Writing for healing

How writing down what I feel helps me feel better

🏷️ Categories: Loneliness, Writing

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Writing to heal and nothing else.

It is a practice that I have learned to embrace over time, and not because I proposed it, it came naturally to become an essential part of me, a refuge. It is a space where I externalize what I carry inside, but leaving it in an intimate place, a secret corner that only I can read.

That calms me down.

Nothing else.

Putting words on paper and letting them do their part.

When I started my diary I made the mistake of privileging quantity over quality -I wanted to write down everything-, but paradoxically I left out the most important thing; what I felt. I wrote a lot of actions and few sensations.

Too much doing and too little feeling.

It took me time, several months, to realize that the diary could give me much more. Little by little I began to write what I was thinking and what made me feel good and bad. I wrote to get through difficult times and to let off steam.

Words were my best therapy.

I will tell you my most intense experience in this regard and what I learned along the way.

Writing what we never said

We never want it to happen, but someday it does.

One winter day my dog Yaky passed away. He was 17 years old, I was 23. We had grown up and lived together all my life, I was only 6 years older than him. He accompanied me from the time I was in school holding my father's hand until I graduated from college. His loss hurt me, it hurt so much. That day I sat down at my journal and couldn't find the words, it was impossible to write a single letter.

As a few days passed, I dared to write.

I felt fear and sadness, but I had to do it.

I was afraid of losing in my memories such a transcendental moment of my life, but sad to have to remember something so sad. All those moments and memories I wrote them down while shedding tears in the process. I didn't like it, but I knew that in the future I would thank myself for having had the courage to make that decision.

Human memory is fragile and he did not deserve to be forgotten.

Over time those words began to comfort me.

What once pained me to write helped me heal in the days that followed. All that weight I carried had been put down on paper, and that calmed me. I knew the worst part was over. When my feelings would subside a bit, I would have a faithful reminder of a defining moment in my life in the pages of the journal.

As it was, those days are the most precious ones I wrote about and I look at them with different eyes now.

As you let the words flow, you begin to untie the knot inside you.

The psychology behind expressive writing

I did some research on whether this was a unique case or if words really did heal.

It turned out that they do.

In the 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker discovered that writing about our emotions improves emotional well-being and physical health. It's expressive writing. In his study, he asked several people to write for 15 minutes a day about traumatic events in their lives. At the end, they felt better emotionally and many even improved their physical health in subsequent medical tests.

Writing is like tidying up a messy, dusty drawer.

When we write, we are forcing ourselves to sort out all that messy stuff in our heads. We reason about what we feel and what happened, which helps us to unburden ourselves and better understand that difficult-to-process experience.

Rationalize the experience, we would say in psychological terms.

How to get started with your own diary

Having used it many times already, I can give you these tips:

1. Forget the rules: don't stop to correct words or grammar, the important thing is to let your thoughts flow without restrictions. What you write is for you, so let go of expectations.

2. Write it several times: Sometimes one day is not enough and it is better to process it little by little (Smyth and Helm, 2003). I spent several days writing down the issue of my dog Yaky.... Write until you get it off your chest.

3. Read what you wrote: Some time later reread the text, you will see how those words loaded with feeling no longer feel so heavy. It is very relieving to feel that little by little you are getting over the bump and it is reassuring to know that there will be a real memory on paper that not even memory can erase.

When feelings are too heavy, it is better to unload them on paper.

Don't hurt yourself carrying so much weight.

✍️ It's your turn: Do you write down what you feel? Did it help you feel better?

💭 Quote of the day: “Let's write down our actions, but also our feelings, because it should be known that we have feelings; regrets, regrets, and grief too great to bear. If we didn't feel those things, what kind of monsters would we be?” Neal Shusterman, Scythe.

See you, take care! 👋😊

References 📚

1. Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40063169

2. Smyth, J. M., & Helm, R. K. (2003). Focused expressive writing as self‐help for stress and trauma. Journal Of Clinical Psychology, 59(2), 227-235. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.10144