Archives | Writing and Healing

Writing and Healing and Breast Cancer

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 9, 2007 in Uncategorized

Is there a benefit to writing for women with breast cancer? What kind of writing is most beneficial? (And might the answers to these questions be extrapolated to other groups?) To look at the first two questions, Annette Stanton, a psychologist at the University of Kansas, and Sharon Danoff-Burg, psychologist at State University of New York in Albany, conducted a study several years ago now in which they divided a group of women with breast cancer into three groups: A group instructed to write a detailed account of the facts of their breast cancer and its treatment A group instructed to write their deepest thoughts and feelings about their experience with breast cancer. This is often called expressive writing. A group instructed to write only about their positive thoughts and feelings in connection to their experience of cancer All of the women completed four twenty-minute writing sessions. And here are some things they learned from this group of women: Women who wrote about facts and women who did expressive writing reported more distress immediately after writing when compared with women who wrote only about positive feelings. At one and three months after writing, women in all three groups reported overall more positive quality of life, less distress, and “high vigor” compared with similar cancer patients who hadn’t written. Three months after writing, women who did expressive writing, and the women who wrote about positive thoughts and feelings reported a significant decrease in physical symptoms and they also had fewer visits to the doctor for cancer-related illness than women who wrote only about facts—or women who didn’t write at all. Writing about thoughts and feelings led to significant physical benefit. Thus, along with expressive writing, writing about positive thoughts and feelings—writing about the good part—was shown to be beneficial for women with breast cancer. Interestingly, though, and, I think, wisely, the authors, in the wake of these finding, advise caution in asking (or, worse, prescribing) persons who are facing adversity to find a positive benefit. They write: Indeed, exhorting individuals to ‘look on the bright side’ or to focus on a specific advantage in their misfortune is likely to be interpreted as minimizing or not understanding their plight. And they go on to name three reasons they think asking for a positive benefit was effective in this particular study: They did not suggest any woman find a particular benefit—but, instead, let women have complete control over any benefit they named and explored. The women were asked to write only after the primary treatment for their cancer had been completed. They had evidence that these women had already had opportunities to process negative emotions in other settings. This is an interesting, and potentially significant, study. And, granting, first, that all research in this field is still preliminary and that more research needs to be done, I’m taking from this study five useful bits: First, that women with breast cancer (And all women with cancer? All people with cancer? All people with illness?) have the potential to gain significant benefit from writing—whether they’re writing about all their thoughts and feelings or whether they’re writing about positive thoughts and feelings that have begun to emerge. Second, that there may be value, at some point, in focusing solely on the good part. Third, that...

Writing to Reframe a Difficult Life Event

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 7, 2007 in Uncategorized

I’ve written here before about the research begun by James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. In 1983 he asked a question that has more or less framed the field of writing and health: Can writing one’s deepest thoughts and feelings about a difficult life event result in fewer illness visits to a health clinic? The answer to that question turned out to be yes—writing can influence health visits. And in the years since, the data has been fairly consistent: expressive writing about difficult life circumstances leads to improved health outcomes. Fifteen years after Pennebaker’s groundbreaking study, Laura King, a researcher at the University of Missouri, asked a new question–a series of questions actually–that moved the research in a bit of a different direction. Her questions: What other kinds of writing might be healing? Does writing, for instance, have to be painful in order to heal? What about writing that focuses on the good part? Might that kind of writing be healing as well? Research had already shown that writing about mundane topics was not especially healing. For instance, in Pennebaker’s first study, one group of students was instructed to describe their dorm room, a topic chosen specifically because of its lack of emotional freight. And, though it’s possible that, for some students at least, the dorm room did strike a meaningful chord, as a group, and as predicted, those students who wrote about their posters and rugs and lamps did not show changes in health outcome. But what about topics that are neither painful nor mundane? What about topics that carry a more pleasant emotional charge? What health effects might writing about those topics have? Laura King asked a group of volunteers to reframe a difficult life event by writing for twenty minutes on four consecutive days on the perceived benefits of this difficult life event. Volunteers were instructed to consider a traumatic event that they had experienced and then “focus on the positive aspects of the experience. . . write about how you have changed or grown as a person as a result of the experience.” When King and her associates analyzed the results they found that the health benefits for this group were identical to those for the group that had written their deepest thoughts and feelings about a trauma. Both groups benefited equally. Perhaps this finding doesn’t surprise you. Perhaps, in hindsight, it even feels like common sense. But, after fifteen years of research on writing about trouble, it introduced a new wrinkle into the research in expressive writing and health. It opened the door to a possibility that many people had perhaps long suspected: that a vast array of different kinds of writing might be healing. Writing about the difficult part is healing. Writing about the good part is healing too. Not either or. But both and. [The source for this brief piece is The Writing Cure, edited by Stephen Lepore and Joshua Smyth, and especially Chapter 7, “Gain Without Pain? Expressive Writing and Self-Regulation,” contributed by Laura...

