Bibliotherapy: Writing Personal Essays to Promote Healing (pt. 2)
Writing About a Disturbing Experience: The Process and the Effects
“I have seen that broken stories are also broken lives” (Anderson 59)
Writing about an unresolved emotional experience benefits writers by allowing them to analyze and understand the experience's effects on them, and to empower themselves by choosing how to react to the experience.
Confronting the Experience
Writers must overcome both cultural taboos and social stigmas to confront their experiences. For example, the American culture often stigmatizes those who breach the subject of grief, which many Americans consider “insensitive and self-centered” (Bosticco and Thompson 258). This aspect of our culture worsens emotional damage by encouraging emotional inhibition, as do social stigmas in writing. According to sociologist Erving Goffman, stigmas are personality traits-particularly undesirable attributes-that cause society to devalue the individual (Anderson 74). Stigmas thus create an additional conflict between the need to share an experience and the need to maintain a socially acceptable reputation.
For example, in his essay “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages that Heal,” Charles Anderson analyzes an essay by Patty McGady in which McGady addresses her experiences with drug addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness. By writing about these subjects, McGady confronts the social stigmas associated with them, which she worried would cause her readers to discredit her. Yet although she resisted writing about these experiences because she found them painful and difficult, McGady acknowledged wanting to write about them every time she started writing. She resolves this conflict by addressing her stigmatizing traits but then focusing on the socially acceptable discourse of therapy. Writing and revising the essay helped her regain control over her life, an effect Anderson calls the discovery of “a subjectivity capable of healing itself by ordering, transforming, and finally overcoming stigma” (Anderson 77).
Understanding Identity
Writing about an emotional experience allows writers to understand it by requiring them to organize and then synthesize information into a clear, coherent narrative so their readers can understand it. Doing so eliminates the physiological effort needed to suppress the memory and allows the individual to store and/or forget the memory more efficiently (Pennebaker 12).
Organizing an experience into a simplified narrative allows writers to then find patterns in their thought processes, behaviors, and overall identity. In his essay, “Writing about Suicide,” Jeffrey Berman discusses a “Literary Suicide” graduate course in which he asked students to write anonymous diary entries. The option of anonymity allowed the students to disclose personal information without feeling coerced. One student, Jonathan Schiff, revisited his entries months later and noted they gave him “a basic awareness of how [his] mind operates” (qtd. in Berman 302). He also realized he would not remember trivial events had they not influenced “the workings of [his] unconscious mind” (qtd. in Berman 303), which inspired him to pay attention to his memories.
In her essay "Pathography and Enabling Myths: The Process of Healing," Anne Hunsaker Hawkins discusses how pathography-writing about diseases-can help writers recover their sense of identity when illness threatens both their physical existence and their sense of identity (Hawkins 241). Emily Nye explored this aspect of pathographies in a case study that became the topic of her essay “‘The More I Tell My Story’: Writing as Healing in an HIV/AIDS Community.” In this essay, Nye describes how she worked with members of a writing group at an AIDS center to analyze how writing about their disease affected them (386). Nye organized the concepts writers wrote about and discovered patterns that indicated what most concerned group members, such as understanding their lives, expressing wishes and regrets, and advising readers (400).
Writing about their experiences allowed group members to find meaning in their lives. Most stories included a "turning point" in which writers identified or created meanings in their lives (Nye 403). For example, one member found new meaning by meditating and studying as a monk, which gave his life meaning by introducing a lifestyle that improved his mental state. Another member found new meaning by fulfilling his lifelong wish to become a DJ; by doing so, he boosted his self-esteem by achieving a significant long-term goal and contributing to society. A third member's turning point came when he met a woman who stayed with him despite his diagnosis, which showed him that members of society still valued and supported him. Through describing and analyzing their experiences with AIDS, the group members found new meanings that gave their lives a sense of purpose.
Nye encouraged the members to analyze how and why the experience changed their thoughts, emotions, and behavior by giving them a summary of her findings after the study and asking for their feedback. Whereas analyzing the traumatic experience allowed them to understand how the experience affected their lives, analyzing how the writing and sharing process affected them allowed the group members to understand their identities in general.
