Survivors’ Writing Workbook

Description

Love and Rage DIY, 2024

Who is the workbook for?

Anyone who thinks they would benefit from writing exercise to help process, journal and cope with trauma. The workbook was written and designed by survivors for survivors to use. It can be used for individual practice or in group workshop settings.

What is the workbook?

Simple, it’s a toolkit of writing exercises for people who have experienced trauma. From journalling exercises, grounding exercises and reflective work.

If there’s nobody on hand to talk to, or you find yourself away from some of your other coping mechanisms and support networks – carrying a notebook, pen and paper with you at all times can be a good way to ensure you’ve always got some tools to hand.

This workbook is intended to act as a guide to using writing as a trauma recovery and coping tool. It’s built to empower you to access easily accessible ways to deal with being triggered, or a really shit day, or a reflective moment – and to be able to do this entirely independently.

There are 14 exercises in this workbook – but from them you can access and interpret endless writing techniques for coping with the way trauma crops up in our lives when it’s least convenient.

The workbook can be used alone, and also acts as a guide for setting up your own peer-support writing group.

Who are love and rage?

We’re a radical project run by survivors. We believe in the power of community (the love part), and the urgency to harness our rage as a powerful vehicle for change (the rage part).

We believe in community and peer support, mutual aid, and creating support networks to fill the spaces the system leaves empty.

We are queer, anti-patriarchal, abolitionist, anti-capitalist survivors* working to meet each others needs and our own needs – because we’ve been let down by a system that doesn’t meet them.

We run peer-led creative writing workshops to help people who have experiences of relationship, domestic and sexual abuse and trauma. From these workshops, we hope to equip people with a toolkit for self-and-peer-reliance. Exercises that are accessible to everyone, that we can do on our own and together, that help us cope with some of the ways trauma can show up in our lives.

*You don’t need to be these things to use the workbook, but maybe you’ll be some of them after.

Please reach out at loveandrage.diy @ posteo.net if you’d like a copy of the workbook but can’t afford it.