Diane Morrow

The Research on Expressive Writing: Writing about Trauma

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 9, 2006 in Uncategorized

In 1983, James Pennebaker, a psychologist, then at Southern Methodist University, conducted, along with one of his graduate students, Sandra Beall, a study of forty-six college students. Students in one group—the experimental group—were instructed to write continuously for fifteen minutes about the most upsetting or traumatic experience of their lives. Their instructions included the following: In your writing, I want you to discuss your deepest thoughts and feelings about the experience. You can write about anything you want. But whatever you choose, it should be something that has affected you very deeply. Ideally, it should be something you have not talked [about] with others in detail. It is critical, however, that you let yourself go and touch those deepest emotions and thoughts that you have. In other words, write about what happened and how you felt about it, and how you feel about it now. In essence, these students were being invited to write about a time when something had fallen apart. Students wrote sitting alone in a small cubicle in the psychology building. They wrote on four consecutive days and did not sign their names to their pieces. These were not students who had been recruited because they were experiencing emotional or physical problems. These were ordinary college students recruited from introductory psychology classes. They wrote about the divorce of parents, about loss and abuse, about alcoholism and suicide attempts. They wrote about secrets. And in interviews conducted after finishing the four writing sessions, students actually reported feeling worse than they had before the writing. But four months later, these same students, compared to students who had written about trivial topics, reported improvements in mood and in outlook on life, and, perhaps most surprisingly, improvements in their physical health. When data came in from the student health center, it revealed that this same group of students had in fact visited the student health center for illness, on average, only half as often as their peers. This particular kind of writing—writing one’s deepest thoughts and feelings about trouble—is sometimes called expressive writing. And it’s the kind of writing about which much of the research on writing and health has been conducted. Since that early study in 1983, expressive writing has been tested in a wide range of settings. It’s been shown to improve self-reported health, psychological well-being, grade point average, and re-employment after lay-off. It’s been shown to benefit women with breast cancer, to decrease blood pressure in people with hypertension, to mitigate pain and fatigue in those with fibromyalgia, and to improve markers of immune function for those with AIDS. In an afterward to The Writing Cure, a compilation of research and theory published nearly twenty years after Pennebaker’s first study on expressive writing and health, he reflects on some of the implications of the body of research in the field. He writes: All of the evidence would suggest that writing brings about a general reduction in biological stress. That is, when an individual has come to terms with an upsetting experience, he or she is less vigilant about the world and potential threats. This results in an overall lowering of defenses. . . . Given the broad range of improvements in health outcomes, it would be prudent to conclude that writing provokes a rather broad and nonspecific...

On November and Breaking and Holding that which is Breaking in the Light

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 7, 2006 in Healing Images, Healing Language and Healing Images

I was raised a Catholic but for the past ten years or so, since joining a Friends meeting, I have considered myself a Quaker. One of the things I like about the Quakers is their potential for inclusiveness. Another thing I like is their use of language—the turn of certain phrases. And one of my favorite Quaker phrases is this one: holding something or someone in the light. This phrase took on a personal significance for me one November, six years ago now. During that November I’d been seeing a patient, A., a man in his fifties, a member of our Quaker meeting, who had previously been entirely well and then had discovered that he had metastatic colon cancer. I’d worked with A. a little over a year, and during that year, while receiving treatment for his cancer, he’d done a great deal of work with healing imagery, including imagery with light. Perhaps, because his imagery was illuminating in and of itself, and because I have received his permission to do so, I will write some about his imagery here later. But for now, what I want to say is that six years ago now, in November, his wife, S., had decided to gather a small group in their home for a Quaker meeting—a meeting whose purpose was, in the language of Quakers, to hold A. in the light. I’d been invited to come to the meeting, but had been unable to attend because I was flying back to Missouri that week to visit my mother who was suffering (and who, unfortunately, continues to suffer) with a rather severe mental illness. That trip to Missouri was, for me, a difficult one. But this is what I remember—and why I am writing about this now: Before leaving southwest Missouri in my rental car to drive back up to Kansas City to catch a plane home, I checked my messages at work and found a message from S.—A’s wife. She reminded me that the meeting in her home would be that day, and she told me what time it would be—at eleven I think. And she told me, at the end of the message, that they would hold me in the light. I am not a person who talks frequently or easily about religion, or of spiritual matters for that matter. I was raised Catholic, but, the way I remember it, most of the language for things of the spirit stayed inside the church; it resided in the liturgy and in formal prayers. I’m the kind of person who tends often to think that spiritual matters are so large—or so something—it is difficult to find language for them. But that morning—driving back to Kansas city—one of those lit-up November days and the landscape is very flat there and the sky is very large—on that morning I felt the beauty of the Quaker language—of S’s language—and the comfort of it—to be driving away from a difficult time—a difficult place—and while I was driving to carry the sense—that knowing—that for this one drive—this hour—I was being held in the light. When I think about what’s possible with writing—and, in particular, writing that has to do with breaking—or with grief—this is one of the images I hold for writing: that writing is a way...