One writer explained that people try to avoid "that closeness stuff" because they don't want others to know about their own negative feelings and because they don't think they deserve support (qtd. in Nye 410). Another stated, "The more I tell my story [...] the less the bad stuff has power over me. It changes how I look at the disease. As I change the story, I change myself" (qtd. in Nye 409). These statements show how the writers discovered new aspects of their identities by reflecting on how and why both their experience with the disease and writing about it influenced them.
Empowering the Writer
Writers who recognize and examine the experiences’ effects on them gain control through the writing process by choosing what to think, feel, and do about the experience. For example, when Berman asked his students at the end of the semester if writing about emotional experiences allowed them to “understand those conflicts better and find constructive ways of dealing with them,” fourteen out of the sixteen students agreed (Berman 307). According to Hawkins, writing pathographies gives writers a sense of control over what she calls "the drastic interruption of a life of meaning and purpose by an illness that often seems arbitrary, cruel, and senseless" (224).
Pennebaker states that part of the distress caused by unresolved emotional experiences comes not only from the events themselves but also from the individual's emotional reactions to the events (8). Thus, writers who recognize and examine the experiences’ effects on them gain control over these effects by choosing what to think, feel, and do. For example, when Berman asked his students at the end of the semester if writing about emotional experiences allowed them to “understand those conflicts better and find constructive ways of dealing with them,” fourteen out of the sixteen students agreed (Berman 307). According to Hawkins, writing pathographies gives writers a sense of control over what she calls "the drastic interruption of a life of meaning and purpose by an illness that often seems arbitrary, cruel, and senseless" (224).
Individuals who experience complex events may benefit more from writing about their experience than individuals who experience less complex events. Complex events require more effort to examine and organize because they affect multiple aspects of an individual's life; Pennebaker e gives the example of how being left by a lover can affect our relationships, finances, self-perceived identity, and daily routines (11).
Physical Effects of the Writing Process
James W. Pennebaker published an article in The Journal of Literature and Medicine titled "Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative" in which he discusses studies he and his colleagues did to examine the benefits produced by writing about emotional experiences. According to Pennebaker, suppressing important emotional experiences drains energy, prevents the individual from exercising cognitive processing and thus prevents understanding, and isolates the individual from others by creating a disconnect in communication and understanding (15). Addressing these emotional experiences, therefore, produces not only mental benefits but also social and physical ones as well.
In their first experiment, Pennebaker and his colleagues asked participants to write for fifteen minutes a day for four days. Participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. While the investigator told members the control group to write about non-emotional topics, the investigator told members of the experimental group to write their "deepest thoughts and feelings" about the most traumatic experience of their lives (qtd. in Pennebaker 4). The investigator also suggested that the latter connect their topics to the participants' relationships with family members, lovers, and friends; to their past, present, or future; or to who they were, who they wanted to be, or who they were at the time (Pennebaker 4). This focus encouraged the participants not only to describe and analyze their experiences but also to reflect upon how those experiences influenced their identity and the identities of others.
When Pennebaker and his colleagues reviewed the results, they found that most participants considered the experience "extremely valuable and meaningful," and 98 percent of the experimental participants said that "if given the choice, they would participate in the study again" (4). In addition, students who often submitted weak academic essays wrote coherent, grammatically correct essays about their personal experiences (Pennebaker 5). This may suggest that allowing students to write about personal topics gives them an additional incentive to engages themselves in their writing and improve their writing skills.
Pennebaker and his colleagues also recorded the participants' visits to the university health center for several months before and after the experiment to observe how writing about traumatic experiences affected the participants' health. They found that experimental participants' doctor visit rates fell "drastically" compared to the control participants (Pennebaker 5).
In addition to the results of his experiments, Pennebaker also cites the results of studies done by scientists around the world that varied from one to five days and from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes per session (7). The studies' writing topics sometimes varied too; some participants wrote about their thoughts and feelings about coming to college, about the experience of getting laid off, or about an imaginary (indirect) trauma (Pennebaker 7). The participants in each study, however, explored their emotions and thoughts regardless of the topic.
These studies link writing to improved mental, emotional, and physical health, including improved immune function including t-helper cell growth and antibody response (Pennebaker 16), reduced pain and medication use among arthritis sufferers, improvements in asthmatics' lung function markers, and lower levels of depression in students taking exams; these writing benefits span across a variety of professions, social classes, and racial/ethnic groups (Pennebaker 5).
