Can your story ease my pain? by Bob Rich, PhD

by Bob Rich, PhD

As an editor with expertise in psychology, I have assisted hundreds of people who have processed traumas in their past through telling their story. Hmm… if they had trauma in their present, they probably wouldn’t have the mental energy to write about it, and processing trauma in your future is possible, but done through Future Traumatic Incident Reduction rather than by writing a book about events that haven’t taken place yet. That’s more like horror speculative fiction.

But yes, telling your horrendous story is a great way to banish its effects on you. Here is a quote from my twentieth book (The Hole in Your Life: Grief and Bereavement, p 28):

“William Funchess suffered terribly as a prisoner of war in Korea. Years later, he wrote a highly successful book, published in 1999. ‘I got yellow pads and ballpoint pens and spiral notebooks and just started writing. The minute I finished writing, the nightmares stopped’.”

Note that this was not a self-help book. It was successful because it covered issues of great interest to many people.

When my mother died in 2000, I had all the materials for writing her biography. I couldn’t even look at it for a couple of years, then wrote the book (Anikó: The stranger who loved me) in three months, which is lightning-fast for me. It won four awards, and every reader has loved it, but this is not because it helped them with their sorrows. Rather, it covered fascinating times in a place few people know much about, and because of the person she was: a woman leader in a highly patriarchal society who had built a million-dollar export business behind the iron curtain. This was one of the many impossible things she’d achieved.

This does not mean that your genuinely painful story of, say, racial discrimination, or thriving despite being handicapped at birth, or the way a car smash changed your life, or [fill the spot here] will be widely sought by readers. Writing it and even publishing it will be very good for you, but it needs more to grip readers. Both my examples have other reasons why someone would read them, and in a way the author’s suffering is incidental. The two stories would be equally interesting if, say, written by an investigative journalist or a historian with no personal involvement.

Many people have the admirable motivation of wanting to be of benefit. I’ve edited the manuscripts of survivors of trauma with enough combined content to fill an encyclopedia of resilience. Some were inspiring, magnificent and informative, but very few would serve as a self-help or instructional book.

Sorry!

This has two reasons.

First, being a survivor of something like domestic violence or an airplane crashing into your house doesn’t make you into an expert on the subject. You are entitled to your opinions, but why should I trust them? If I want to learn cooking, I’ll read a book by a master chef. Tommy down the road my be great at fixing cars, but I’d rather trust an instructional written by a mechanic.

Second, everyone is unique. A case study of one has very limited application. To be of service to others in relieving their suffering, a book needs to cover all the most usual ways that kind of pain tortures us, the various circumstances, and the ways it affects us, and the available solutions.

The very best books for doing this combine personal tragedy with decades of expertise.

Elizabeth Harper Neeld lost her beloved husband when she was a young woman. After she had resolved her grief, she retrained as a grief counsellor. She wrote her wonderful book, Seven Choices: Finding Daylight after Loss Shatters Your World, after she had accumulated hundreds of case notes. Her book is wrapped around her personal journey through grief, but every point is illustrated with other examples, and she uses her clients’ stories to illuminate journeys different from hers.

So, if you are a cancer survivor and want to write it up to help others through that journey, get training in a relevant field of knowledge first. Oh, do write your personal story as a way of dealing with the trauma, but hide it in a folder of your computer until you can draw on your professional experience as well.

OK, now for a bit of barefaced promo.

Two of my books are exactly this.

I suffered major depression from at least five years of age. I had it under control by twenty-three and banished from my life by forty-three. I am still a grumpy old man—just ask my wife—but my excuse is that when the bug of creativity bites me in the bum, I don’t want the real world to intrude.

Reviewers have noted that the power of my eighteenth book, From Depression to Contentment: A self-therapy guide is that the science-validated program has my personal experience as its skeleton.

The original manuscript also included lots of short stories and explanatory essays. But Victor Volkman, the wonderful publisher of Loving Healing Press, cruelly forced me to amputate these, because, he said, people don’t buy a self-help book that’s over 50,000 words. So, I put the excised bits into Lifting the Gloom: Antidepressant writings. The two books go together like main course and dessert.

My twentieth book took flight on June 1, 2025. You see, my darling daughter died in December 2024. Since my mother’s death in 2000, I’ve gained an enormous amount of experience as a therapist and applied it to myself. I processed the grief for my mother in two years, which is about average. It was a few days for my daughter. I will miss her for the rest of my life. The book is titled The Hole in Your Life: Grief and Bereavement because that’s an accurate description of my situation. However, the terrible monster grief isn’t chewing at my soul.

I express an important positive psychology tool as “The more you give the more you get, and the more you give the more you grow.” One of my healing tools is to turn my loss into benefit for others. Like Elizabeth Neeld’s book, mine is built around my personal loss, but covers all aspects of grieving.

The tools for dealing with the death of someone important in your life are the same as those helping you to cope with other major stresses, such as the barrage of news about climatic disasters, the terrible wars, the very personal effects of the concentration of wealth wrecking the lives of millions.

One of my healing tools for myself is this book. I offer it to reduce suffering, and this helps to make sense of my loss.

If you are a survivor of past trauma and want to write a book about it, I offer my work as a model (says modest Bob). If you are still in the throes, I offer my books as healing tools.

Please buy them, because my publisher does need to recover his investment. For my part, I reckon that money often costs more than it is worth, so mainly I ask you to read them, benefit from them and recommend them to others. And if you send me proof of purchase, you have earned a second book, free. But if for any reason you cannot afford even the very low price of an e-book, please use the contact page at my blog, Bobbing Around and we will find a way to work together.

Also, I invite you to join my team, striving for a society ruled by cooperation, compassion, decency. For example, my Bobbing Around team and I support a little orphanage in Uganda that keeps forty kids alive.

Oh, by the way, being 82.5 years old, I no longer accept new editing clients. However, my friend Issac Robledo, best-selling author of inspirational books, is in the process of developing an editing service, and he is HUNGRY for new clients. You can contact him here