A shared universe › Blog › Writing about what hurts · Español
In November 1983, at a university in Dallas, a few dozen students spent four days in a row writing for fifteen minutes a day, most of them about the most painful thing they had lived through. When they finished they left the paper in a box, with a promise that nobody would link it to their name. That experiment opened a line of research that runs to this day.
The psychologist James Pennebaker, then at Southern Methodist University, divided 46 students into four groups. Some wrote about trivial subjects. The others wrote about a traumatic event in their lives, but in three different ways: setting out only the facts, setting out only what they felt, or combining the two.
At the end of each session, those who had written the facts and the feelings together came out worse: their mood was lower and their blood pressure slightly higher. But over the following six months they went to the university health centre less often. Pennebaker and his colleague Sandra Beall published it in 1986 and presented it cautiously, as a preliminary result.
Pennebaker stayed with the subject for decades, later at the University of Texas at Austin, and other laboratories joined in. In a 1997 review he summed up what had been found so far: fewer visits to the doctor, changes in some markers of the immune system, better grades in students, less absence from work and laid-off professionals who found jobs sooner. The effect appeared in very different people and in several countries, Mexico among them. Speaking aloud into a recorder worked in a similar way to writing.
One striking detail: in one study, some participants wrote on paper that they handed in, and others on a magic slate that was wiped clean when the sheet was lifted. There was no difference. What mattered was not that someone read it, but putting it into words.
To understand this, in the early nineties Pennebaker’s team created a programme that counted what kinds of words each person used. When it analysed six studies it found three clues. The people who were helped most by writing used more words of positive emotion. They used words of negative emotion to a moderate extent, neither too many nor hardly any. And, above all, over the days they used more words such as “because”, “understand” or “realise”. They began with jumbled accounts and ended with a story that made sense.
Other studies point in the same direction. In one, expressing a trauma only through body movement, without words, did not have the effect on health that doing it in writing as well did. In another, from the University of Iowa in 2002, those who spent a month writing about what they thought and felt about a difficult event ended up seeing something good that had come out of it, while those who wrote only about their emotions, with a heavy weight of the negative, reported more symptoms of illness during the study.
Simply letting it all out doesn’t seem to be the key. What helps is gradually putting in order what happened and what it means, something very close to naming what you feel.
Expressive writing has its limits, and knowing them stops you expecting from it what it can’t give:
If you want to give it a go, these are the guidelines most studies have followed:
The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, which promotes this exercise, advises against it if you have lived through a serious trauma very recently or if the subject overwhelms you. If you notice yourself sinking while you write, stop. You can come back another day or choose something less painful.
And if you write the same thing every day, with the same questions that lead nowhere, you may be closer to going over the same thing again and again than to putting it in order. Writing is no substitute for talking to someone, or for treatment when it is needed. If what you carry inside won’t let you live, share it with someone who can help. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
What you write for yourself stays in the notebook. If, at the end, a sentence turns up that sums it up, you can light it on a star with “What weighs on me”. Then someone will read it and leave you a line of comfort.