Writing about traumatic experiences did distress participants for several hours after writing; however, participants reported feeling "as happy as or happier than" control participants at least two weeks after the study (Pennebaker 6). The better participants felt before writing, the worse they felt afterward and vice versa; for example, writing about these topics immediately improved the moods of "highly distressed" participants (Pennebaker 6). Another study reported that hostile and suspicious individuals benefited more from writing than individuals who lacked these traits (Pennebaker 6).
One study found that university staff members who write about emotional experiences miss fewer days than those who do not (Pennebaker 16). I experienced this effect during my first semester of graduate school. Over the summer, I experienced what I consider a significant emotional event that produced several of the negative emotions and behaviors Bosticco and Thompson identify in their essay as symptoms of grief. Because I keep a diary, I continually wrote about the experience before, during, and after it occurred.
Although I still experience some of the negative effects, I noticed how writing about the experience affected me by reducing the frequency and intensity of negative emotions. Most importantly, I have not missed a graduate class or a class that I teach, whereas in previous semesters, I missed between one and two weeks of classes due to upper respiratory infections, ear infections, conjunctivitis, and the seasonal flu. I need to make sure I take into account other factors that influence my health, though.
During his studies, Pennebaker found that writing benefitted participants specifically because it requires cognitive processing. He points out that if writing about emotional experiences benefits participants because it allows self-expression, then other forms of self-expression should produce the same benefits. However, research done on this topic suggests that only forms of self-expression that require cognitive processing produce benefits (Pennebaker 8). Pennebaker and his colleagues did a study in which participants either (1) expressed a traumatic experience by using movement, (2) expressed an experience by using movement and then writing about it, or (3) exercised ten minutes per day for three days (Pennebaker 8). The groups who used movement to express themselves reported feeling happier after the study, but only the group that wrote about the experience showed "significant improvements in physical health and grade point average," what Pennebaker calls "long-term physiological changes" (8).
Both Pennebaker's studies and dozens of other studies from researchers around the world provide evidence that writing about emotional experiences produces measurable, empirical improvements in mental and physical health. Those benefits do come with minor disadvantages, such as feeling upset directly after writing, but the benefits appear to outweigh the costs. Pennebaker also explains why writing benefits individuals; it requires cognitive processing.
The Effects of Sharing the Experience
"…Silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one,
and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion” (Levi 88-89)
Writing about emotional experiences allows individuals to understand and resolve experiences, but sharing their work to others further benefits writers. For example, sharing anonymous diary entries and hearing their classmates’ entries affected Berman’s students in three ways: it engaged them more, boosted their confidence, and caused them to empathize more with others.
Hearing from Others
When writers share their experiences, whether anonymous or not, they influence their audience in two ways: they boost the audience’s confidence and cause the audience to develop empathy toward others.
Hearing how other people react to emotional experiences gives the audience the confidence to risk writing about more personal experiences. For example, almost all of Berman’s students gave him permission to read their anonymous entries aloud. They did so to see their classmates’ reactions to their experiences while protected by anonymity. When Berman read the anonymous entries aloud, the students showed interest in and identified with the entries, which them realize others shared their experiences. This collaborative trust, which Berman calls “distanced intimacy,” gave students the confidence to examine more personal experiences (Berman 294).
As the class continued, this distanced intimacy developed into empathy. In his fifth diary entry, Schiff explains how hearing other classmates’ stories makes him feel as though he vicariously experiences the events. As a result, whenever he sees his classmates, he feels concern for them even though he does not know which entry was theirs (Berman 303). This anecdote limits the extent of the audience’s concern to the classmates, however, so further studies should be done to determine whether or not sharing diary entries causes students to extend this concern, intentionally or unconsciously, to other members of society.
Sharing Experiences
In his book The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi argued that communication is not only always possible but unavoidable because we are biologically (and thus socially) programmed to communicate, particularly through language" (Levi 88-89). Many writers recognize their need to communicate long before they share their stories.
