or bankruptcy—was good or right. None of these things are good. And debatably none of them are “right.” Nor does this metaphor mean that we should purposely pursue or create painful situations in our lives so that we can grow. Rather, the message of blooming in the dark is that the dark presents us with a unique opportunity that if harnessed skillfully can propel a life forward in ways that couldn’t occur if the darkness had never happened.
I’ve designed this book as a guide to help you view your particular situation in a new way and to equip you with effective and powerful tools, so that you can navigate the darkness in your life skillfully. I will share with you principles about blooming that I have learned from practicing psychotherapy for nearly two decades. I will tell you about some of the empirical findings I have learned as a researcher who studies coping with stressors and who develops interventions to improve mental health. I will share transformative knowledge that as a university faculty member I teach my students about integrative health and wellness, such as mind-body approaches for healing, including journal writing. I’ll provide many of the powerful writing prompts I’ve used as a Writing for Wellness workshop facilitator with people who want to process and grow from cancer and chronic illness. And I’ll share some of the strategies I use as a health and wellness coach when I assist individuals in achieving goals they thought were beyond their reach.
I will also share with you the exciting findings of many other researchers that support the blooming principles in this book, so that you can feel confident that the tools we’ll be using are effective. But beyond all this professional experience and research, I will also meet you in these pages as a fellow Night Bloomer. You’ll witness part of my personal journey, as well as those of some of my clients and workshop participants, and even those of some famous individuals who bloomed in the dark. I see myself as a humble guide with hard-won experience, a guide who has traversed this path many times before with people from all walks of life and who has learned some of the secrets of finding treasures and experiencing transformation in the dark.
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, asserted that “suffering ceases to be suffering … at the moment it finds a meaning.” Indeed, despite the old adage that “time heals all wounds,” recent research shows that the real healer is “finding meaning”1. The goal of Night Bloomers is to help you make meaning out of your suffering, so that the darkness in which you find yourself can become a fruitful time of healing and personal growth. Now, let’s turn our attention to why writing is such a powerful tool for blooming in the dark.
To me alone, there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief
And I again am strong.
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1807
Writing Is Good for You
Early on in my graduate studies, I came across a series of research papers describing how writing can help people feel better emotionally and physically. I did a deep dive into the literature and was fascinated with what I found. Dr. James Pennebaker is considered the pioneer in expressive writing, or as it’s called in the research, written disclosure. Little did I know then that ten years later he would train me how to lead Writing for Wellness workshops. In Pennebaker’s original writing experiment in 1986, now repeated hundreds of times by researchers around the world, he and his team asked undergraduate students to write about either a trauma or a neutral topic (such as describing the room they were sitting in) for fifteen to twenty minutes a day over a period of four days2. The students who wrote about a trauma, describing both the traumatic event and their feelings about it, experienced better physical health, fewer doctor visits, improved sleep, less pain, and more positive mood over the following months. That was our first glimpse that there was something about getting one’s pain into the written word that helps the body and mind feel better.
Since then, researchers have found a host of other benefits for the writer3, including better immune system functioning by stimulating T-helper cell growth and antibody response to viruses and vaccinations4, improved wound healing5, lower pain levels6, better sleep7, and lower cortisol levels8, blood pressure, and heart rate9. Writing has also been shown to improve our emotional and psychological well-being10, including increasing positive affect11 and reducing depression12, anxiety13, post-traumatic stress14, and intrusive thoughts and avoidance, which are associated with the experience of trauma15. The physiological changes facilitated by writing cause our bodies and minds to relax, creating a fertile context for healing.
The benefits have gone beyond health. Research has also found that those who have written about emotional topics experienced better grades, found jobs more quickly, and were absent from work less often compared to those who did not write about emotional topics16.
The Type of Writing Matters
Some of you might be thinking that writing about your worst trauma or whatever has landed you in the dark will increase your distress, just like thinking or talking about it can make you feel worse. And you’d be right, but only partially so. Researchers have found that some people who write about a distressing topic tend to feel worse after they finish writing compared to people who write about neutral topics17. The good news is that this outcome changes over time: The initial distress after writing about stressors and trauma is short-lived and for many turns into long-term positive changes in emotional well-being. Not so for those who write about neutral topics. They don’t experience positive changes in their emotional well-being.
Other fascinating research has shown that the type of writing matters. People who experience intrusive rumination—distressing thoughts that just pop into your head and run on an endless negative or catastrophic loop—are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating condition that can occur after experiencing a trauma18. However, people who engage in deliberate rumination—intentionally thinking about a distressing event in a particular way—are more likely to experience post-traumatic growth, or positive effects as a result of experiencing a trauma or stressor.
Both intrusive and deliberate rumination involve repetitive thinking. The difference is that deliberate thinking is an intentional process to examine and reflect on a situation. This type of repetitive thinking is good for us. It helps us create meaning, reduce fear, and change unhelpful thinking styles19. We can use
