Originally published in the Opinion page of the Herald-Zeitung, April 9-10, 2022.
For the past 35 years I have kept journals and written in them at least 5 days a week. I have always felt it sometimes soothing, sometimes painful but certainly valuable when I hone in on topics that go beyond simply recording my days; my expressions go deeper, bearing down on losses, challenges, financial and physical limitations as well as hopes for a productive and purposeful future. When I write more intensely about what conveys in my life a sense of bliss as well as what events have sprouted blisters that needed more attention, I gain new levels of understanding.
But in my readings of late, I am discovering how medicinal writing about discomforts, challenges, or places where life has entered to hijack my best plans can be. Several books have attracted me to this topic, but none more grippingly than James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth’s Opening Up and Writing it Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. It has been out since 2010 and is in its third edition.
I have frequently experienced such a healing quality to my journaling, but now I see from these psychologists, whose research has revealed with various groups how the immune system is boosted, how memory improves, how clutter in our often traffic-jammed mind can be lessened, how understanding can be gained on a deeper level of awareness, and how a new focus to our lives can be installed—all through what he calls “Expressive Writing.”
His method is as uncomplicated as it is profound, Essentially, he calls for remembering an event such as a loss, a failure, an unexpected turn in the road of our life’s journey, or any impediment that stops one short; we know these incidents because we feel their power to arrest us, to swallow us, and to force us into reassessing what our true purpose in life is.
Pennebaker suggests not writing about it immediately, but to let some time pass. When we are ready, write about it for 15 minutes a day for 3 or 4 days to allow it to unfold. But he also cautions that self-reflection in writing is not the same thing as self-absorption; the latter takes over when we simply relive the experience repeatedly to the point of madness. Instead, he encourages writing about the event in detail from a detached point of view, where we can see ourselves with some objectivity. In this expressive writing we ask how we felt at the time of the event (critically important) and how we feel now in writing about it.
When, after research trials with large numbers of writers following this simple but effective way of understanding what happens to us from a writer’s point of view, he asked them months later what they had gained. A common response was “It helped me think about what I felt during those times. I never realized how it affected me before.” Another: “Writing deeply and thoughtfully about what happened to me and the feelings that accompanied it, I was able for the first time to let it go completely.”
Expressive writing can also include a persistent story we tell about ourselves that can be either demeaning or uplifting. In the former case, one may want to edit and revise those stories that shame or belittle one, and to create a contrary version that can change the story one lives by.
His book’s wisdom may encourage others to begin writing into what ails or encourages them, in order to locate its deeper sources of contact with who one is. It is a form of what another writer referred to as “writing for your life.”