A year ago I was in a very different place with my health than I am now.
I weighed 30 lbs more than I do now. I was exhausted, recovering from things my health team couldn’t quite nail down but decided was a combination of adrenal fatigue, post viral syndrome, a reactivation of Epstein Barr Virus and a relapse of Fibromyalgia.
I took a hiatus from work and focused on healing and listening to my body.
If I had to tell you what caused it, I’d say that it was emotional stress, both from current events and past difficult experiences. I had a lot going on with my adolescent kids. And the #metoo movement was bringing up unresolved pain that I’d been unsuccessfully trying to deal with for most of the decades I’ve been alive.
Why am I telling you this? Did I find a way to heal all my ills?
Not exactly. I did find new tools that helped tremendously. Mindfulness meditation and cultivating a deep friendliness with myself. Depth journaling to release repressed emotions. The Grief Recovery Method which I now guide people through as a large part of my work with others. Radical self-care and paying attention to myself. Regular journaling.
I wouldn’t stay I’m totally healed. I have a couple of chronic illnesses, after all. But I am working again and participating fully in my life.
I’m still exploring and making connections. And finally writing another book.
As I’ve long been a professional writer and journal keeping, learning about the ways writing can be a healing force in our lives is super interesting to me. So I’ve embarked on a learning journey to discover all I can about the ways we can use our personal expression to let go of what hurts us and move gracefully through life.
Expressive Writing: Foundations of Practice, edited by Kathleen Adams is a waypoint on that journey.
Each chapter delves into a different aspect of writing and how it can be used to heal. The book’s audience is mainly writing teachers and therapists, but is an interesting read for the average writer as well.
Here’s what stood out to me the most, in terms of the work I’ve been doing and how I’m moving forward.
Connecting feelings and events
To use writing as a healing tool, it’s important to connect your experiences, the events of what happened, with your feelings about them — either then or now. It’s not enough to just write about how you feel, or to recollect what happened. The connection between both is important in moving through the pain.
Reflecting on your writing
Taking a short time to read what you’ve written and reflect on it helps you further process your emotions. You can reflect on the experience of writing as well as what you wrote.
Using different journaling techniques
There are many different ways of journaling, depending on your needs and where you are on your writing journey. Starting with sentence stems, where you fill in the blank with a word or phrase after the initial prompt and going all the way to free writing, where you write whatever comes to mind, there are many ways of journaling.
Giving yourself a time-limit, such as 5 minutes, can get you over an emotional or creative hump, as you know the exercise is limited in duration. It’s only 5 minutes, after all. You can withstand almost anything for 5 minutes.
Making a list, writing in the form of dialogue between you and another person (or your body), or writing an unsent letter are other ways to creatively approach journaling to find what works for you.
Writing poetry to access the heart
As a teenager, I wrote a lot of poetry. Sometimes I didn’t quite understand what I was even writing, but I knew it expressed a deeper part of me and my experience that I couldn’t otherwise access.
In working with teens at risk, Richard Gold discovered that writing about terrible experiences helps them become externalized and concrete. “The fog of shame and confusion lifts, and the experience is objectified as a real, though often painful, event that can be better comprehended emotionally and cognitively.” (chapter 6, page 137)
Putting these things together in the heart and the head is what allows healing to occur. It’s how it works with The Grief Recovery Method, too.
I’ll continue to read my way through many books on using writing to heal and report back on them, and am practicing these exercises myself in my own journal. Writing can allow an unlocking and accessing of deeper parts of yourself you can’t otherwise get to. I believe it’s these parts that need to be witnessed in order to find healing.
If you’d like to connect with me on Goodreads and keep me accountable to my reading as well as share your favorite books with me, you can get to my profile here.