Marwen is the fantasy town created by Mark, a man who suffered a traumatic brain injury and PTSD following a savage assault. Marwen includes all manner of villains, dilemmas and allies that parallel his conscious everyday life. Marwen is the stage upon which his drama unfolds.

It was my pleasure to view the new Welcome to Marwen with Play Therapists and for them it all made perfect sense: Our imagination projects our issues into a third space of potential transformation. The narrative stories and characters all unfold there, even as they do in our conscious and unconscious memory. When the space is safely held we can resolve trauma and even write new endings to the unfinished narratives. This is true for children and really everyone.

In terms of Matrix Reimprinting Marwen is the place inside us where memories abide and the energetic selves of our past continue to interact with charged memories and their characters. As in Marwen, our present egos may enter that space to assist our younger energetic selves negotiate the trauma resulting from particular situations. In that special matrix our present selves may interact with past selves and other past characters. Like an internalized Gestalt exercise we are able to resolve and amend our story.

In the quantum levels of reality time is really more fluid than we imagine it to be. What we perceive as past, present and future really overlap, interact and co-exist as one. The past is not really past. And the future is simply that of which we are yet unaware.

The good, the very hopeful thing about Marwen, the Matrix, and the Child Therapist’s sand box, is the way that carefully held space can transform. We really do have the ability to rewrite our stories, especially their endings. In that sense it really is possible to heal the past from the present. And those are the gifts that an enlarged consciousness and loving support may actually bring.