To me alone, there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief
And I again am strong.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1807
Writing Is Good for You
Early on in my graduate studies, I came across a series of research papers describing how writing can help people feel better emotionally and physically. I did a deep dive into the literature and was fascinated with what I found. Dr. James Pennebaker is considered the pioneer in expressive writing, or as it’s called in the research, written disclosure. Little did I know then that ten years later he would train me how to lead Writing for Wellness workshops. In Pennebaker’s original writing experiment in 1986, now repeated hundreds of times by researchers around the world, he and his team asked undergraduate students to write about either a trauma or a neutral topic (such as describing the room they were sitting in) for fifteen to twenty minutes a day over a period of four days2. The students who wrote about a trauma, describing both the traumatic event and their feelings about it, experienced better physical health, fewer doctor visits, improved sleep, less pain, and more positive mood over the following months. That was our first glimpse that there was something about getting one’s pain into the written word that helps the body and mind feel better.
Since then, researchers have found a host of other benefits for the writer3, including better immune system functioning by stimulating T-helper cell growth and antibody response to viruses and vaccinations4, improved wound healing5, lower pain levels6, better sleep7, and lower cortisol levels8, blood pressure, and heart rate9. Writing has also been shown to improve our emotional and psychological well-being10, including increasing positive affect11 and reducing depression12, anxiety13, post-traumatic stress14, and intrusive thoughts and avoidance, which are associated with the experience of trauma15. The physiological changes facilitated by writing cause our bodies and minds to relax, creating a fertile context for healing.
The benefits have gone beyond health. Research has also found that those who have written about emotional topics experienced better grades, found jobs more quickly, and were absent from work less often compared to those who did not write about emotional topics16.
The Type of Writing Matters
Some of you might be thinking that writing about your worst trauma or whatever has landed you in the dark will increase your distress, just like thinking or talking about it can make you feel worse. And you’d be right, but only partially so. Researchers have found that some people who write about a distressing topic tend to feel worse after they finish writing compared to people who write about neutral topics17. The good news is that this outcome changes over time: The initial distress after writing about stressors and trauma is short-lived and for many turns into long-term positive changes in emotional well-being. Not so for those who write about neutral topics. They don’t experience positive changes in their emotional well-being.
Other fascinating research has shown that the type of writing matters. People who experience intrusive rumination—distressing thoughts that just pop into your head and run on an endless negative or catastrophic loop—are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating condition that can occur after experiencing a trauma18. However, people who engage in deliberate rumination—intentionally thinking about a distressing event in a particular way—are more likely to experience post-traumatic growth, or positive effects as a result of experiencing a trauma or stressor.
Both intrusive and deliberate rumination involve repetitive thinking. The difference is that deliberate thinking is an intentional process to examine and reflect on a situation. This type of repetitive thinking is good for us. It helps us create meaning, reduce fear, and change unhelpful thinking styles19. We can use carefully crafted writing prompts to facilitate this type of deliberate, repetitive thinking. These types of writing prompts provide us with a time-focused, intentional rumination experience about our adversity. This leads to meaning-making and new healing narratives, which ultimately sets us up for post-traumatic growth.
After discovering this compelling research on expressive journal writing, I started using writing in my work with clients as an activity they could do between sessions. Many of them benefited from this writing. After receiving training with Dr. Pennebaker at Duke University, I then began offering Writing for Wellness workshops for students, community members, and people who were going through or had gone through the experience of cancer and chronic illness. The feedback on the helpfulness of writing was so encouraging that it motivated me to keep coming up with new prompts for expressing our deepest thoughts and feelings and for facilitating transformation. What my clients and workshop participants were experiencing mirrored what the research has found over the last thirty-plus years: writing helps people who are suffering.
Writing Was My Lifeline
And then the research got real. When my husband left, and like I have done in every other crisis, I pulled out my journal and started writing. Every evening before bed, I would look forward to the twenty or thirty or even sixty minutes I had to pour out my heart on the page, relieved that I wasn’t exhausting anyone by saying the same things over again or expressing the same pain that I thought I should have been over by now. Some days, I’d even take a ten-minute break at work to just write about what I was thinking and feeling—a lifeline for those first few months of foggy sadness.
On the sage advice of my writing coach, I turned my journaling into a memoir, chronicling the year of separation up to the day in court when a judge granted the divorce. I would write a chapter and then edit it, write another and edit it, and so on until the book was complete. Then I edited the whole book several times. With every revision, I found myself getting stronger and happier. It wasn’t until I finished the book that I realized I had just done the equivalent of trauma therapy, which is telling your trauma story again and again until it loses its emotional power; has a beginning, middle, and most importantly an end; and gets integrated into your entire life story.
I knew I was through the darkness when my divorce story was just a chapter in my life story and not my entire life story, which is how it felt when I was in the middle of it. Interestingly, as I did more research for this book, I came across a study that showed that among recently separated adults, creating a narrative about their divorce experience seemed to be the most helpful type of writing for emotional recovery20.
Writing Can Help You Too
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