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Four Ways of Looking at Healing, in No Particular Order

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 7, 2007 in Uncategorized

Purple tulips in the window A photograph of purple tulips in the window A woman whose daughter has died, sixteen years ago, and, still, the grief, it catches her unaware—that raw fresh ache.  This is more frequent in January.  How do you do it? I ask her.  I really want to know, how does she do it.  I picture her getting up every morning, making breakfast, walking the dog—it’s wet some days and cold—and then there’s all that has to be done next.  How do you do it?  She says she knows that she will see her again.  When she dies she will see her daughter again.  She tells me this as if it is the most obvious thing. Remembering to refill the bird feeders on a winter afternoon and then looking out the kitchen window—finches—swooping in to the feeder as if to some busy midtown diner, where inside it’s warm, there’s a waitress inside refilling coffee, and voices, that sound of forks against...

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Alive

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 26, 2007 in Uncategorized

Yesterday, while my son was at his piano lesson, I went to the public library, and while I was there I came across a book by Mary Oliver entitled Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Mary Oliver is the author of that poem, Wild Geese, among many others. In any case I brought her book home, along with a stack of others, and last evening I opened the book, and in the introduction I came across this—one of the loveliest invitations to making language–to writing–that I’ve seen— And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new a serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning, ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a...

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The Research on Fiction Writing and Health

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 21, 2007 in Uncategorized

There’s a piece of research that dovetails well with Lee Smith’s experience that I wrote about last week. It’s the only piece of research I know of that looks at what happens in terms of health when people write fiction. The study was conducted in 1996 by Greenberg et. al. and is cited in The Writing Cure (106). Participants in this study—college students—were divided into three groups: A group who wrote about nonemotional events A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about a previous trauma A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about an imaginary trauma Both the group who wrote about a previous trauma and the group who wrote about an imaginary trauma had significantly fewer visits to the student health center in the month following the writing than the group who wrote about nonemotional events. Thus, writing about real trauma was beneficial. And writing about an imaginary trauma—writing fiction—was beneficial. (Granted, not all fiction has to do with trauma or difficult life events but one could argue that a fair amount of fiction touches on this area. Consider, for instance, Stephen King. Edgar Allen Poe and that telltale heart. J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Charles Dickens and all those stories of orphans. Grimm’s fairy tales. I can’t help but wonder, as I write this, if reading these stories—holding strong emotions through reading—might not also offer a kind of healing—but that perhaps is a different question for a different day—-) In a discussion of this study, the authors propose a reason that writing about imaginary trauma might be beneficial. They propose that writing about imaginary trauma may have allowed people to “accommodate themselves to negative emotions in a safe context.” This resonates for me with the words that Lee Smith used when she talked about writing her novel: I was in a very heightened emotional state the whole time I was writing it, and it meant everything to me to have it to write. And Molly’s story became my story, or at least a receptacle of all this emotion I didn’t have anything to do with. Story as a (safe) receptacle for emotion? Writing fiction as a (safe) way to hold strong emotions? Writing fiction may, of course, lead to a lot of other things as well. Beautiful novels. Moving short stories. A deeper understanding of life. A new way of looking at the world. Entertainment. Joy. All of this may happen for the reader—or for the writer. But maybe one of the other things that can happen—sometimes—for any one of us—and not just published novelists—is this opportunity for writing fiction to become a safe way to hold and digest—and perhaps transform—strong deep...

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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...

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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...

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