Everybody's life is unique, a mixture of individual experiences from the cradle to the grave. Some of these experiences will have been blighted by emotions such as fear, shame, anger or guilt — emotions that can often mar and affect a person’s life if the original source remains untapped, festering in the deepest recesses of the sub- conscious, usually only reachable by a trained hypnotherapist.
However, once you begin writing, whether it be a daily diary, a memoir, or even a psychological thriller, you will find, as I did, the door to your sub-conscious mind gradually opens and those deepest emotional secrets become accessible. This precious resource is not only grist to the mill of writing (emotional content in a book is what holds a reader's attention and keeps them turning the pages) it is also a balm of catharsis for the writer. After revisiting long-past tainted experiences, exposing them to the light of day, you will soon realize that they no longer affect you. And a sense of liberation follows!
Writing my first book, Seven Sisters Down Under, a true-life travel memoir, is a classic example of the above. Unaware of the repressive guilt I’d been harbouring since leaving home at the age of eighteen, on writing a certain chapter that was relevant to my past, I became very emotional, tears streaming uncontrollably down my face as I wrote. The emotion soon past, along with the harbouring of the guilt. So if your aim is to write a true-life story, gather all the information you can but be prepared to visit the fathomable depths for more.