When my youngest foster daughter was in treatment for her severe eating disorder, one of her therapies involved writing a trauma narrative. In 11 single-spaced pages, both sides, she documented all the obstacles she had overcome in her young life: the death of her father, her mother’s alcoholism. Then, in what her counselor called a destruction ceremony, she shredded her words, stuffed them into balloons, and set them sailing on her way outside of the residential treatment facility where she was living at the time.

Now, the reasons that trauma narratives can be so helpful for people are many. Via anxiety habituation, writing one’s trauma narrative acts as a kind of exposure therapy; the

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