How Writing Heals the Soul

1:44:4

2024-07-21

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Expressive writing is not a benign act of recounting the day’s events but a transformative tool for meaning-making. It gifts the opportunity to rewrite our lives’ narratives, repositioning ourselves as chief-in-charge. It’s an invitation to stand inside what writer, speaker, and activist Parker Palmer (2009) refers to as the “tragic gap,” or the space that exists between reality and possibility.

What is Expressive Writing?

James Pennebaker (1997), social psychologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, pioneered the research on expressive writing, asking individuals to write about a stressful or traumatic event, standing in the “tragic gap,” searching for a life rope to venture into a healthier space and place. Originally, Pennebaker and colleagues recruited college students to the lab and randomly assigned them to either write about a troubling experience or an innocuous topic, such as chronicling last week’s activities, under the guise of reflecting upon their time management skills. In both the experimental and control conditions, the participants wrote anonymously. Initially, the researchers hypothesized that self-disclosure on the page, making the internal external, would bring about positive health consequences.

However, though some of these earlier assumptions were likely true, the real power appeared to be in the act of writing itself, not in the disclosure. Although some participants in the experimental group felt worse immediately following the writing, over time, they had healthier outcomes than the control group, as measured by the frequency of visits to the student health center. In addition, amongst the experimental group, students who routinely submitted sloppy work for class eloquently constructed thought-provoking narratives, clearly valuing their story.

Follow-up studies conducted by a wide range of researchers replicated the results while vastly expanding the population to include war veterans, healthcare workers, cancer survivors, chronic pain sufferers, crime victims, first responders, new mothers, caregivers, the recently unemployed, and the incarcerated. Moreover, the duration of the time spent writing and the number of writing sessions appeared to not significantly alter the health benefits. Across studies, participants wrote anywhere from two to 15 minutes in consecutive sessions spanning just minutes apart to weeks in between.

Interestingly, follow-up studies indicate that it is not even necessary to reflect upon your own life circumstances. For example, participants who wrote in response to narratives documenting other people's difficult life experiences still showed health benefits.

Though not definitively known, one explanation is that expressive writing invites people to hone their emotional granularity and processing skills, which can later be applied to their own unique struggles. In addition, reading about others' pain may diminish feelings of self-isolation as participants come to see hardship as part of the universal human condition.