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Is the Struggle to Make Meaning Good for Your Health? (part 2)

Posted by on December 20, 2006 in Uncategorized

Is the Struggle to Make Meaning Good for Your Health? (part 2)

Here’s a second study relevant to struggling, this one conducted by psychologist Eugene Gendlin in the early sixties, and discussed in the first chapter of Ann Weiser Cornell’s book, The Power of Focusing. Apparently, Gendlin, then at the University of Chicago, was interested in the question: “Why is psychotherapy helpful for some people and not others?” What he did, first, was to tape hundreds of therapy sessions, gathered from many different therapists and clients. Then he asked therapists and clients to rate whether the psychotherapy had been successful. If both agreed, and if psychological testing supported this finding, the therapy was deemed successful. This successful therapy was then compared to therapy that was considered by the participants to be a failure. When researchers listened to the tapes of successful therapy vs. unsuccessful therapy they noted one key difference. Clients in successful therapy struggled more. Ann Weiser Cornell writes: . . . at some point in the session, the successful therapy clients would slow down their talk, become less articulate, and begin to grope for words to describe something that they were feeling at the moment. If you listened to the tapes, you would hear something like this: ‘Hmmmm. How would I describe this? It’s right here. It’s . . . uh . . . it’s . . . it’s not exactly anger . . . hmmmm.’ Often the clients would mention that they experienced this feeling in their bodies, saying things like, ‘It’s right here in my chest,’ or ‘I have this funny feeling in my stomach.’ In contrast, clients who felt like the therapy was a failure didn’t struggle in this way. They were actually more articulate—or more apparently articulate—in the sense that they spoke in smooth, less interrupted ways. (They were, it would seem, more glib. They had things figured out–but nothing changed.) I find this comparison fascinating, and not inconsistent with what I often see with patients. This week, for instance, it often seemed like we were all struggling to make meaning–patients as well as myself. And I love how this study offers a rationale for not only tolerating such struggle for meaning but in fact encouraging it and perhaps celebrating it. I find myself wondering about this question: Why is writing more healing for some people than it is for others? Could it have something to do with how much a person is willing to struggle on the page? A kind of willingness, perhaps, to be initially inarticulate—and halting—and groping—in the service of eventually coming to a new understanding—perhaps a new story—or a new form for one’s story. The Power of Focusing can be found here....

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Is the Struggle to Make Meaning Good for Your Health?

Posted by on December 18, 2006 in Research

Is the Struggle to Make Meaning Good for Your Health?

There are two pieces of research I’ve been thinking about this month. Both are about the struggle to make meaning through language and both, I think, are relevant to this whole question of what writing and rewriting our stories. The first study, conducted by James Pennebaker and colleagues in 1997, shows that when people used increasing numbers of insight words or causal words in their writing they showed improvements in health. Examples of insight words are realize, understand, think, and consider. Examples of causal words are such words as cause, effect, reason, and because. In a discussion of this study, Pennebaker writes: “The present analyses indicated that changes in thinking patterns—as opposed to static thinking patterns, which do not change over time—predict improved health.” I find this study terribly interesting. The researchers weren’t trying to measure how insightful these narratives people wrote were, or whether or not they were “good” narratives. What they were measuring—and what seemed to matter—was this process of finding meaning—this indication that, over time, thinking patterns changed. And this process of finding meaning is suggested by sentences that included cognitive words and that might look something like this: I’m beginning to realize . . . I think perhaps . . . I thought I understood what had happened, but now I’m considering . . . Changes in thinking patterns—as opposed to static thinking patterns, which do not change over time—predict improved health. It’s the kind of statement that’s worth considering, I think, and coming back to. It’s the kind of finding that has implications not just for writing and healing, but for healing itself—–   Part 2 of this article–an article about the struggle to make meaning in psychotherapy–can be found...

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Writing and Healing Idea # 18: The Things We Carry

Posted by on December 17, 2006 in Writing Ideas

A list can be a kind of form. A list can be a way at getting at something that might be hard to get at in another way. Consider this list from Tim O’Brien’s story about Vietnam, “The Things They Carried,” from his incomparable collection by the same name. Perhaps you are already familiar with the story. Here’s the second paragraph. A list of the tangible things that the men carried: The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending on a man’s habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he’d stolen on R&R in Sydney. Here’s a paragraph from later in the story (20). They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. You can make a list of the things you carry or that you have carried. You can write about the balance and posture required to carry...

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Notes in Bathrobe Pockets

Posted by on December 15, 2006 in Forms for Writing and Healing, Healing Poetry

Foggy this morning. I’m thinking (again) about those pieces and images that can pierce through fog. For a writer. Or for a reader. The kinds of things that Janet Desaulniers is talking about, I think, when she talks about collecting. In his book, A New Path to the Waterfall, a book about, among other things, navigating loss, and navigating the approach of death, Raymond Carver includes an apparently simple poem: “His Bathrobe Pockets Stuffed with Notes”. The poem is made up of of thirteen fragments. Here are three: Those dead birds on the porch when I opened up the house after being away for three months. “We’ve sustained damage, but we’re still able to maneuver.” Spock to Captain Kirk. The rabbi I met on the plane that time who gave me comfort just after my marriage had broken up for...

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Listening & Collecting

Posted by on December 13, 2006 in Guest House, Healing Images

Listening & Collecting

Over twenty years ago now, when I was in medical school at the University of Missouri, I wandered over to the main campus looking for a writing class, and, in a stroke of good fortune, found an excellent writing teacher, Janet Desaulniers. She was all the good things you want a writing teacher to be—smart, funny, attentive, encouraging, dexterous with language and form. She teaches now in the MFA program in writing at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Last year she did an interview with Alex Shapiro which appears in the on-line magazine, Identity Theory. The entire interview is worth taking a look at, but the bit I want to draw attention to here is the bit, about halfway through, when she begins to talk about writing the story, “After Rosa Parks,” which appears now in her fine collection, What You’ve Been Missing. She talks about how when she was first trying to write “After Rosa Parks” she would start with a piece of something—a strong something—a moment or a snatch of dialogue—and then she’d find herself forcing it, trying to make it into a scene, trying to make it become a story. She says this: It was so utilitarian. Not to mention agonizing. I kept killing each spark of promise because I kept pushing each one past what I knew for sure. And that’s how you end up telling the kind of lies fictions cannot tell. Anyway, enduring the pain of failing and failing that story, which I very much wanted to tell, opened me up to seeing early composition in new ways. Now I start with collecting things. I don’t try to know anything and lead anything. Seeing early composition in new ways. Collecting. And she goes on to tell how she started this process of collecting with one of her students. He was a talented writer, had been in the writing program at Chicago for three years, and he was feeling this kind of suicidal desperation because he hadn’t yet written anything he felt was good enough. And she made this deal with him—1666 words a day. For a month. That was the deal. Not trying to make these words be anything yet. Not trying to write a story—or a poem—or even an essay. Just collecting things. She describes it like this: . . . once you start collecting things you come to respect discrete units of significance for what they are. You don’t say, Oh, I own this really good interlude, now how can I hook it up with something else? Because you’re not making. You’re collecting. So it’s all about listening to the sound of matter. Of significance. It might be an observation; it might be a piece of dialogue. If you have to write 1,666 words a day, everything’s game. At breakfast my husband would say, “You know, I think this sweater’s going to change my life.” And after I finished laughing, I thought, Right, I’m taking that. Discrete units of significance. I like that. Later in the interview she talks about the next steps—taking these units and using craft to create and discover form in these units. But I’m interested now, and first, in the units themselves. The early stage of composition. And I’m writing about this here because...

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