In my last article, How Your Brain Sabotages Your Writing Process (and What to Do About It), I talked about how writers with trauma around creativity and self-expression are often taken down during the writing process because their nervous system gets freaked out when they sit down to write.
When the nervous system gets freaked out, it sends danger signals to the brain warning that the creative process needs to be shut down immediately. The brain then sees any creative effort the writer is making as an imminent threat in the vicinity and takes action to stop the writer from writing, usually through some insidious form of writer’s block (freezing, paralysis, distraction, sleepiness, etc.).
The big question most writers have when they discover this is what’s going on with them and why they have so many problems writing is: How do I make my nervous system stop doing that?