Rewrite Your Life. Jessica Lourey
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All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.
—Isak Dinesen
“You should write a book.”
Maybe, like me, you first heard this as you shared the story of your daycare lady locking you and your sister in the closet before letting her creepy grown son perform puppet shows for the rest of the kids. Or, perhaps someone suggested novel-writing-as-a-release after you mentioned how close you'd come to getting car-jacked when your sweet, animal-loving friend pulled her Toyota into an unlit parking lot so you could both stand vigil over a dead dog in New Orleans' Lower Ninth. I call these types of experiences “story food,” the life occurrences so remarkable that you can't help telling other people about them.
Here's another possibility: maybe you've never shared your most intense experiences with anyone because you're private, or think no one would believe you, or simply and understandably don't want to relive those moments, even within the safety of words. Yet, some secret, scrappy part of you is whispering to get that story out. If that's the case, I'm telling you what others have told me.
You should write a book.
Sure, it's a pop-off answer to anyone who's had a traumatic or amazing or unbelievable experience, but it turns out there is science behind it.
Mountains of it.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CREATIVE THERAPIES
The human need to creatively express ourselves can be traced back to the oldest-surviving painting, scratched into an Indonesian cave forty thousand years ago. (By the way, it says a lot about human priorities that the first plow wasn't invented until thirty thousand years later, a fact that makes me weirdly happy.) Visual art as expression expanded and flourished from there, producing Michelangelos and Picassos and Gentileschis, but it wasn't until 1939 that the therapeutic value of art was established. That year found WWI veteran and artist Adrian Hill recovering from tuberculosis in a British sanatorium. While there, he was asked to teach painting classes to his fellow patients, many of them returning veterans and a lot of them assumedly bored. Hill witnessed firsthand art's healing power on those vets. He brought his discovery to the general public, coining the term “art therapy” in 1942.
Hill believed that the symbolic mediums of drawing and painting busied the hands and freed the mind, allowing the body's natural reparative mechanisms to do their work unimpeded. His hypothesis was oversimplified, but science would soon prove him right.
Writing as therapy began to catch up to art therapy in the 1960s when New York psychologist Dr. Ira Progoff introduced the concept of reflective writing for mental health. He called this process the Intensive Journal Method. As a Jungian, Dr. Progoff subscribed to the healing power of accessing unconscious or repressed memories. Like visual art therapists before him, he witnessed the therapeutic value of externalizing an emotion or experience, encapsulating it in an image or an essay and thereby releasing it.
Innovators Michael White, an Australian therapist, and Dr. James W. Pennebaker, an American social psychologist, built on Progoff's work in the 1980s. White, along with his colleague David Epston, established the narrative therapy movement. The movement's central tenet is that “the problem is the problem,” not the person experiencing it, and that externalizing the problem by writing about it is the most effective way to address it. Dr. Pennebaker was a pioneer in the writing therapy, or expressive writing, movement, whose research into the connection between secrets, language, and mental health has been groundbreaking. Pennebaker was one of the first to clinically establish that basic writing exercises can significantly improve mental and physical health as well as work performance. His most famous book, Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, accessibly demonstrates the connection between writing and healing.
HOW NARRATIVE THERAPY WORKS
Hundreds of studies have since been conducted to figure out how writing heals, because it does mend and transform. Social scientists have established that expressive writing decreases anxiety and depression; reduces pain and complex premenstrual symptoms; improves the body's immune functions including boosting antibody production; enhances working memory, physical performance, and social relationships; reduces illness-related doctor's visits; improves the physical and mental states of Alzheimer patients' caregivers, cancer patients, and people with HIV; reduces the symptoms of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and eating disorders; and positively addresses a host of PTSD symptoms. In fact, a recent pilot study of eleven veterans diagnosed with PTSD found that after a dozen sessions of narrative therapy, not only did over half of the veterans experience a clinically significant reduction of PTSD symptoms, but a quarter of them no longer met the criteria for PTSD.
That's just a start.
Writing makes everything better.
It's tied to how our brains are wired. We are creatures of habit, evolved animals who perceive stimuli, run it through our limbic system, attach significance to it, and then respond.
Stimulus—significance—response.
Here's an example. Let's say you're stuck in traffic. The traffic jam is a stimulus. It's the job of your amygdala, an almond-shaped glob of neurons housed deep in your brain, to process stimuli, organizing events into emotional memories. Your amygdala codes this particular experience with frustration, which is the significance you attach to it. You respond to this emotion by swearing and mentally squishing the heads of the people in the cars around you. This swearing and mental-head-squishing response becomes your established action pattern any time you perceive a stimulus that your amygdala has classified as frustrating.
Stimulus—significance—response.
Traffic jam—frustration—mental head squishing.
But you don't have to remain a slave to this feedback loop. Thanks to your evolved prefrontal cortex, the big chunk of brain directly behind your forehead that governs executive reasoning, you have the ability to break free of this stimulus-significance-response pattern. (Pavlov's dogs were not so lucky.) Still, as anyone who's tried to quit smoking knows, being aware of the best path and choosing it are two different beasts. And the more intense the emotion, the less blood flow to the prefrontal lobe, therefore the weaker our ability to make rational choices.
To add to the problem, it turns out your neural pathways cement themselves in the case of traumatic events. The result is that some people respond to reminders of stimuli, a condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This trauma-induced reprogramming of the brain explains why it's impossible for many veterans to enjoy Fourth of July fireworks, for example. Their limbic system, the creamy nougat center of the human brain where our memories and emotional lives are housed, has coded “explosion” with “danger,” and so when these veterans hear fireworks, they react as they would, as any of us would, to a bomb going off nearby.
From the outside, this condition may appear simple to correct. They're fireworks, not bombs, after all. But neuroimaging proves that when people are merely reminded of trauma, blood flow ramps up in the brain structures associated with extreme emotions and decreases in the areas associated with communication. The sufferer essentially becomes trapped in their own fear, at the mercy of neural patterns. The good news is that writing therapy, along with other mindfulness practices, including dialectical behavior therapy, art therapy, yoga, Qigong, tai chi, Alexander Technique, and meditation, allows you to reprogram your brain.