Writing Is Good For You
Most people hate to write. They’d rather get a root canal than sit down and write something more substantial than an email to Mom. Professional writers tremble at the possible effects that AI will have on all writing. Many non-writers, I imagine, will welcome it with opening arms as soon as they figure out how to write a business report or family eulogy by going on ChatGPT and typing in “Eulogy for Uncle Bob. Married to Aunt Maude for 50 years. Liked RV’ing, playing Keno in Vegas, and watching Fox News.” Seconds later out comes a tear-rendering remembrance of “Ol’ Bob” and “Sweet Maude” – “Thank you, Maude, for making Bob a good man” -- and a pithy quote about life from Sean Hannity. Voile! Masterpiece!
Getting over that hyper-critical self-consciousness or self-judging of putting one word after another is tough for many people but it can be a real pleasure to read something that you wrote and liking it. Even more importantly, writing can be a valuable life practice for dealing with all kinds of personal problems.
“Journaling” became an overused catchword in the 1980’s. Before, diaries were for pre-pubescent school girls. Journaling was something for adults to do to trace their daily thoughts and experiences, i.e., a diary with bigger words. It sounds like an Oprah word. But as more people tried it, more people probably got something substantive from it, though the word is no longer in heavy circulation.
I’ve been a professional writer since 1980, so for me to write daily after contracting the rare neuroimmune disorder, transverse myelitis, and becoming paralyzed, it was a natural outlet. A few years later, those daily thoughts were the starting point for a book about the whole experience.
Now, more and more, non-writers are using writing as tool for dealing with trauma. Suggested by a therapist, a non-writing friend of mine, an artist by trade, sat down and wrote a description of the breast cancer she contracted last year and the emotional roller coaster of tests, a mastectomy, chemo, radiation, estrogen blockers, and fears about the future. She saw it as an act of seeing the whole event at a slight remove and trying to put it in the past.
She also said that a critical part of the process was rewriting and editing what she had written. When you edit, you tend to spot the passages that seem false or exaggerated or badly written and focus on the more honest content. An editor by definition is a detached outsider, even when it’s your own material.
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One expert, James Pennebaker at the University of Texas, described the practice this way: “I think of expressive writing as a life course correction.”
This kind of writing as therapy has now become a whole new field of clinical psychology. In a recent New York Time article, they describe a treatment for PTSD patients called “written exposure therapy.” Patients are asked to write down, by hand, their thoughts and feelings about a traumatic event and then discuss the writing process with a therapist. A new study in the journal, “JAMA Psychiatry,” deemed the treatment as effective as, say, cognitive therapy and seems more engaging. As opposed to higher rates of dropouts in other approaches, “only 12.5 percent of subjects dropped out…before completing a course of treatment.”
An author of the study, Denise Sloan, explains it like this: “It works…by allowing the clients to confront the traumatic memory, lessening their fear and avoidance, and allowing them to identify misconceptions like self-blame.”
It’s that last phrase that struck me. At least with me, and probably millions of other trauma survivors, self-blame runs deep. It’s less than it was the day I became paralyzed, but still there. Maybe I should write another book about the experience.
Good luck.
Barry, Ellen, “A Relatively Speedy Therapy, Using Writing, Shows Promise for PTSD,” New York Times, 8/24/23