For example, Nye's AIDs/HIV writing group members explicitly expressed wanting to be acknowledged (Nye 406), a social act that Hawkins claims prevents isolation by fulfilling the writer’s need to communicate "a painful, disorienting, and isolating experience" with others (224). Sharing their experiences not only allowed group members to see their audience recognizing and understanding their words but also to educate others. One group member explicitly stated that he wanted to "save one life;" teaching others about the disease gave the writers a sense of control and a way to "fight back," promoted compassion, and strengthened the community (Nye 405-406).
Writers share their experiences to connect with others, thus fulfilling the need for social interaction. Schiff wrote that seeing his classmates’ interest in his entry made him feel much less ambivalent about attending class (Berman 302). Writers also share their experiences to get feedback, and the feedback often increases the writer’s sense of self-esteem and confidence. In fact, Bosticco and Thompson noted that feedback acknowledging the writer’s emotions makes the writer feel valued (Bosticco and Thompson 260).
Berman’s students gained confidence in their writing through seeing and hearing their classmates react to their entries. For example, Schiff wrote in his sixth diary entry that it moved him to see his classmates listen and respond to his entry about his father’s suicide, a reaction that acknowledged the significance of the event and validated his reaction to it. Previously, Schiff had assumed nobody could understand his problems, and he even stated that had he not seen his classmates’ sympathy toward his entry, he would not have felt confident enough to further explore and analyze his father’s suicide and how the experience affected Schiff (Berman 302).
The Significance of Sharing Experiences
Sharing experiences benefits both the writers and their audience. It creates trust between writer and audience, which both triggers empathy and strengthens social ties. Sharing experiences also boosts the writer's self-esteem and the audience members' confidence to explore their own lives. While writing about emotional experiences benefits the writer, sharing those experiences with others benefits both the writer and the audience.
Potential Use of Personal Essays in the Classroom
Therapeutic benefits
Exploring emotional experiences produces therapeutic benefits, such as allowing students to develop emotional literacy and thus overcome emotional inhibition, find meanings in previously unexplored experiences, recognize aspects of their identities, and understand and control the negative effects of their experiences.
While instructors should avoid attempting professional therapy, they can still encourage students to explore emotional experiences. Teaching effective writing methods allows students to develop emotional literacy, which helps them overcome emotional inhibition and can improve their overall health. Should they choose to further explore emotional experiences, doing so can allow them to learn not only how to effectively organize information and recognize patterns but can also reveal meanings in their lives and aspects of their identities. Students can then understand and control the effects of their experiences.
Literary benefits
Exploring emotional experiences also produces literary benefits, including the ability to connect literature to their identities and to real-life contexts, as well as strengthening creative and reflective writing skills. Connecting literature to identity promotes a deeper understanding of both and engages the individual. For example, Schiff states in his sixth diary entry that the context of the diary entries and class discussions made his reading assignments seem “so much more real,” and that he felt closer to Virginia Woolf than he had felt before taking the course (300).
Writing diary entries also strengthened the students’ creative and reflective writing skills; they wrote more than they expected, and their writing tended to be “insightful and eloquent” (Berman 310). For example, in his third diary entry, Schiff uses three images as metaphors to refer to psychological concepts. He references images from earlier entries: a bottle of insecticide, a key, and a house. Schiff explains how he thought his father died from drinking a bottle of insecticide, which rested on the top shelf in the family’s tool shed. Beside the bottle, his family placed a key for the children to let themselves into the house after school.
Schiff uses these three images as metaphors when he refers to the key as the means to “unlock his father’s secret,” the poison as a “real-like example of family skeletons in the closet,” and the house as the truth behind his father’s death (qtd. in Berman 297). He also describes his older brother and sister as being able to reach the key more easily because they could remember their father, while Schiff did not remember his father and thus had to strain “in order to reach the key and enter the house” (qtd. in Berman 297). This also reflects Bosticco and Thompson’s explanation of how emotions can be disconnected from memory and how writing can bridge the disconnect by evoking the memory.
Another metaphor Schiff uses is one in which he draws a parallel between his father’s unresolved suicide and the Beatles’ song “Revolution Number Nine.” He describes how the singer repeats words while a cacophony of noises plays in the background, and though the singer repeats the words to “block out the chaos around him,” the background noise drowns out his own words (qtd. in Berman 304). Schiff then reflects on what he accomplished by addressing his father’s suicide in his diary entries: using words to “address the noise, not block it out” (qtd. in Berman 304). This metaphor connects the song’s meaning and Schiff’s purpose in writing diary entries, thus helping Schiff understand both.
