can literally change your mind.
Drawing on the wide body of research in this area, the three most promising explanations as to how this works are habituation, catharsis, and inhibition-confrontation. I explain all three below.
Habituation
The effectiveness of habituation (note that the root word is “habit”) in changing negative patterns is based on the fact that central nervous system arousal decreases with repeated exposure to a single stimulus. In other words, the familiar becomes boring.
Let me give you an example. Say you show up to your office job next Monday, thinking it's just another day. When you get to work, however, you discover a red-nosed clown sitting in your spare office chair, smiling opaquely at you, his red clown feet so huge that they disappear under your desk.
That would be frickin' terrifying.
You would call people. They would tell you not to worry, that the clown is there as some sort of cost-saving, effectiveness-lacking productivity exercise. You believe them, but Creepy the Clown is still horrifying, particularly because that empty smile remains stapled to his face as he silently watches you type.
Day two he's still there, he'd maybe be a little less freaky, but for sure you keep one eye pinned on him at all times. On day three, because he hasn't killed you yet, you decide maybe it's safe to move both eyes to your computer screen, at least when checking email. Come day four, you're in the middle of texting your friend a photo you've just taken of the front of your shirt, and more specifically the toothpaste smear shaped like a famous singer (#ifoundmintyelvis), before you remember that Creepy the Clown is sitting five feet away.
You see where this is going?
By the end of the week, you're all meh. He's a clown in a chair and you've crap to do.
You have become habituated to the clown.
Like all good programming, habituation has a genetic advantage. If we respond to something that is proven safe with a heightened nervous system, we don't have as much attention to give to what is actually dangerous. Now that we're walking upright, we can use this power of habituation to our advantage. Specifically, by writing about past stressful or traumatic situations, we can gain mastery over them, freeing up room to worry about the actual threats, which are far rarer than our ancient limbic systems would have us believe.
Catharsis
At its most basic, a catharsis is an emotional release or a cleansing. You've likely felt catharsis after confessing to a professional or venting to a friend. My first memory of catharsis came when I was seven. My family had moved from a medium-sized city to the small town of Paynesville, Minnesota, right before I began second grade. I had to hit the ground running. New school, new kids, new rules, and I was the kid wearing homemade jeans and garage sale tennis shoes with teeth stained gray due to an antibiotic I was injected with as an infant. As a scraggly bonus, I fiercely refused to comb any part of my hair that I couldn't directly see, which meant that whoever sat behind me got a real treat.
Suffice it to say, I was not fitting in.
That first day on the playground, three girls, their names mercifully lost to time, cornered me by the slide. The one with rainbow barrettes spoke for them all. “Where you from?”
Probably she was only curious. Maybe she was trying to be my friend. For sure, I blew it.
“St. Cloud. My dad's an actor on TV.”
That's what's called a BIG FAT LIE. My dad had just quit his job as a cartographer to make a go at his dream of being a full-time alcoholic. What black alley that lie lurched out of, I'll never know.
“No way!”
“I swear on my mom's life.” The air rushed out of me as soon as I said it. Whoof. Like I'd punched myself in the stomach. My mom was everything to me—security, safety, food, love, my oasis in a hurricane of a home life—and I'd just lied her life away. Talk about following the shit with the shovel.
You better believe the girls wanted to play with me after that. Everyone wanted to play with me. I should have been thrilled, but I was sick at what I'd done. I spent the rest of the day weeping in the nurse's office. When she offered to call my mom to come pick me up, I demurred, positive that if my mom wasn't already dead, she'd certainly croak on the drive in.
At the end of the day, I could barely drag myself off the bus and into the house. Against all odds, my mom was there, dead lady walking. She took one look at me before bundling me inside a hug.
“What's wrong?”
I rolled over on myself like a professional narc.
And you know what? I felt a thousand pounds lighter, imminent punishment for lying notwithstanding. I'd been hauling that weight all day. It felt great to lay it down.
Catharsis really can be that immediate and that effective. Think of cathartic sharing as removing the lid from a bubbling pot, where the steam is any extreme emotion—guilt, fear, anger—that has been bottled up. Engaging a negative experience by talking or writing about it, or a version of it, releases the more intense emotions associated with it. Catharsis “lets off steam.”
Inhibition-Confrontation
According to inhibition-confrontation, the third theory of why writing is an effective pathway to emotional healing, it's hard work to avoid thinking about stress or trauma. This is the inhibition part of the name. Somehow, someway, the negative thoughts and impulses leak in despite our best efforts to tamp them down. This denial leads to chronic stress, which takes a toll on the mind and body.
Confronting these stressors through writing—the confrontation part of the name—produces immediate boosts in mental and physical well-being. The trauma or stress—in other words, the stimuli—still exists in memory form, but when you face it, its significance changes.
Here's an example. Think of your life ordeals as zombies trying to get in through your front door. You spend all your energy shoulder-to-the-door trying to keep them out—inhibiting the zombies' arrival—which doesn't leave much time or attention for anything else. Your very survival depends on keeping that door closed, but you're exhausted; you can only keep this up for so long, so you finally let down your guard. The zombies charge through, and—what??—you realize there were never any flesh-eating monsters on the other side of the door. It was memories of zombies you were holding back this whole time.
The arts, and specifically writing, provide a protected route for opening that door and letting the memories-masquerading-as-life-threats in. Once they're through, you free up all the time and energy you've spent shoring up that door. For my money, the most exciting part of this last theory is that what we've been inhibiting or holding doesn't need to be traumatic or long-buried. Through writing, we can confront even a minor annoyance and still reap health benefits.
In further good news, it isn't necessary to know which one of these three explanations you're tapping into to be sustained and healed by writing. You just need to write. You don't need to choose autobiography or memoir as your vehicle either, though both narrative therapy and expressive writing therapy are centered on factual writing, often in the forms of essays, journals, and letters.
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