At some time in life, a person will experience death of a relative or lose something that was very important to he or she. After that traumatic event, will that person confront his or her pain, or will that person bury it deep within them? Both ways are possible, however, only one is effective in the long term. According to Tim O'Brien, the most effective way to heal after a traumatic experience is to share stories. In Tim’s book, The things they carried, he used the motifs of loneliness, life, and the mood of nostalgia to illustrate the importance of sharing stories during a healing process.
The effectiveness of sharing stories was demonstrated when Tim O’Brien was able to transition from war life to real life with free of stress. Tim O’Brien was in the Viet Nam war, and has carried a tremendous amount of memories and trauma with him from …show more content…
He then started to write about those memories and trauma, and he soon realized that it was a way for him to heal from that traumatic war. To him writing was similar to, “grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me….all the terrible things I had seen and done.”152 Writing stories allowed him to take his burdens of the past and put it on papers, and then on the readers. As he writes, he would have to let his memories come back to him, organize them in a way that best fits his situation, and that will enable him to come to term with it. Writing was Tim’s therapy, it was his method to accept the past, and continue to live his life. To further his point, Tim recalled his past traumatic experience, and showed how he manifested stories to heal from a loved one’s death, “In the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her... there are no brain tumor and no funeral homes.” 232 Tim manifested a parallel universe where the traumatic death of Linda never happened,
The effectiveness of sharing stories was demonstrated when Tim O’Brien was able to transition from war life to real life with free of stress. Tim O’Brien was in the Viet Nam war, and has carried a tremendous amount of memories and trauma with him from …show more content…
He then started to write about those memories and trauma, and he soon realized that it was a way for him to heal from that traumatic war. To him writing was similar to, “grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me….all the terrible things I had seen and done.”152 Writing stories allowed him to take his burdens of the past and put it on papers, and then on the readers. As he writes, he would have to let his memories come back to him, organize them in a way that best fits his situation, and that will enable him to come to term with it. Writing was Tim’s therapy, it was his method to accept the past, and continue to live his life. To further his point, Tim recalled his past traumatic experience, and showed how he manifested stories to heal from a loved one’s death, “In the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her... there are no brain tumor and no funeral homes.” 232 Tim manifested a parallel universe where the traumatic death of Linda never happened,