Therapy through writing

While reading “The Things They Carried,” I kept thinking of how it reminded me of someone having a therapy session written down. O’Brian told stories, fictional stories about Vietnam. At first I thought it was a memoire of Vietnam stories because I knew that the author was a veteran, but it seems like he was just telling these stories to get a load off himself.
When I go to a therapy session, sometimes there are elaborations, stories that kind of happened, etc.. The point of therapy isn’t to lay down your life story verbatim, but to feel better. I think that this is what this author was doing. He took a life altering 2-3 years of his life in Vietnam and wrote out his pains. He told stories to get over the trauma. Whether or not they were true is beside the point, it helped him get past the horrors that he went through. Seeing your best friend die, walking around in a sewage pond, and getting shot at- all of these things happened one way or another.
His friend who hung himself didn’t have any way to release those feelings. He didn’t have an out for his emotions and so he just snapped one day. I think that by writing these short stories, O’Brian was saving his own sanity. Different people cope in different ways, but writing I believe is a wonderful way to get everything out in the open. Writing helps me organize my thoughts, remember sequences of events, and better understand myself.