Writing As Therapy: How Your Story Can Help You Heal From Emotional Pain
Your Story Can Help You Heal
When I was 18 weeks pregnant with my second child, my husband and I went to the clinic for the routine ultrasound to find out the sex of the baby. We found out it was a boy and we also found out some unwelcome and surprising news: our son had a life-threatening form of congenital heart disease. This was our entry point into a foreign land of fetal anatomy, cardiac pressures, echocardiograms, and intensive care units. We made the gut-wrenching choice to undergo a surgical procedure to open one of his heart valves while he was still inside of me at 23 weeks gestation. After our son Griffin was born and the crisis was finally coming to a close, I looked around and wondered where the heck I was. Everything in my life looked and felt different. I wasn’t the same person I had been a year prior. I asked myself, “How do I make sense of all this?”
I found the answer in telling my story. I reflected on the excruciating decisions we were asked to make, the deep sadness I experienced, the terror of the unknown. I wrote and talked to my husband and read the journals I kept during the pregnancy. Then I wrote some more. Eventually I shared the story on a national stage with the doctor that performed the in utero surgery sitting in the audience. Through this process of becoming the narrator of my story, I noticed something profound: I felt much better for having done it.
Research Proves Our Stories Are Healing
Us humans live in story. We make sense of our lives by weaving together our personal stories. We make choices to embellish certain details and leave others out entirely. The culture in which we were raised, the part of the world we were born into, our family of origin; all of these factors, and many more, influence our stories.
Writing, recording, and sharing my story gave me a sense of peace and meaning that I had not experienced through talk therapy, online support groups, and self-help books and podcasts. I wanted to share this idea of authoring your own story with other people so that they too could figure out who they were and how to move forward after tragedy struck. Since I’m a scientist at heart, I turned to scientific research to see whether any data existed that aligned with my personal experience.
Turns out, there is a ton of research and empirical evidence on how our stories shape us and influence our wellbeing. The two areas I’ve studied and drawn upon the most in my work are narrative identity and expressive writing.
Narrative Identity: Your Life Story
In 1982 psychologist Dan McAdams was teaching a graduate seminar on “self and identity”. He and his students were studying the work of the great psychologists and social scientists, like Erik Eickson, who talked about identity being formed by reconstructing our pasts in a way that makes sense to us. McAdams asked his students: “If you could see identity, what would it look like?” While the students didn’t come up with an idea that clicked, McAdams himself did, after that summer seminar ended. He decided that identity would look like a story, an autobiography that integrates our experiences and provides meaning and purpose. The concept of narrative identity was born.
While this concept has evolved and changed over time, this idea that our stories make up part of our personality and therefore have a significant effect on us persists. Narrative identity is a way to process and interpret our difficult experiences to create a life story. We make connections between our past experiences as we reflect on who we want to be in the future or who we are becoming. I’ve always seen narrative identity as an opportunity for us to dive into our own personal stories and look at them in a new way; one that serves to uplift us rather than deflate us.
In some of my favorite studies of narrative identity, researchers Laura King and Joshua Hicks describe working with three groups of people who had experienced significant upheaval in their lives: 1. Parents of a child with Down syndrome 2. Women divorced after 20 or more years of marriage and 3. Men and women who self-identify as gay or lesbian.
Participants who had one of these experiences were asked to write about themselves in two different ways. First, they wrote about the best possible current version of their life, which would include the significant life event. The second way was to write about their “lost selves”. Their lost selves were the best possible version of their life if the big event had not occurred; if, for example, they did not have a child with Down syndrome. What would life have looked like if that challenging experience never happened?
What they found was that the people holding onto the second type of story, clinging to their lost selves, were less happy. When the participants embraced their current story, the real one, their challenges became an “unexpected strength and played a role in the creation of a more differentiated and integrated self”.
This is how I came up with “Your Story Is Your Strength”, as the tagline for my business. When we craft our personal narrative, factoring in the difficult events and what we’ve gained and learned about ourselves through them makes us happier. King and Hicks conclude that “the active, self-reflective struggle to see the silver lining is a key ingredient of maturity”. In essence, we have to face the pain if we want to grow.
Expressive Writing: Write To Heal
I started writing on my blog in 2014. For a long while I didn’t hit publish on anything I wrote. I just got out of bed early every Friday morning and headed to the local coffee shop to write for an hour while my husband got our two little kids up, dressed and fed. I could have done anything with that time: yoga, crossfit, sleep, read. Why did I choose to write?
I couldn’t have voiced it at the time, but the reason I wrote was because it helped me make sense of hard things in my life. It helped me feel better. All these years later, I’m still doing it.
Social psychologist James Pennebaker started to study expressive writing because he knew that keeping secrets about trauma was harmful to our health. So, he wondered, how could people safely reveal their secrets?
In his first study in 1986, Pennebaker had student participants write for 15 minutes a day for four consecutive days about an upsetting, emotional upheaval in their lives. This study found that expressive writing led to a decrease in the number of doctor visits and improvements in immune function.
Since the first study, many (but not all) other studies have confirmed the health benefits, both physical and mental, of expressive writing. Since his original work, Pennebaker has loosened the requirements of writing and now asks us, the writer, to experiment with what feels best for us, whether that is writing every day for four consecutive days or writing every Friday morning for one hour.
Expressive writing focuses on the feelings that an event in your life evoke. It can be messy and unpredictable and if you try it, set aside any need to edit or spellcheck. Expressive writing is all about getting the emotions out and onto the page. It’s important to write continuously and if you run out of things to say it’s ok to repeat what you have already written. If, however, you are writing about a traumatic event and you feel you have pushed yourself too far and that it is too upsetting, you should stop writing. Pennebaker tells us that it’s common to feel sad or down for a bit after you’ve completed your expressive writing session.
There is so much freedom in the expressive writing method. For many people, writing is a path to self-reflection and growth. As Pennebaker says, “Writing keeps our psychological compass oriented.”
What are the health benefits of writing your story?
Physical Benefits
Emotional Benefits
How Do I Get Started Writing My Story?
Writing your story to help you heal from emotional pain is easily accessible. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t require a lot of time. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. We have all felt apprehensive about a blank page staring back at us. When I’m coaching clients I use a framework that builds upon the science from both narrative identity and expressive writing.
I start with creating space for yourself to explore your story. Before you even pick up your journal or open the laptop, make sure you will not be interrupted. Set up your space for creativity - candles, twinkle lights and your favorite warm beverage do wonders to help to set the stage. When you’re set, follow these simple steps.
Simple Steps To Begin Your Healing Narrative
Record your self-defining memories. These are your memories that are emotional, vivid and critical to the person you are today. Pull out old journals and photos to guide you if you feel stuck.
Consider how these events have changed you and in what way. Did you rethink your values? How did your view of the world change? Take time to explore the meaning of these life-changers.
Start piecing it together. Think about the structure and the story line. Weave your memories and their meaning together in a way that feels unified and conveys the lessons learned.
Ready to finally start your self-care practice and get over being stuck? Self-care is the bridge to your story. Click here to sign up to get my free, on demand webinar to walk you through the steps 💌.