Category Archives: writing therapy

Can writing mindfully be more healing than writing expressively?

Posted on by inktuition
1

I’ve always believed that writing down feelings is a route to healing them. For me, as a writer, the mere action of putting fingers to keyboard and letting my soul spill out onto the screen is healing in itself.

Write mindfully about everyday happenings can help divorced people face their feelings. (pic:istockphoto.com/nameinframe)

But that’s not the case for everyone – especially people going through recent separation or divorce. Or so says this fascinating report from Huffington Post on a scientific study into the different kinds of writing therapy that can have different kinds of emotional effects.

Researchers asked one group to write about their anger, guilt and all the other feelings that come up post-divorce. A second group wrote their story with a beginning, middle and an end, like a novel. And a third group merely wrote down what they did during the day (went shopping, sent emails etc). The groups were also categorised into people who brood over things and people who seek meaning from their trauma.

The outcome of the experiment wasn’t at all what scientists were expecting, however. The feeling writers and story writers fared worse emotionally than the people cataloguing their daily deeds – suggesting that brooding on your feelings when they’re raw really doesn’t help separated people feel any better.

I’m surprised and fascinated by the article’s conclusion. Author Wray Herbert says: “Writing about boring and ordinary stuff helps divorcing men and women to re-engage in their daily lives without focusing on emotional pain and loss. Thinking about lunch and laundry may distract brooders from their brooding.”

So there we have it. Being mindful of the boring stuff in the moment is what can really help.

Expressing your fears takes their power away

Posted on by inktuition
4

It’s something therapists and writers have known for years, but now psychologists have confirmed that naming your fears stops them having so much power over you.

Giving a name to something, or expressing exactly how you feel, means you don’t have to deny the feeling or keep squashing it down. Sometimes the energy needed to keep it at bay is more painful and stressful than just talking about it anyway. Writers use that technique all the time: expressive or reflexive writing puts into words their feelings and stresses, and therefore externalises what’s going on inside and helps to process feelings and look at them objectively.

Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) did some tests on people who are afraid of spiders, asking some of them to approach a tarantula, and to experience and label their fears. For example, to say: “I’m anxious and frightened by the ugly, terrifying spider.” People who were able to express their fears were able to get closer to the tarantula, and had less of a stress reaction.

Michelle Craske, a professor of psychology at UCLA and the senior author of the study, said: “The implication is to encourage patients, as they are exposed to whatever they are fearful of, to label the emotional responses they are experiencing and label the characteristics of the stimuli — to verbalise their feelings. That lets people experience the very things they are afraid of and say: ‘I feel scared and I’m here.’ They’re not trying to push it away and say it’s not so bad.”

The crucial point is this: “Be in the moment and allow yourself to experience whatever you’re experiencing.”

A poem about a miscarriage

Posted on by inktuition
1

My heart went out to Gary Barlow and his wife Dawn when I heard how their baby Poppy had been stillborn. In my work as a therapist with women who have lost babies to miscarriage and stillbirth, I know there are intense feelings of loss around what might have been – the dreams that have been so cruelly taken away – mixed with intense gratitude for the blessings they do have.

A friend of mine recently miscarried her baby. She is a young, healthy woman, who already has a child, so she is baffled why she miscarried. She said: “When I heard about women who had miscarried, I used to think of it as matter of fact. But now experiencing it myself, it is a whole different world. It’s almost like I now belong to a club, where there are so many of us but no-one talks about it and women suffer in silence. Now I think: was there a spirit? Where has it gone? What was God’s reason to take my child away from me?”

I wish I had an answer. The way I chose to respond to her pain was in creative writing, via a poem:

To the twinkle that blinked Continue reading →