repetitive thinking. These types of writing prompts provide us with a time-focused, intentional rumination experience about our adversity. This leads to meaning-making and new healing narratives, which ultimately sets us up for post-traumatic growth.
After discovering this compelling research on expressive journal writing, I started using writing in my work with clients as an activity they could do between sessions. Many of them benefited from this writing. After receiving training with Dr. Pennebaker at Duke University, I then began offering Writing for Wellness workshops for students, community members, and people who were going through or had gone through the experience of cancer and chronic illness. The feedback on the helpfulness of writing was so encouraging that it motivated me to keep coming up with new prompts for expressing our deepest thoughts and feelings and for facilitating transformation. What my clients and workshop participants were experiencing mirrored what the research has found over the last thirty-plus years: writing helps people who are suffering.
Writing Was My Lifeline
And then the research got real. When my husband left, and like I have done in every other crisis, I pulled out my journal and started writing. Every evening before bed, I would look forward to the twenty or thirty or even sixty minutes I had to pour out my heart on the page, relieved that I wasn’t exhausting anyone by saying the same things over again or expressing the same pain that I thought I should have been over by now. Some days, I’d even take a ten-minute break at work to just write about what I was thinking and feeling—a lifeline for those first few months of foggy sadness.
On the sage advice of my writing coach, I turned my journaling into a memoir, chronicling the year of separation up to the day in court when a judge granted the divorce. I would write a chapter and then edit it, write another and edit it, and so on until the book was complete. Then I edited the whole book several times. With every revision, I found myself getting stronger and happier. It wasn’t until I finished the book that I realized I had just done the equivalent of trauma therapy, which is telling your trauma story again and again until it loses its emotional power; has a beginning, middle, and most importantly an end; and gets integrated into your entire life story.
I knew I was through the darkness when my divorce story was just a chapter in my life story and not my entire life story, which is how it felt when I was in the middle of it. Interestingly, as I did more research for this book, I came across a study that showed that among recently separated adults, creating a narrative about their divorce experience seemed to be the most helpful type of writing for emotional recovery20.
Writing Can Help You Too
We’re going to use writing as our primary tool for blooming. Writing will allow you to move through your suffering by first acknowledging its existence and then processing it. We’ll use writing to release your painful emotions and dark thoughts rather than ruminating on them continuously21. But to heal, you’ll need to do more than simply recall your story; you’ll need to reconstruct your story22. To reconstruct your experience through writing, you’ll use the writing prompts in the following chapters to search for and find meaning in your suffering—what are the lessons to be learned, the benefits to be experienced, the resolution necessary to move forward? We’ll also use writing to explore other perspectives, identities, and pathways to wholeness that will facilitate greater ease as you move through the dark.
You’ll find that as you write your story, it will become more objective and you will gain emotional distance from it. Eventually, you will integrate the trauma and suffering into your overall life narrative, so that it no longer runs the show. Like editing, you will “rework and reword,” and finally you will write a new ending to your story. I will guide you through each of these steps using the prompts in the pages to come.
How to Use This Book
Here are a few things you should know and do before we get started:
∗ Twelve Principles of Blooming in the Dark. This book is organized around twelve principles of blooming in the dark. These are principles I learned through my own seasons in the dark and those of my clients. Each principle and accompanying writing prompt is grounded in empirical research from various domains of psychology. One chapter is devoted to each principle. Following the description of each blooming principle, there are six to eight thought-provoking journaling prompts for you to complete at a pace that feels right to you. These prompts are designed to help you experience each of the twelve principles of blooming in the dark.
∗ Choose a beautiful blooming journal. If you haven’t already done so, find a lined journal in which to respond to the writing prompts in this book. It should be a journal that inspires you to write. Maybe the cover is your favorite color or has a background you find inspiring. I’d recommend you begin with a new journal rather than one you’ve already written in, so that it can be devoted exclusively to your blooming process. If you’d find it easier to have the writing prompts already typed into your journal, I’ve created a downloadable PDF that lists each of the writing prompts for the twelve blooming principles with lots of blank space after each prompt. You can find My Night Blooming Journal at www.drmichellepearce.com/nightbloomersjournal
∗ You do not need to be a writer to benefit from this book and the journal exercises. The writing exercises in Night Bloomers are designed for personal transformation, not to sharpen grammar, spelling, or composition skills. In fact, paying attention to those aspects of writing can impede the effectiveness of using writing as a tool for healing.
∗ It doesn’t matter what type of pain and suffering you’re going through, this book is for you. The twelve blooming principles and the writing prompts I’ve designed are applicable to many different “dark times” in life, such as loss, grief, death, illness, divorce, breakups, job loss, aging parents, estrangement, miscarriage, rape, assault, bankruptcy, affairs, disability, life transitions and upheavals, and so on.
∗ You can work through the twelve blooming principles and accompanying prompts at your own pace. Some of you may complete the journal exercises in a few weeks, others in a few months, while others may take even longer than that. The important thing is to go at a pace that keeps you growing.
∗ Be sure to keep watering your seed through your writing even when you don’t see signs of growth. If it feels like too much to work through all the chapters and prompts in order, you can dip in and out of the chapters. There are also enough writing prompts in each chapter that you can choose the ones that most resonate. You can also go back and complete prompts you didn’t complete earlier or respond to prompts again, once you are further along in the process and your responses might have evolved.
∗ Writing might make you feel a little worse before it makes you feel better. In the research, some participants reported feeling more distress for an hour or two after writing about a traumatic event. However, over time the people who wrote about a trauma—and not the people who wrote about a neutral event—experienced better emotional and physical health23.
∗ This is different from your childhood diary. The prompts are designed to help you
