The Writing Paradox: How Writing about Hurts Can Actually Heal
We were going to Hilton Head Island for vacation, and my mom said I had to have a bathing suit, even though I had refused to go swimming for years. When I tried on that bathing suit, something inside of me—something that was already fragile—snapped. I had never been comfortable with my body or myself, and as I entered my teenage years my self-consciousness heightened and my self esteem lowered. This is the night my journey into self hatred began to manifest itself in less subtle ways.
Before this night, much had happened in a short period of time, and I had no idea how to handle the emotions I felt: My friend Emile was sick and had furiously rejected my attempt to help her; my “adopted mom,” Michelle, had moved eight hours away; and I had begun to realize how dysfunctional my family was. I was devastated that Emile was angry with me and that she was hurting, I was lost without Michelle’s advice, and I was stripped of any illusion that my parents had a healthy relationship—or that I had a relationship at all with my dad.
After “the bathing suit incident,” Michelle encouraged me to write to her positive qualities about myself; it was over a thousand words of raw, fourteen year old angst and frustration about the fact that I couldn't seem to find any good qualities in myself. I emailed my venting to Michelle, who undoubtedly regretted having asked me to do this because I hadn’t written anything positive; and I felt better for having released all of those thoughts to someone other than myself. Without realizing it, Michelle had made me aware of this realm of ultimate diary-writing where I was able to empty all the toxic thoughts from my overstuffed brain—and do it quickly. While writing made me aware of the brokenness in my life and caused me a lot of pain, I realized I needed it. As Jamaica Kincaid wrote in My Brother, “I became a writer out of desperation” (qtd. in Zimmermann 13).
Beginning high school, my writing was oriented towards my struggles with anxiety, depression, and an eating disorder that had been building through the years; I was drowning in emotional stress and didn’t see any means of floating besides writing. I chose writing over sleeping, eating, and doing homework. Four years later, I’m still dealing with the struggles that became evident during my freshman year of high school, and I’m still writing. I write because I have to; if I didn't write, I would self-destruct—it’s simple as that. I continually learn through the act of putting my thoughts and experiences on paper that life is ugly and beautiful, that I am weak and strong—and that life is a bundle of paradoxes. I’m thankful I discovered writing when I did; I have a head start in dealing with my demons, and I’ve realized early on the place that writing has to have in my life in order for me to stay sane.
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah does exactly what I hope to do one day with my experiences: he creates an inspiring and emotionally charged memoir. Though Beah’s and my stories are almost as different as they can be (for example, I was never a child soldier in Sierra Leone), I saw myself over and over again in his descriptions of avoiding thinking as a coping mechanism. In Writing to Heal the Soul, Susan Zimmermann writes that she had “sidestepped [her] sorrow, not knowing how to move through it,” but that using writing to move through her pain had lead her into a place of healing (17). This was Ishmael Beah’s process. When he went to New York to meet other children facing similar situations as he had, Beah participated in long discussions about “solutions to the problems facing children in [their] various countries.” He says, “[it] seemed we were transforming our sufferings as we talked about ways to solve their causes and let them be known to the world” (Beah 148-149). That phrase, “transforming our sufferings,” seems to be an apt description of the effect writing our stories can have. Beah went through a major transformation from carefree, innocent child to murderous, robotic boy solider—and then to courageous, wise young man. I, too, have gone through a transformation: from carefree, innocent child, like Beah, to terrified and self-destructive teenager, to honest and determined young woman. In an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, Beah says that he wanted people to know through his book that “human beings are capable of true evil and equally capable of regaining [their] humanity.” He shares how he tried to write as he felt back then when he was twelve years old. Beah took himself back to the most traumatic experiences of his life, and described them in detail—and that is precisely why his memoir is so affective for his audience and for him. Beah had stumbled upon healing through writing. He recognizes that by writing, he “transformed [his] experiences into something positive.” He had shared with others what had happened to him—and to many other children across the world— in order to move on from those experiences into a new life, and also to make the world aware of what was going on in other countries to innocent children; Beah used his memoir to testify to the injustice committed against him, and so have I.