Writing and Healing Idea #19: The Good Part in Other People’s Stories

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 5, 2007 in Writing Ideas

When I was in graduate school, taking a writing workshop, one of my teachers told us that we would probably learn more in the workshop from looking at other people’s stories than we would learn from our own. The notion, I think, is that sometimes we can become too close—too attached—to our own stories, and that sometimes it’s easier to see other people’s stories because we can see them from a fresh perspective. So—the writing idea: Consider a story, any story as long as it is not your own story. It could be from a book, a newspaper, a movie. It could be from a recent conversation with a friend. Now consider the good part. It could be that very, very difficult things happened. But . . . still . . . was there a good part? Some good thing, however small? Of course it may happen that you might not know at first what the good part is—in fact I think that might be the best way to begin. I have no clue what the best part of this story is. . . But then say you keep writing—say you keep writing I don’t know. . . I don’t have a clue. . . And then maybe you write, I don’t know but I wonder if maybe. . . Or, I don’t know but I’m beginning to think. . . Say you keep writing like this. Then—it could happen—something could jump off the page—your own words—and they could surprise you. (I didn’t know I thought this. I had no idea. . . ) There’s a writing teacher, Donald Murray, author of A Writer Teaches Writing, who says that we become writers when we are surprised for the first time by our own writing—that that in fact is the kind of thrill that can bring us back to writing again and...

Have You Gotten to the Good Part Yet?

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 3, 2007 in A Different Perspective

The theme for this month—Figuring Out the Good Part—springs from an essay, “The Good Part,” written by Dennis Covington and found in the anthology, The Healing Circle, which I’ve mentioned here before. Covington’s essay is funny and sharp. It asks excellent questions. In fact, the entire essay constitutes a kind of question in and of itself—a question that’s terribly relevant, I think, to writing and healing and to the way we try to make sense of the stories of our lives. The essay begins with a pair of Florsheim Imperial wingtips. These are, apparently, a somewhat expensive line of men’s shoes, but this particular pair was bought on sale for $5.88 by one Bunky Wolaver, a man who loves a bargain and who also happens to be married to Dennis Covington’s sister, Jeannie, a woman confined to a hospital bed with a severe flare of lupus. She’s undergoing a painful procedure—having her blood cleansed—and she passes the time with her brother and his wife, Vicki, by telling stories. So she tells about her husband, Bunky, buying these shoes in a size six, even though he’s a size nine and a half, because he does love a good bargain. He’s been trying for days to find someone to give the shoes to—no luck—and then that morning he calls, Jeannie tells him her doctor’s there making rounds, he asks her if maybe she could just lean over the bed and check and see what size the doctor’s feet are. The story goes on. Another lupus patient, a woman in Jeannie’s support group, stops by to visit. Both women have advanced disease and Covington relates that the visit is mostly a somber one, but then at one point Jeannie tells the woman about Bunky’s Florsheim Imperial wingtips and the woman starts laughing so hard that the chair she is sitting on collapses. Covington writes: Jeanie’s stories have always seemed particularly Southern to me, and on the way home from the hospital that night, Vicki and I entered a serious discussion about the nature of Southern storytelling. The good part of Jeanie’s story, I thought, was Bunky asking her to check out the size of her doctor’s feet to see if the shoes he had bought on sale might fit. Vicki thought the good part of the story was the moment when the other lupus patient’s chair collapsed. We didn’t resolve the issue, but we did conclude that every story, Southern or not, has to have a good part. “Have you gotten to the good part yet?” we often ask each other when one of us is reading a novel the other has recommended. But what exactly constitutes the good part of a story? And since our lives themselves are stories, where in this sea of misery, this vale of tears, does the good part lie? Covington proposes then that the answer to this last question can best be found in another story, and he proceeds then to tell a long and winding story which includes, among other things, his father, twelve armadillos, the loss of two of the armadillos (the father left the latch to the cage open and afterwards felt horrible about it), a stint of alcoholism, a marriage, getting sober, two daughters, his father’s death, a trip to Florida with...

All the Pieces Laid Out on the Table: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 1, 2007 in Healing Images

A couple of years ago now, a woman in one of my writing workshops at Cancer Services, Rosetta, a breast cancer survivor, was writing about healing place. One of the things she ended up writing about was trying to find a place where it might become possible to put all of her questions out on the table. Questions like: What now? What next? Where do I go from here? I like her table image. I can see it. And her image seems to me now a fitting image for writing and healing this month: all of the pieces laid out on the table. Pieces perhaps of your own story. Pieces of your own writing. Some of the pieces may be jagged. Some may be worn by the elements, like sea glass. And perhaps a pattern has begun to emerge out of the fragments—a clear shape—a lovely mosaic. But who knows? It may have fallen apart again. As far as I can tell, that’s the way it goes with forms and patterns—they come together and fall apart. Say you wake up one morning then—you make your way to the table–there’s a clear slanted light. Or maybe it’s late, the rest of the world gone to sleep, the room quiet, there’s just the one lamp. Maybe you find yourself touching the pieces. And maybe as you are touching them, and maybe only for a moment, it becomes possible to ask the next question. Among all these pieces— What was the good part? What is the good part? (Is there a good part?) (Is there more than one?) [Note: The picture for this month was taken last August when the black-eyed susans were blooming in my yard. It seems to me that one of the good parts of January, when the garden may be a bit brown and sodden—it’s very sodden here now after several days of rain—one of the good parts is remembering those perennials that may be lying dormant, waiting for the right time to break the...

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