As I embark on a writing practice, I aim to allocate at least 10 minutes per day towards stream-of-consciousness writing, without any censorship or judgment. To enhance my sense of grounding, I will incorporate body awareness into my practice at times. In a previous article, I highlighted seven benefits of a writing practice. However, during my research, I have discovered an even more comprehensive list, incorporating the previously mentioned benefits, and adding an additional 23. While these sentiments about the benefits of a writing practice may have been expressed before in literature such as “The Artist’s Way”, I feel compelled to reiterate them. Before presenting the full list of 30 benefits, I would like to delve into three of them in greater detail.
1. Writing Practice Connects Us to Our Innate Healing Wisdom
“Unleash Your Inner Healer with a Writing Practice! Writing can be a magical tool to tap into our own inner wisdom and unleash the healing power within us. Imagine having a friend who always has answers to your deepest questions, wants to make sense of your life, and mends things that were broken long ago. Well, that friend is actually a part of you, waiting to be discovered. By simply engaging in a writing practice, where you let your thoughts flow freely without judgment, you can tap into this healing force. Trust us, it’s way more therapeutic than you think! Think of it as your own personal therapy session, where you connect with the wisest part of yourself. So grab a pen and paper and let the healing begin!”
2. Creative Writing May Help to Reconsolidate Memories
Have you ever had a memory pop up in your mind and felt like you’re reliving it all over again? That’s because every time we bring a memory to the surface, we experience it differently, with new perspectives and insights.
Writing about those memories can take our recollection to a whole new level. When we put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), we activate multiple parts of our brain and consciousness, allowing us to interact with the memory in a fresh way. This is especially beneficial for those with PTSD, as writing about memories can help activate the higher parts of the mind and shift how we perceive and feel about them.
By engaging in creative writing practice, we open the door to our imagination and creativity, inviting them to join forces with our memories. This unique interaction can alter the way we respond to memories in the future. While re-consolidating traumatic memories can be a challenging task, research suggests that our brains have the capacity to do so with the right approach.
Back in 2000, a study in Nature reported on the targeting of a phase of memory known as reconsolidation. Dr. Daniela Schiller explains that this phase is activated every time you remember something, and it’s the act of remembering that triggers the phase. In a recent Nature study, Schiller and her team of researchers found that fearful memories can be rewritten, but not erased forever. Unlike in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the content of the memories isn’t erased, but instead the emotional response is changed.
There are various therapies that address the reconsolidation of painful memories, such as EMDR. EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, like buzzers or tapping hands, that go back and forth from right to left in an even rhythm. This approach is also found in drumming practices. Experimenting with a writing practice while using bilateral stimulation and rhythm may improve the reconsolidation of memories that takes place during the writing process. While exploring therapeutic tools during writing is worth considering, it’s important to observe titration and approach the core of the memory slowly and carefully over time.
3. Writing Practice is Efficient; It Can Happen Anywhere and in Brief Periods of Time
Another benefit of writing practice for healing is its efficiency. As a form of writing, it’s a lot easier than writing research articles. For example, I can spend as little as 10 minutes writing, even while waiting for something like in a waiting room, or right before going to bed, and in that 10 minutes it’s possible for me to allow a whole bunch of my psyche to stream through onto the page. It’s actually a very efficient process; it can be done anywhere and it can be done in really brief amounts of time with great effects. My personal experience is that during these brief moments a flow can be started that can bring forth a lot of healing experiences, insights and solutions, certainly a lot more than I expected.
In addition to the three benefits, I have identified 27 additional potential benefits. I have consolidated all 30 into a list below:
30 Ways a Writing Practice Can Help Trauma Recovery
A writing practice enables me to…
Cultivate My Relationship with My Self
- Tap into my own Innate Healing Wisdom; to tap into my hidden, innate healing capacities.
- Create more connection between myself now and parts of my past that became fragmented. To create more self-connection and less fragmentation.
- Get in touch and build relationships with various aspects of my Self. Strengthen Sense of Self — identity, essence, personality, preferences and opinions. To repair the internal architecture of Self.
- Give hidden parts of myself a voice.Resurrect the invisible, the forgotten, and the silenced.
- Connect with resources from my past such as positive memories, moments in which I felt strong, things and people who were support figures in my life. Give me a more resourced life by helping me to feel my strengths more deeply and fully.
- Cultivate a loving attitude towards my self — both my past and present self, to repair the kinds of negative attitudes I learned to have towards myself.
- Making time to be selfish with my writing — writing for myself — and combats codependency and caretaking behaviors.
- The act of maintaining a writing practice for yourself is a radical and powerful form of self-care.
Emotional Healing
9. Writing Practice can be a safe time and space to allow emotional release and expression, which frees up energy.
10. This can begin to break up the stagnation of stuck emotions, to help create more movement and maybe the ability to eventually let go and move on to some degree.
11. Teaches me to respect and derepress my feelings, desires, thoughts and allow them to expand and be visible. To bring up repressed emotions and allow them to express themselves. To not trivialize but to receive. To keep speaking my story in many different experimental ways without censorship or any time limit; without any limit on how many times it needs to be told or how many ways it needs to be told. Writing practice allows the things inside me to emerge and to have their own unique way of living and existing in the world. The tender and forgotten and suppressed things in us deserve this; they deserve a voice.
12. Writing practice teaches me to be assertive, persistent and courageous with myself-expression, to not stand down, even in a world that wants me to forget what is, in fact, most urgent in me.
13. Over time, may lead to more feelings of reconciliation and forgiveness (and may not, which is OK).
Progress
14. A writing practice can enable me to engage an efficient way to make headway in my healing, accelerating the recovery process.
15. To experience Post Traumatic Growth; to make destruction into something creative and positive.
16. Engaging in creativity catalyzes recovery
Time
17. As I elucidated above, writing practice may assist me to reconsolidate memories which can result in giving me new ways to feel about my past. This includes both non-traumatic and traumatic memories.
18. Link together disrupted shattered times — disconnected periods of my life — to make Time feel more coherent and more whole.
19. Gain deeper understandings of past events by bringing in new ways of thinking that I did not have at the time. Perhaps gain insights that help me to make sense of what happened.
Writing Together
20. If I begin sharing some of my writing, this could help heal from social isolation by communicating with others about my pain and experience.
21. Taking the writing practice process into a group setting, for example in a writing practice workshop, could help me find more people to heal with, more possibilities to experience co-regulation. Sharing the writing that comes out of writing practice could enable me to reach other people who need to hear my words. Our words can inspire in others more courage to save themselves — the many selves in themselves — in numerous ways. And vice versa, creating more richness in the healing process.
Solve Things
22. Organize thinking about problems and decisions and come up with creative solutions.
23. Identify the felt sense of when something feels “right,” a felt sense lost a long time ago but that resurfaces in certain times and places.
24. Find out what my truth really is with regards to something. To discard other people’s thoughts and judgments and values and goals and pressures from my psyche. To know that my own experience is more important than what they say or think.
25. To more actively resolve unresolved issues so that the energy can be freed up to apply to the present.
26. Organize my thoughts better, help repair aspects of my cognition that were damaged.
27. Help me to engage my imagination for creating my future
Grounding
28. Helps to concertize what has been nebulous, giving language to things that are without language. A kind of grounding.
29. Helps me create containers for experience. For example, to define the edge where the pain ends outside of which there is no pain, or to define the moment when I was not in danger anymore after which I was safe from that one threat, or to define the moment the abuser stopped or left and the next moment when I was not being harmed anymore.
Hope
30. Writing practice can save us. Writing practice can save lives.
