“Most of the best poems, the most personal, are gathered crumbs.”

— Robert Lowell

I have an artist friend who has sketchbooks upon sketchbooks filled with color studies and studies of shapes and figures. They are beautiful, organic, colorful and rich. When she talks about these studies she talks about learning and playing with vocabularies of shapes and colors. She talks about trying out new vocabularies for her work. Vocabularies of colors. Vocabularies of shapes. The term vocabularies made my head spin -- I wanted to shout, “That’s it!”

She offered language, or the possibility of language, for something I couldn’t quite put words to. There was suddenly vocabularies for languages that defied words. You could make, study, and create with the fragments that might make a whole. During difficult stretches of healing, I often found that the words I had or the words I knew seemed too small to describe my experience. Feeling words didn’t seem to match the way I felt. Sadness felt too small. Longing felt too far away. Rage felt both inadequate and out of proportion.

And maybe visual vocabularies felt congruent or familiar – as images often were better communicators of feelings and experience than words alone. Early on in my healing a feeling I often had was of coming apart: I felt like my arms and legs weren’t attached. The image I had was a small doll that I owned as a child whose arms, legs and head were connected internally with a central rubber band. When the rubber band broke—her arms, legs and head detached. The image wasn’t violent, as much as it was simply disconnected. But words—such as detached, or disconnected, or even coming apart didn’t describe how I felt. I felt like I was in pieces, like I was fragmented, like I couldn’t move as a whole, like I had to sit still.

When words don’t match your feelings or experience it can feel hopeless or pointless to communicate and this can make healing frustrating. Yet, communicating your experience and feelings--having them validated and witnessed is a crucial part of healing--and why it’s so important to expand what we think of as vocabularies of healing. Most often when we imagine talking about trauma we think of feeling words---and feeling words are important. Research shows that merely putting feelings into words can help us feel better. And tools like the Feelings Wheel can help you do that by finding more words than the simple five: mad, sad, afraid, happy and disgusted. Putting our feelings into words is important for everyone, not just trauma survivors.

But what I have found in my own healing and in working with others is that for people who have experienced trauma—feeling words, even the more descriptive feeling words, don’t feel like they fit. They feel alien. And there are many good reasons they don’t fit. One reason is a lack of experience of saying the words and having them validated or heard. In essence feeling words are a foreign language—they’ve never been paired with anything. And another big reason is that repeated trauma causes us to go numb—or to shut down emotion. So that not only don’t you have words for feelings, but you may not actually have any experience with the feelings themselves. The sensations themselves are new—and trying to describe them with words seems impossible.

So what are the vocabularies of healing? How can you find them or create them? It requires experimenting with different ways of seeing and hearing—and it requires you risking saying whatever feels true to you at the time. You can make vocabularies of healing from words, images, metaphors, poems, songs, dreams, stories, or films that ring true or resonate somewhere in your body and mind. They may come from dance, or yoga or the natural world. Sometimes an image or fragment of words shouts your experience in a way that you never could have—and sometimes the experience is quiet—like an echo—like a distant image of something that just catches your eye—but it gives you hope that you might be able to describe this feeling soon.

These vocabularies would look different for everyone: some might be actual sketchbooks, some might be boxes of found objects, some might be playlists of music or piles of books with post-its marking the pages. I have sketchbooks of watercolors, and poems typed and pasted to the pages, map fragments, and notes from books I have read. The word ‘vocabulary’ comes from the latin vocare –to name or to call. Much of the work of healing from trauma is naming—sorting the experiences you had and giving each part of the experience a name.

But the root of the word ‘vocabulary’ is actually the root of the word for voice and this is what creating a healing vocabulary does: it gives you a voice about something that rendered you voiceless. It gives you language for things that you had to be silent about—that were often unspeakable. It gives you a voice to your trauma—but also, importantly, to your healing—a way to be understood and connect. A way to go from lost to found. A way to go from hidden to seen. A way to go from healing to growth. Becoming whole--one image, poem, fragment, metaphor at a time.

Robert Lowell in Hirsch, Edward (2021). 100 poems to break your heart. NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 133