On Discovering the Healing Power of Writing
Writing has always been cathartic for me. My journals have been a place to get my emotions out so that I could sort through them and identify what has been murky inside. That alone is a huge benefit to writing. But most of the time it ended there - once I purged, I would move on. I’ve been guilty of what Allison Fallon calls “rage on the page” - where I just dumped all of my feelings out and let them take control, instead of, what the Stoics would suggest, analyzing my emotions, understanding them, and using this knowledge to move forward more productively. Only recently have I begun to consider the possibilities of writing not just as a clearing-out, but as a process of reconstructing something better. Writing is not just an emotional detox; it is itself a path to healing.
Little did I know that Allison Fallon’s newest book, The Power of Writing It Down, was entering my life at the perfect time in my relationship with writing. I picked it up thinking I might learn some helpful tips to pass on to the authors I work with - I had no idea I was meeting a book that would push my own writing forward.
Writing to Heal
The Power of Writing It Down is a book about writing - but it’s not for writers. Or, rather, it’s not only for writers. It’s for anyone who has experienced heartache and trauma and needs a safe place to process it. Allison writes, “Writing gives us space to work through our biggest questions” - questions like, Why did this happen to me? What made me choose that? Is this a pattern in my life? What is the story I’m telling myself? What do I want my life to look like?
Allison draws on the research of James Pennebaker, who studied the effects of writing on our emotions. It turns out that “writing for as little as twenty minutes a day for as little as four days in a row can cause a measurable improvement in your mood” (Fallon, p. 19). There’s a very good argument for incorporating more writing in our lives as a tool to help us process emotions and find more peace within ourselves. It’s not the only tool - don’t stop seeing your therapist or taking prescribed medications - but it is a powerful and underutilized tool that all of us can start taking more advantage of.
But simply writing isn’t necessarily enough; how you write plays a huge role in whether and how quickly it will help you heal. “Rage on the page” actually wires your brain to have that response when you experience similar triggers in the future. This is a scary realization - especially when you realize that for almost 25 years you’ve been wiring the wrong neural pathways - but it’s also an empowering one. Because if, through writing, you can wire your brain the wrong way, you can also wire it the right way.
Allison provides several prompts and ideas for helping us start to process our emotions and reframe our stories - not sugarcoat them, not look for the proverbial silver lining - but tell our stories in a way that helps us find closure and growth, whatever that looks like. You can also sign up on Ally’s website for her once-a-week prompts, or join her weekly Writer's Club for powerful writing prompts.
Here were my two favorite writing tools Ally provides - ones that I’ve already been using in my journaling practice, and they are changing my life!
The Infinity Prompt
The Infinity Prompt is a set of five questions that you can ask yourself about anything. The brilliance of these questions is that they help us separate our thoughts from our feelings, and understand how our feelings often propel our actions.
- What are the facts of the story? What happened?
- What are my thoughts about those facts? What is the story I am telling myself?
- How did it make me feel? Where did I experience that in my body?
- What did I do because I felt that way?
- What happened next?
These questions turn our attention from ruminating on what someone else did to us back to ourselves. And if you’ve been focusing negative attention on yourself - perhaps berating yourself for a mistake - they help to give you a bit of distance to recognize the story you’re telling yourself (as Brene Brown likes to say) as just that: a story. This is like going through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with yourself.
This process of analyzing your feelings is also a very Stoic practice. Marcus Aurelius often did this in his Meditations. It’s no wonder this process works; Stoicism was the inspiration for cognitive behavioral therapy.
Your Narrator Voice
The other practice Ally’s book introduced me to is tapping into your inner narrator voice. Sometimes we put too much emphasis on what others say we should be thinking/feeling/doing, and we don’t trust our own inner knowledge about what we need. Tapping into your narrator voice helps you take control of your own story and decide what it means.
“The narrator doesn’t change any of the facts of the story. The narrator frames the story. He or she decides what the facts mean, and in doing so, gives the story a destination.” - Allison Fallon, The Power of Writing It Down
Ally writes that your inner narrator is all-knowing. She (or he) understands you and can explain the decisions you make. She knows what everyone else - everyone who tries to impose their story on you - doesn’t know, the truth about the situation.
Ally recommends writing about the situation as if you’re the narrator. This can feel incredibly empowering and help you have faith in your own inner wisdom. It’s a subtle way to affirm your beliefs, convictions, and emotions, rather than entrusting your peace of mind to other people’s fickle judgments.
Learning to Trust the Paper
At the start of my freshman year at my Christian college, the new freshmen were assigned to “alpha groups,” small groups of students, led by an older student, that were designed to help you get to know the campus, make friends, and feel settled in this new phase of life. Great idea. At one of the first meetings, though, we were expected to “tell our life stories,” i.e. our testimonies of how we met Christ. I heard stories from other freshmen who had had this meeting with their alpha groups about how powerful it was, how everyone cried, how people had overcome traumatic events through Christ. Truly beautiful stories, I’m sure. But I dreaded this meeting. Even writing about it now, my heart has picked up its rhythmic pace.
My story was shame. The story I told myself at the time was that I had royally f*cked up in high school by losing my virginity, and none of these good God-fearing Christian kids were going to want to be around me. So when it came around to my turn at that meeting, I chickened out. I told the story of growing up in the church - which was true - but I left out the massive, gaping wound in my heart that had already been festering for a few years. I told the most boring, simplistic version of my story I could, praying it would be over soon. I ran back to my dorm room after the meeting and cried. How dare they demand to know my darkest secrets? I didn’t know those people - I had just gotten there. I couldn’t trust them.
Telling your story - laying out your trauma, no matter what it is - is a risk. Once you put it out there, others bring their own experience and beliefs and judgments to it, and there’s no longer any protection. Disclosure has to be done in a safe environment, and Ally understands this well:
“Imagine a woman telling her abusive husband that she’s been cheating on him, not knowing how he will react. Imagine a daughter telling her mother that her father - her mother’s husband - has been molesting her since she was a baby. If her mom responds by validating her claim and getting her daughter to safety, then disclosure will be helpful for her. If not, it can be tragic.”
But that’s the beauty of paper. It accepts everything you have to tell it without judgment. And in writing, we can give ourselves the understanding and patience that we need from others, through prompts and strategies like the Infinity Prompt and using our Narrator Voice. It gives us a chance to retell our stories in a way that releases us from our inner narratives of shame and literally re-wires our brains to treat ourselves with more grace and love next time.
This is my main takeaway from Ally’s book: Writing offers us freedom and healing from the damaging stories we tell ourselves, and it opens up new possibilities of hope and love and life. Your invitation to experience this possibility is probably sitting on your desk or your nightstand or on your laptop. The question now is: Will you accept it?
