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3. Write to Heal
Even if you have no health-care practitioner to share your story with, you can
begin to speak your truth by “writing to heal.” This creates the experience of
seeing yourself for who you really are, perhaps for the first time in your life.
Bernie Siegel, MD, often uses the “writing to heal” exercise in workshops.
Recently, he asked a group of high schoolers to write letters to themselves on the
topic of “why you love yourself.” Then he had them write letters to themselves
on a more bracing topic: why they might want to end their lives. Siegel wanted
students to see, at the end of his experiment, that the pile of pages the entire
group of teens had written on why they thought they should commit suicide was
five times higher than the pile on why they thought they should love themselves.
“It was only at that point, once they knew they were not alone with their
painful emotions, that they were able to not lie about what it was that they felt,
and start creating lives for themselves,” says Siegel. He learned in his thirty
years as an assistant clinical professor of general and pediatric surgery at Yale,
that “whether your story is about having met with emotional pain or physical
pain, the important thing is to take the lid off of those feelings. When you keep
your emotions repressed, that’s when the body starts to try to get your attention.
Because
you
aren’t paying attention. Our childhood is stored up in our bodies,
and one day, the body will present its bill.”
Felitti often asks patients, “Before you come back for your next appointment,
start sending me a detailed history of your life.”
Studies show that writing about stressful experiences not only helps patients
to get better, it keeps them from getting worse. James Pennebaker, PhD,
psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, developed this simple
assignment: “Over the next four days, write down your deepest emotions and
thoughts about the emotional upheaval that has been influencing your life the
most. In your writing, really let go and explore the event and how it has affected
you. You might tie this experience to your childhood, your relationship with
your parents, people you have loved or love now, or even your career. Write
continuously for twenty minutes a day.”
According to Pennebaker, even “short-term focused writing can have a
beneficial effect.” For instance, when students were asked to write to heal, their
grades went up. When individuals wrote about emotional upheavals, they went
to the doctor less and showed changes in immune function. The exercise of
simply writing about your secrets, even if you destroy your writing immediately
afterward, has been shown to have a positive effect on health, even for people
battling life-threatening diseases.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon found that the simple act of writing and
reporting on an emotional state had a substantial impact on the body’s physical
state. They had participants complete a difficult math task while evaluators gave
them negative criticism that was intended to make participants feel angry and
ashamed. Afterward, one group wrote about their emotional state and the other
didn’t. Those who wrote about their anger and frustration for just a few minutes
had a smaller increase in heart rate, and a healthier cardiovascular response, than
those who didn’t express themselves.
Kendall, who suffered from undiagnosed celiac disease and was teased and
belittled by her family, decided to write a document outlining the reality and
facts of her health situation as a child, along with her parents’ “damaging
response.” She wrote the letter because her parents were asking to have more
contact with her family, which she wasn’t comfortable with.
Kendall gave the document to her therapist, who then met with Kendall’s
parents to discuss it with them. “I do not have the health, energy, or inclination
to reestablish a relationship with my parents at this point,” Kendall says. “But I
did need to write up the document for my well-being, as well as to give my
parents some needed information.” Since writing the document, two things have
changed in Kendall’s health situation. “For the first time since my diagnosis, my
celiac disease is no longer considered refractory,” she says. “Results from my
recent upper GI endoscopy show that my villi have healed.”
Kat also decided to write down her story. “It was hard for me because we
were always shunned in my family whenever we mentioned what had happened.
But I suddenly realized I needed to give myself permission to tell my truth,” she
says. “I wanted to rewrite my story and tell it from my perspective in order to
give my story meaning.” So Kat began. “Here I was, pushing thirty-five, broke
and broken, drowning in a deluge of memories. I was still carrying around that
feeling from that first moment when I saw my mother’s body, that terror and
grief. I had never let it all surface, and I was unable to let it all go.”
She wrote down every memory, every emotion, as well as her experiences as
she set out to heal herself. She self-published the book
I Think I’ll Make It: A
True Story of Lost and Found
and shared it with all of her family members as
well as the world. In writing, she was able to let go of her guilt and shame.
“Writing was an enormously healing process,” she says.
Today, Kat is a motivational speaker and life coach who gives talks to high
school students about overcoming adversity—using her voice to tell a truth that,
for so many decades, could never be told.
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