Writing and Healing Idea #13: Making a List of Lifelines

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 5, 2006 in Healing Resources, Writing Ideas

I wrote a few days back about having a few lifelines in place if and when you decide to do any writing about things that have broken. You can now, if you want, and if you haven’t already done so, formalize that. You can make a list of your own personal lifelines. Here are some questions that might help you in putting together your own list: Are there places you can go when you feel like something is falling apart? Are there places where you’ve been in the past that are safe and comforting? Can you imagine these places when you need to? Are there resources that make you feel safe and nurtured? Certain foods? Certain objects? Photographs? Poems? Letters? Books? Particular songs? Particular music? Would it be useful to create a playlist? Is there someone you can call when you feel like something is falling apart? A friend? A counselor? Is there someone you can call to mind? (This can be a person, living or dead, who you know well—or perhaps someone you have never met.) Is there something or someone or even some words that you can remember—and call to mind—when you feel like something is falling apart? Make your list as short or as long as you like. Save your list. Take it out and consult it as...

A Word of Caution about Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on November 2, 2006 in Healing Resources

Some of the writing ideas I’ve put up on this site have to do with writing about difficult or painful experiences. Though research has shown that this kind of writing can, over the long haul, be healing, research has also shown that, in the immediate aftermath, writing of this sort can sometimes feel painful. On his website, James Pennebaker, a preeminent researcher in the field of writing and health, offers this advice, which applies in particular to writing that deals with upsetting experiences: Many people report that after writing, they sometimes feel somewhat sad or depressed. Like seeing a sad movie, this typically goes away in a couple of hours. If you find that you are getting extremely upset about a writing topic, simply stop writing or change topics. I think this is sound advice. Some people may wonder: how upset is too upset? For me, an analogy to yoga is sometimes helpful here. I once had a yoga teacher tell us that when working on a new pose it’s prudent to stretch just a bit beyond where one has been before—stretching into that “good” and bearable kind of soreness—and holding that stretch for ten seconds, fifteen seconds, twenty seconds—but not stretching into frank pain. Stretching that is too painful can cause a kind of rebound effect: it hurts so much the next day that you may never want to go back to the class or ever think about yoga again. Writing can be like that. Writing that becomes too painful can make us want to shy away from the process. So, just a bit of a stretch—a bearable stretch. I also think it’s helpful to remember lifelines—those things that reconnect us to a sense of safety and comfort and belonging. And then we can call on those lifelines when we need them—when we, for instance, stretch ourselves a little farther than we intended to stretch. A healing place can be a lifeline. A healing resource can be a lifeline. Healing language. A friend. A counselor. A doctor. A teacher. A nurse. . . . Perhaps one of the most important things to know when writing about difficult experiences is to simply recognize when one is becoming overwhelmed–oh, I’ve gone farther with this than I intended–and then to pull back: to take a break. To go outside and look up at the...

Writing and Healing Idea #12: Letting Something Fall Apart

Posted by Diane Morrow on in Writing Ideas

You can start small. You can wait until you are ready. You can wait until it is the right time. You can choose one small thing in your life that has already fallen apart. You can choose one concrete thing—a favorite sweater, a cracked coffee mug. You can choose something larger. Your car. Your roof. Your marriage. Your heart. You can choose anything at all. You can write the words FALLING APART at the top of the page. Or write BREAKING. Or write BROKEN. Then begin. Write physical and concrete detail. Exaggerate. Exaggeration can be a way to make the falling apart more vivid. It can also be a way to get at a kind of truth. Write verbs. Break. Fracture. Collapse. Disintegrate. Crumble. Write sensory details. Write how the breaking feels. Write how it feels in your body. Write where you feel it in your body. If at any point this becomes too uncomfortable, take a respite. Step outside if you can. Look at the sky. Remember that at any moment you can, if you like, return to a healing place—in the actual world or in your imagination. ___________________________________ See also: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, a poem about the practice of...

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