Writing through trauma

Shortly after writing about self-talk yesterday, I found a book on hold for me at the library: The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us, by James W. Pennebaker. I'd been fascinated when I first heard about the research in the book. In particular, I was struck by the idea that we use the word "I" more when we're being deferential than when we're authoritative. (It's not quite that simple, of course, which is why I put the book on hold.)

Here we are with my friend Wendy, probably in the late 90's.
Wendy is one of the friends I used to take long walks with to
discuss and work through my childhood traumas.

I started reading as I walked home from the library, and long before I got to anything interesting about pronouns, I found research on using writing as a way of working through the effects of trauma. I've always used words to work through things that troubled me, whether it was during long walks and conversations with friends in childhood, journal entries, or letters. But I haven't known how or why it helps, or whether I benefit simply because I'm a word-oriented person.

Pennebaker and his colleagues have done some interesting and revealing research. They tested people who were suffering physically and emotionally, had them write essays about their traumas, and measured how much they benefited. They analyzed the essays for words that signified positive and negative emotions, as well as cognitive dimensions (and a whole host of other things). Here's what they found:

Over all, the more people used positive emotions while writing about emotional upheaval, the more their physical and mental health improved in the weeks and months after the experiment.

Negative emotion showed a different pattern. People whose physical health improved the most from writing used a moderate number of negative emotion words. That is, people who expressed negative emotion language at very high rates did not benefit from writing — almost as if they were awash in their unhappiness. By the same token, those who used very few negative emotion words did not benefit — perhaps a sign that they were not acknowledging the emotional impact of their topic. The emotional findings, then, suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life's traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.

That in itself was interesting to me, specifically as it relates to this blog. I started writing here in an attempt to better understand my own experiences and to force myself to write more coherently about them than I do in my journal, which is intended to capture my stream-of-consciousness thought and free my mind for other things. I read on.

The people whose health improved the most started out using fairly low rates of cognitive words [think, realize, believe, etc.] but increased in their use over the four days of writing. It wasn't the level of cognitive words that was important but the increase from day to day. In some ways, use of insight and causal words [because, effect, rationale, etc.] was necessary for people to construct a coherent story of their trauma. . . .

These findings suggested that having a coherent story to explain a painful experience was not necessarily as useful as constructing a coherent story.. . .

There is an important lesson here. If haunted by an emotional upheaval in your life, try writing about it or sharing the experience with others. However, if you catch yourself telling the same story over and over in order to get past your distress, rethink your strategy. Try writing or talking about your trauma in a completely different way.

This is exciting stuff. And it's similar to what I wrote about yesterday, in that much of my damaging self-talk is about telling myself the same story of hopelessness and loss over and over again. In doing so, I reinforce the pain instead of moving through it. So, no more of that. Instead, I'm going to try again to emphasize the positive when I can (easier to say today, when I've had about 48 hours of emotional stability), and to continue to mine my experience and Sandy's for insights and coherence. (And maybe some quiet Sunday afternoon, I'll run the blog through Pennebaker's online tools to see what the word count says about me and my process!)