Writing to heal is one of the most frequent advice as a tool to help with anxiety and PTSD. It can be one of the most powerful tools, but it can also play against you.
My apartment is small, but filled with notebooks. They’re hefty and bulky, as I always choose hardcovers, and, yes, a part of me wants to let them go, but I can’t. Those pages hold much of the healing I’ve done over the past five years. Some of them have wounds that have healed for much longer.
There’s one that I don’t dare open, and I bet it will remain closed for years to come.
Those notebooks and countless files on my PC are part of my journey of writing to heal. It has many terms: journaling, diary writing, and expressive writing. No matter how you call it, it’s one of the most intimate ways I’ve dealt with trauma, anxiety, and PTSD.
In fact, I can say that it goes back longer than five years. For years, all I’ve known is to write about my issues.
I can’t say I know why. It just came to me, and for years, writing has worked as a release valve for many things I felt and experienced. This stream-of-consciousness exercise helped me release much of what I had locked up, but I never did it with guidance.
Now that I look back at it, I’ve taken up writing to heal on and off, for years. It’s only until last year that I took it up as part of the tools that helped my healing process. Before that, the practice of writing wasn’t organized. In fact, I didn’t even know I was writing to heal.
The practice of writing to heal has many misconceptions
Over all these years as a writer, many people have told me: «I feel like I want to write, but I don’t know what to write about. Plus, no one will read it.»
That’s what most people get wrong about writing to heal. They either believe that you must do so to get published or that no one will read it.
The reality is that writing to heal has nothing (or mostly nothing) to do with others reading it. Even the work you intend to publish might have a different true purpose.
I started writing my first novel (unpublished, as of yet, and I’ll keep it that way) when I was 14. I finished it when I was 17, and it was only twenty years later that I understood that most of it was an exercise in healing.
You can do this too!
Throughout most of my life, I’ve turned to some form of writing as a way to vent out my issues. After all, writing is the most intimate form of self-communication you can have.
Writing is a more powerful tool than other forms of self-expression because it takes hard work. It’s an effort you put into writing every word and leaving it in its final form.
But, back in those teenage years, I wasn’t writing to heal, or at least, I wasn’t voluntarily doing so. It came naturally. I had the urge to do so. If you have that urge, listen to it.
The urge to write is a clear sign that we want to let stuff out and might not have the courage to tell others. Not only that, but it will endure the test of time. That’s why writing is so powerful.
I’ve revisited some of the notebooks I’ve written over the years, which blew me away. It’s a photograph of the past. It tells me how much I’ve changed, and how the struggles have evolved or disappeared altogether.
How I used writing to heal as a tool to recognize trauma
PTSD is no friend of mine, but we’ve learned to get along. The weird thing is that it can come when you least expect it. In my case, it came years after my traumatic experience, and I wasn’t aware of it.
Trauma triggered my anxiety four years after the lightning strike. I thought I had learned to live with the accident’s ramifications, but I hadn’t. Often, it happened right after exercises, strenuous workout sessions, or hockey matches.
The great thing about a gym is that very rarely do the people there care about you. In those rooms of vanity and giant mirrors, ironically, it’s easy to go unnoticed.
So, I placed a mat in the far corner of the gym and sat down alone with my thoughts. The only point of my sitting in the corner was to avoid the embarrassment of a full-blown panic attack in public.
When I told my therapist about these attacks, she suggested writing to heal them. At first, I found the idea hard to grasp.
How would I sit down and write about the heaving sensation in my chest? The tingling in my legs, lack of balance, vertigo, and tinnitus were so intense that I couldn’t focus.
My therapist wanted me to write about it then and there? It made no sense.
«Let’s give the trauma space. Let’s recognize it», my therapist said. It made sense, though I was still skeptical.
Your phone is a great tool
We live in interesting times, many people have said. There’s too much dopamine: social media, phones, content platforms, and the list goes on. Our technology has advanced so much that we can’t avoid it: we’re always connected.
In most cases, this excess of information and connectivity destroys our mental health. Our brains never rest, and they have to, but in the case of those panic attacks, this technology was ideal.
Part of my exercise in writing to heal was to jot down three things:
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Where my attack was happening
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What I was feeling in my body
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What I was thinking
I wrote them all down on a Google document, which saved them on the cloud. Then I’d send them to my therapist, and we’d discuss the findings during our sessions. After I became much more adept at detecting them, I no longer had to send her the updates. Instead, I wrote down these three things and stored them for a later exercise.
This exercise, small in dimension but massive in its effects, was the first use of writing to heal that I had found. In it, technology played a vital part.
Writing to heal as a daily exercise
Facing the worst situation of my life was not easy. It still isn’t, but it’s something that I had to do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to overcome most of my mental health challenges.
I accomplished this through intense therapy sessions. There’s no replacement for professional help. As the sessions grew farther apart, writing took an essential role.
Between sessions, my therapist and I embraced writing to heal as an activity. Now, it was no longer about writing down what was happening during a panic attack. Instead, I also wrote about those nuanced moments when intrusive thoughts were now more subtle.
Therapy made me realize that most of the time, I was in a fight-or-flight mode. My mind raced with those intrusive thoughts more often than I wanted to admit. Writing to heal made me hold myself accountable by recognizing those moments.
Not only that, the daily practice of writing helped me visualize the moments in which panic set in. Along with the tools I’ve learned in therapy, writing to heal has helped me better understand myself.
What’s fascinating is that writing to heal has grown as a tendency in the past five years. Yet, scientists have known the positive effects it has on mental health for years.
This practice has been around for decades
Psychology professor James Pennebaker noted the powerful effects of writing in 1986. He had a small group of his students write for 15 minutes a day about their most traumatic experiences. As BBC tells us, the impact was big.
They were told to let go and to include their deepest thoughts, even if they had never shared these thoughts before. Four days running, they did the same thing. It wasn’t easy. Pennebaker told me that roughly one in 20 students would end up crying, but when asked whether they wanted to continue, they always did. Meanwhile, a control group spent the same number of sessions writing a description of something neutral, such as a tree or their dorm room.
In 2002, the American Psychological Association published «Writing to heal». It explained how writing was no stranger to therapy. It explains that writing about emotions could boost immunity in patients with life-threatening conditions.
These findings blew me away. As I researched for this article, the idea that writing to heal was so powerful lingered in my head. After all, I was a first-hand witness of its benefits.
The deep research surrounding it gave me a sense of confidence. I had found a healthy way of dealing with my anxiety and PTSD. It felt too good to be true. So, that’s where I grew cautious, even in writing this article.
Writing to heal isn’t perfect
Since my accident in 2018 and more so in the last year, I’ve written my way through through a fair share of problems. Writing has helped me heal, and there’s plenty of evidence that it helps.
However, like I said at the beginning, we live at a hectic pace. We need everything now and fast, and we behave the same way with mental health.
We now see it in a reductionist approach (my wife’s term, which I love). So, we expect to improve with one method, one exercise, or even one appointment. Instagram posts say there are «three steps to curing anxiety.»
The harsh reality is that mental health takes time to heal, and so these quick fixes can lead to frustration. In some cases, even make us feel worse. So, as much as I love this practice, writing alone won’t heal all our problems.
In fact, writing to heal becomes a burden when you expect it to heal everything. Instead, we should focus on an integral approach to improving our mental health. Once we do that, we’ll see we should embrace writing to heal.