Writing for Healing
Sutter Center for Integrative Holistic Health
Life happens—to all of us. Upheavals touch every part of our lives - our physical health doesn’t affect just our bodies, we don’t just lose a job, and we don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are — our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Thoughts about difficult life events may keep us awake at night, distract us at work and even make us less connected with other people. When a traumatic event occurs or we undergo a major life transition, our minds have to work overtime to try to process the experience. Without some resolution, the echoes of these events can affect us all our lives. Unresolved traumatic events may lead to depression, anxiety, and even physical illness. Fortunately, there are a number of interventions that can help us to digest and make sense of such difficult events in our lives; expressive writing is one of those interventions.
Medical research has confirmed that expressive writing has a measurable positive effect on both healthy people as well as patients suffering from disease. Several years ago, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealed that asthma and arthritis patients showed a significant reduction of symptoms when they wrote about stressful experiences. The growing fields of both journal and poetry therapy hold much promise in the areas of healing, and growth, and personal development.
Why would writing help us to heal? When we can translate a difficult experience into language, we make the experience graspable, and we are more likely to come to peace with that experience so that it no longer haunts us. We may see improvements in our physical health, as well as our social connections, our memory, and our sleep. Writing in a group with other people allows us to share our experiences in a safe, supportive environment; it also helps us to realize that we are not alone, that we all share the same fears and concerns as well as the same hopes and dreams. We no longer endure in a vacuum, we become part of a community, supporting and being supported by others.
Practitioners