Post-Traumatic Creativity: How Psychological Turmoil Can Unlock Our Creative Potential

November 18th, 2020

By Steve Taylor, Ph.D.

Guest writer for Wake Up World

2006 was a difficult year for me and my wife. In April our second child, Ted, was born. Ted was a lovely baby (and is a lovely boy now), but he seemed to be born without the need to sleep. At night it was difficult to settle him down, and when he finally did settle, it was usually only for a short time. He would usually wake several times throughout the night, every hour or so, and my wife and I would take turns getting up.

This is quite common with new babies, of course, but with Ted it went on for a long time. I was working as a college tutor while working to meet the deadline for a book, and I soon became exhausted (although not as exhausted as my wife). We also had Ted’s three-year-old brother to look after. Eventually, probably due to the stress, I became seriously ill for the first time in my life, leading to two weeks in the hospital and an operation. Strangely enough, it was while I was in the hospital that Ted finally — after nearly nine months — settled down and began to sleep through the night.

During this time of turmoil and stress, I began to write poems, or short poetic spiritual reflections. I’ve always loved poetry, and in my teens and early 20s, I wrote a lot of poems and song lyrics (none of them particularly good). But it had been about 10 years since I’d written a poem. And the pieces that were starting to come through me now were different. They weren’t prose, but they weren’t exactly poems. They were poetic, but a little too loose and free to correspond to traditional concepts of poetry.

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Recommended articles by Steve Taylor, Ph.D:

• Do Psi Phenomena Exist? A Debate (Part One)
• Do Psi Phenomena Exist? The Debate Continues
• David Ditchfield’s Remarkable Near Death Experience
• Waking Up – Are Spiritual Experiences Becoming More Common?
• The Guru Syndrome: When Spirituality Turns Sour
• Can Suffering Make Us Stronger?
• Transformation Through Dying: The Aftermath of Near Death Experiences
• Elation: The Amazing Effect of Witnessing Acts of Kindness
• The Power of Forgiveness: The Transformational Effect of Letting Go of Resentment
• The Power Of Silence

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