I turned the page in the neighborhood advertising rag quickly. I didn’t want to read about yet another life-changing program. I’d been through too many already. Not interested.

As told to C.B. Lieber

“Write Your Way Home” is a life-changing series of workshops in which you will discover the transformative power of writing. Join us on a journey of healing, self-knowledge, and discovery. Write your way through relationship struggles, heal childhood wounds, explore your inner blocks, and get to know the hidden aspects of your personality through interesting and creative writing exercises.

I turned the page in the neighborhood advertising rag quickly. I didn’t want to read about yet another life-changing program. I’d been through too many already. Not interested.

My parents had divorced when I was a teen, and I could divide my life into two parts. Not before and after the divorce. No, that would be too clean. It was before and after therapy.

Both my parents relied on me heavily as a support system, and by the time I went to seminary I was a world-weary adult, all of 18 years old. My seminary teachers persuaded me to go to therapy to work out the bruises from my childhood and learn healthier coping mechanisms. When I met my husband, who also came from a divorced home, I was determined that our home would look very different from anything I’d known.

So here I was, eight years later. I’d been in therapy for over ten years, and I’d built a beautiful home and marriage. But we’d been through a lot of stress recently, and I was feeling completely burned-out. Worse, I’d started snapping at my husband. A lot. I knew I was in danger of slipping into my parents’ behavior patterns, but I didn’t know how to stop myself. And therapy just wasn’t doing it anymore.

Even though I’d dismissed the Write Your Way Home ad as out of hand, I couldn’t bring myself to throw the ad out.

Heal childhood wounds. Explore your inner blocks. Interesting and creative writing exercises. The words danced across my eyes as I lay in bed at night after yet another exhausting day of children’s squabbles, a draining phone call from my mother, and the resulting frustrating argument with my husband.

What in the world is the matter with me? I thought. Why can’t I get a handle on my life?

Maybe it was time to try something new after all.

Hesitantly, I called Yocheved Rottenberg, the instructor, and signed myself up for the six-week course.

If it didn’t pan out, I told myself, I could always just back out after the first week. What did I have to lose?

Week 1

I take a seat at Yocheved’s dining room table, trying not to feel self-conscious as I pull out my notebook and pen. There are five other women in the class. Smiling, Yocheved explains how the class works. No one has to share anything, but if we do choose to share, it will be completely confidential.

We go around the table introducing ourselves. I eye the other women. I don’t know any of them, and they all come from completely different walks of life. We range in age from 30 (me) to 80. Will I feel comfortable sharing my life with these strangers? What am I doing here anyway? I can’t remember why I thought this was a good idea.

“We’ll start with a warm-up exercise,” Yocheved says. “Answer three questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want?”

We have five minutes to write, and we all get to it.

In five minutes or less, I define myself and my purpose in life. Afterward, I write:

I guess that’s why I’m here right now — to figure myself out and to figure out how to get past the things are holding me back, tripping me up. To feel better about myself.

We talk about the exercise, what it did for us, and then move on to exercise number two, a character sketch of ourselves. Here, we describe what our homes look like and what a stranger walking in would deduce about the woman of the house.

From the outside, my life looks like it’s under control. My house is neat and tidy, my kitchen functional, even the toys in the kids’ room are in order. It’s on the inside that there’s a problem….

Yocheved passes around out a box filled with random objects — a mixing spoon, a pen, a Playmobil man. We’re supposed to take one object and describe how it defines a challenge that we’re dealing with. I take a lock and key, and I write.

I’m off and running, my pen filling up an entire page before I realize how much time has passed.

The challenge is all locked up inside me. Somewhere inside, I’m stuck, stuck, stuck, and I can’t get past that place that holds me back….

Before the end of the class, we write three words about how we’re feeling now. I write:

Calm. Centered. Hopeful.

I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but I walk out the door in a completely different frame of mind. Burned-out? Frustrated? Miserable? Who, me? I’m just in a difficult place right now and I can get out of it, like I’ve gotten out of other difficult places before.