.
After thirty years in practice, it's fun to find out what I know about things. I'm in the middle of the chapter about Medically-based traumas. I sat down and wrote a list of cancer-related EMDR targets, from pre to post cancer treatment. I'd never thought of the list before, but I've done these things with people over the years, and my brain made a coherent organization, that I'd never consciously thought. I love how we can program ourselves to do these complex things, and just get out our own way and do them.
My mother writes fiction. My husband is a photographer. Both of them organize complex data from an unconscious space. Mom drags her writing out of her guts. Doug "shoots from the heart". I think my writing is from the brain, though my motivation to do it is from my brain and from my heart. Writing is fun for my brain in the way my crossword puzzle addiction is fun. I find the word that fits, and am more likely to find the word if I don't try very hard. If I can't find the crossword or the right word in a sentence, I go to Dictionary.com's thesaurus and look it up. The heart part drives the motivation. I want to reach as many therapists,and their clients, as I can, with the information I have amassed over the years. I want to relieve as much suffering as I can with the skills that I've been given. And I want to give other skilled therapists the venue to do the same.
As I write, I think of the other writers sitting at their computers, getting out of the way of their internal writers; letting the words flow; chasing down citations; tweaking sentences; and providing new ways for therapists to help their clients heal.
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