Shoshana Felman, in her book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, defines testifying as a “vow to tell, [a] promise [to] produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth” (Felman and Laub 5). Using writing as testimony gives it a power that a simple diary entry doesn’t possess. The purpose of testimony is to deal in a public way with experiences in order to heal the person sharing as well as to teach the audience. In Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, Louise DeSalvo says:
Scores of other writers…write about what they have lived through—experiences that might not be commonly known—to heal themselves. But they also write to help heal a culture that, if it is to become moral, ethical, and spiritual, must recognize what these writers have observed, experienced, and witnessed. All are writing to right a human wrong—one that affected them, surely, but one that affects others, too. Writing testimony, to be sure, means that we tell our stories. But it also means that we no longer allow ourselves to be silenced or allow others to speak for our experience. (216)
Testifying to our experiences has a freeing effect on us as well as the people who hear the testimonies. Eyes and minds are opened as a result of the sharing, and the sharer feels more at peace with himself and his thoughts. DeSalvo believes that “[writing] to heal, then, and making that writing public…is the most important emotional, psychological, artistic, and political project of our time” (216). Therapists seem to agree with DeSalvo, because more and more frequently, they are encouraging their clients to tell their traumatic stories to several people, claiming that it would hasten the disappearance of symptoms like anxiety that are connected to their experiences (Felman and Laub 26). Every time I share my story with others, I feel less controlled by the self-deprecating thoughts that haunt me: I’m “diffusing [their] power over [me]” (DeSalvo 22).
Dr. James Pennebaker, in his book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, discusses at length the studies he performed on college students to prove that writing about traumatic experiences in a detailed and emotional way improves psychological and physical health. He found that students who wrote in this way consequently went to the on-campus clinic fifty percent fewer times than they did before the study. Pennebaker links this seeming increase in health to the decrease of inhibition that occurs when people write and/or talk about their experiences effectively. This inhibition Pennebaker writes about is when “people must consciously restrain, hold back, or in some exert effort to not think, feel, or behave,” (9) and this, according to Pennebaker’s studies, has deleterious effects on everyone who does it: inhibition is like stress in that it “gradually undermines the body’s defenses” (2).
Pennebaker discovered through his studies that people who didn’t talk about their “major life stressors” had “recurrent unwanted thoughts, higher levels of anxiety and depression, insomnia, and a variety of health problems” (25). In fact, not writing or talking about greatly traumatic experiences, or “not [translating] the event into language” is linked to “ruminations, dreams, and associated thought disturbances” as well as some psychological disorders like multiple personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (9). Writing and talking about these events is crucial in the healing process because “the mind torments itself by thinking about unresolved and confusing issues.” Writing is a preventative tool against this torment because it “promotes self-understanding” (93).
Pennebaker believes that sharing rather than inhibiting traumas is a “natural human response” that “can influence our basic values, our daily thinking patterns, and feelings about ourselves” (27, 2). In writing or talking about traumas, people free their minds to think about other things and simultaneously begin to understand what happened to them from a different perspective. Pennebaker also found that writing about these events allows for an “organization to the event and a summarizing of it” (97).
Sharing our experiences after writing them is important; because not sharing them, “…keeping [them] locked away where no one can read [them,] repeats the lethal pattern of silencing and tyranny and shame that so often accompanies trauma” (DeSalvo 209). If writing is to be a truly freeing tool, it shouldn’t be kept only to ourselves. Sharing helps us to remember that we are not alone in our struggles and pains. I have met several people who have been through similar situations as I have because I shared my experiences with them. People who have experienced horrible things often feel alienated from the people who haven’t; and in sharing their experiences, they enable others to understand what has happened, which eliminates the feeling of aloneness and may simultaneously provide the motivation someone else needs to share his story.
The Ethiopian perspective of illness is quite different from the American perspective of illness. DeSalvo focuses on how the people of Ethiopia see illnesses as opportunities for an “internal spiritual and healing journey” (181). John L. Coulehan says, “Illness and disability… entail our sustaining gigantic losses: of meaning, of wholeness, or certainty, of relationships, of freedom, of control” (qtd. in DeSalvo 181). This, of course, is true both for Ethiopian and American people; but the Ethiopians use their illnesses as a tool to learn instead of as a curse or as a nuisance slowing them down. Instead of their illness setting them apart from healthy people, it becomes a bond that brings sick and healthy people together. In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur W. Frank writes that the “ill, and all those who suffer, can also be healers. Their injuries become the source of the potency of their stories” (xii).
It may be tempting to think that just writing at all will be a helpful experience, but Pennebaker’s studies demonstrate that only writing in a way that describes in detail an experience as well as the writer’s emotions towards that event is healing. Writing about “superficial” things such as the color of one’s shoes is not helpful in any way, and writing only about emotions towards events or only about the events themselves may actually be harmful because it leaves the writer in a mental place to focus on the event instead of work through it (37). DeSalvo says, “… only writing that describes traumatic events and our deepest thoughts and feelings about them, past and present, is linked with improved immune function, improved emotional and physical health, and behavioral changes indicating that we feel able to act on our own behalf” (25).
I’m not sure that I would be in college—or, at least not in college and doing well—if I had not discovered writing four years ago. I would not be able to understand why I struggle with the things I do or how to begin healing from them if I hadn’t poured myself on paper and began to see my challenges in a less insurmountable way. Through writing I have learned that I am a person worthy of love from others and myself, that I am capable of overcoming my struggles, and that I am strong.
