Looking for a practical strategy you can use regularly on your own to look after your health and wellbeing? Our psychologist, Alan Hely, writes about the technique of Therapeutic Writing and how it may be able to help you with your emotional, mental, and physical health. He breaks down the exact steps and provides tips on how to implement it into your life – so you can live well.
The Benefits
Therapeutic Writing is a technique that requires you to write about important events in your life. This technique is frequently referred to as “Expressive Writing”. Many years of research have shown that the process of writing has very therapeutic effects which can even transfer to improved physical health. Therapeutic Writing is shown to have beneficial effects on the immune system, sleep health, heart rate and blood pressure, social anxiety, and emotional health. Putting negative emotions into words can diminish their effect on us.
The Process
Become your own scientist and find out what works for you!
Therapeutic Writing helps you to work through complicated and traumatic issues in your life. It works best when trying to come to terms with what has happened in the past.
Therapeutic Writing has been found to be helpful in reducing stress caused by;
- Traumatic experiences from your past,
- Current or recent upheavals,
- Major life course changes and transitions,
- Quietening the mind.
The Technique
Use one or more of, or even all of, the following goals for Therapeutic Writing, depending on what is happening currently in your life.
Deepest thoughts and feelings. Write about the same or different topics or related topics over several sessions. Watch for any change in your relationship with the topic.
Thought processing. Work towards recording your thoughts and feelings about a traumatic event. This aids in bringing relief to long avoided thoughts and memories of an event.
Benefit finding. Focus on the positive aspects of the experience. Even in the most traumatic of life events, the human spirit can find a way to benefit from the experience. Have you grown, changed, become better equipped to meet future challenges.
Best possible future self. Create the image of your future self. How did you get to be this person, what work did you have to do, what changes did you have to make.
Fork in the road. Sometimes life dumps on us and we are forced to take a different path to the one we planned or expect to play out. In a similar way to the “Best possible future self” technique, write what you would like to be in the future in this new life path.
Dark work. Don’t attempt this technique without consultation with your psychologist. Dark Work requires you to expose your self to the deepest and most painful thoughts and emotions of an event. The aim is to gradually desensitise you to the memory of the event so that it remains as memory for the facts, but not an emotionally destructive trigger.
How to Include Therapeutic Writing In Your Life
1. Choose a similar time on a regular basis, such as “Three nights per week at 8.00 pm after dinner”
2. Find out how long your brain likes the process. You can write for 2 minutes once per week, or 10 or even 30 minutes three to four times per week. Don’t force yourself, you are becoming your own self coach in this task.
3. Use the same location if you can. Create a comforting space, that removes you from outside distractions and make this your personal confidential therapy and recovery room. You can also write outside in a park or on the beach providing you have privacy free of distraction.
4. Write about one topic or many topics simultaneously, which ever seems to be the correct thing to do. Sometimes writing will invoke memories that would also like to “Come to the party”.
5. Finally, this is completely confidential. You do not have to share what you write with your therapist or other people. And that can sometimes be the most therapeutic part of it all – that you can share things with yourself, through writing, without anyone else’s opinion.
