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What Should You Write?
- Write about what keeps you awake at night.
- Write to learn where you need to go.
Trust where your writing takes you. You may start with a trauma / emotional upheaval but soon begin writing about other topics. As long as these other topics are emotionally important, follow them. If, however, you find yourself writing about what you would like for dinner — or some other distracting topic — then force yourself back to the trauma / emotional upheaval.
# Write about issues relevant to the here and now.
# Write only about traumas that are present in your mind.
Write only about traumas that are present in your mind.
A remarkable amount of literature deals with repressed memories. The repressed memory literature explores the idea that people have had horrible childhood experiences that they don’t remember — many of which involved childhood sexual abuse. The writing you are doing here focuses on what you are aware of now. If you have no memory of a given childhood experience, why not go with the working assumption that it never happened? After all, you wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Write only about conscious traumas and upheavals. It will save you thousands of dollars in therapy and legal bills.
How Much Time Should You Write?
How frequently to write.
While there is some debate about whether it is better to write for four consecutive days or to separate your writing days, there is nothing conclusive either way.
How long for each session.
In most large-scale studies, people wrote for around twenty minutes on three to four occasions.
How many days to write.
What if you find that you enjoy writing and want to continue past four days? Do it.
Booster-writing sessions
Think of expressive writing as a tool always be at your disposal, or like having medicine in your medicine cabinet. No need to take the medicine when you are healthy, but when you are under the weather, you can always turn to it. Once you have tried writing as a healing agent, try it again when you need to. Also, you might find that in the future, you won’t need to write for four days, twenty minutes a day. Merely writing occasionally when something bothers you might be sufficient.
Writing prescription: To Journal or Not to Journal?
Sometimes a healthcare provider may tell a patient, “You should write about that in a journal,” but that’s as far as the prescription goes. You may wonder, is keeping a daily journal a good idea? Ironically, there is no clear evidence that keeping a daily journal or diary is good for your health, perhaps in part because once people get in the habit of writing every day, they devote less and less time to dealing with important psychological issues. Sometimes a journal can become a worn path with little benefit.
Writing in a journal about the same trauma, using the same words, expressing the same feelings over and over is a bit like the grandmother in Eudora Welty’s story, A Worn Path. The woman in this story travels the same path every year at the same time, seeking medicine for a child who died years before. No medicine will bring back the grandmother’s dead child. Writing in a journal every day about that same issue with the same words in the same way will probably not bring the relief you seek and may actually do more harm than good.
My own experience is that journal writing works best on an as-needed basis as a life-course correction. If your life is going well, you are happy, and are not obsessing about things in the past, why over analyze yourself?
Let it go and enjoy life as it comes. It is safe to say that some future miseries will visit you again. When they happen, do some expressive writing to deal with them.
When Should You Write?
How soon after a Trauma / Emotional Upheaval?
# Recent trauma / emotional upheaval
# Present trauma / emotional upheaval
# Past trauma / emotional upheaval
# Future trauma / emotional upheaval: Is it helpful to write about the eventual death of a loved one? Or a divorce that you know is coming? Or something else in the future? Sure, why not? It’s free. But in your writing, explore why you are having the feelings and how these feelings relate to other issues in your life. Remember that the point of this writing is how we make sense of a troubling experience or event and how we incorporate that experience into the entire story of our lives.
Some Questions To Ponder Over
- Is This a Good Time in Your Life to Write?
- What’s the Best Time of Day to Write?
- Where Should You Write?
- What Technology Do You Need to Write?
Think about:
# Creating a unique environment.
# Creating a ritual for writing.
And Finally, The Flip-Out Rule
I hereby declare you ready to begin your expressive writing experience.
But before you start, it is important to review The Flip-Out Rule.
If you feel that writing about a particular topic is too much for you to handle, then do not write about it. If you know that you aren’t ready to address a particularly painful topic, then write about something else. When you are ready, then tackle the other topic. If you feel that you will flip out by writing, don’t write.
What could be simpler?
Enjoy your writing.
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