In addition to drawing connections to other texts, writing also encouraged students to do the same with real-life contexts. Analyzing and discussing their experiences with suicide made Berman’s students less likely to romanticize suicide in literature than students in classes that did not write and share diary entries (Berman 309).
Conclusion
I support critics of bibliotherapy who warn instructors to avoid attempting professional therapy, and more research needs to be done on the contrary results experienced by experimental participants suffering from PTSD. Yet I also support writers like Brand, Berman, Bump, and MacCurdy who promote helping students explore their mental and emotional identities. The overwhelming amount of research I found suggests that exploring emotional experiences produces both therapeutic and literary benefits.
While instructors should not force students to explore disturbing experiences, merely teaching them how to write effectively and then encouraging them to explore their life on their own can improve every aspect of it.
References
Allen, Guy. “Language, Power, and Consciousness: A Writing Experiment at the University of Toronto.” Teaching Composition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 65-98. Print.
Anderson, Charles, and Marian MacCurdy. Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. Print.
Anderson, Charles M., Karen Holt, and Patty McGady. “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages that Heal.” Anderson 58-82.
Bishop, Wendy. "Writing Is/And Therapy?: Raising Questions About Writing Classrooms and Writing Program Administration." Journal of Advanced Composition 13.2 (1993): 503-516. Web. 4 December 2010.
Berman, Jeffrey, and Jonathan Schiff. “Writing about Suicide.” Anderson 291-312.
Bosticco, Cecilia, and Teresa Thompson, Teresa. “The Role of Communication and Story Telling in the Family Grieving System.” Journal of Family Communication 5.4 (2005): 255-278. Web. 25 October 2010.
Brand, Alice G. “Healing and the Brain.” Anderson 201-221.
Bump, Jerome. “Teaching Emotional Literacy.” Anderson 313-335.
Downs, B. “Lessons in Loss and Grief.” Communication Education 42 (1993): 300-303. Print.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. "Pathography and Enabling Myths: The Process of Healing." Anderson 222-245.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.
MacCurdy, Marian M. “From Trauma to Writing: A Theoretical Model for Practical Use.” Anderson 158-200.
Nye, Emily. “‘The More I Tell My Story’: Writing as Healing in an HIV/AIDS Community.” Anderson 385-415.
Pennebaker, James W. “Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Literature and Medicine 19.1 (2000): 3-18. Web. 25 October 2010.
“I have seen that broken stories are also broken lives” (Anderson 59)
Writing about an unresolved emotional experience benefits writers by allowing them to analyze and understand the experience's effects on them, and to empower themselves by choosing how to react to the experience.
Confronting the Experience
Writers must overcome both cultural taboos and social stigmas to confront their experiences. For example, the American culture often stigmatizes those who breach the subject of grief, which many Americans consider “insensitive and self-centered” (Bosticco and Thompson 258). This aspect of our culture worsens emotional damage by encouraging emotional inhibition, as do social stigmas in writing. According to sociologist Erving Goffman, stigmas are personality traits-particularly undesirable attributes-that cause society to devalue the individual (Anderson 74). Stigmas thus create an additional conflict between the need to share an experience and the need to maintain a socially acceptable reputation.
For example, in his essay “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages that Heal,” Charles Anderson analyzes an essay by Patty McGady in which McGady addresses her experiences with drug addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness. By writing about these subjects, McGady confronts the social stigmas associated with them, which she worried would cause her readers to discredit her. Yet although she resisted writing about these experiences because she found them painful and difficult, McGady acknowledged wanting to write about them every time she started writing. She resolves this conflict by addressing her stigmatizing traits but then focusing on the socially acceptable discourse of therapy. Writing and revising the essay helped her regain control over her life, an effect Anderson calls the discovery of “a subjectivity capable of healing itself by ordering, transforming, and finally overcoming stigma” (Anderson 77).
Understanding Identity
Writing about an emotional experience allows writers to understand it by requiring them to organize and then synthesize information into a clear, coherent narrative so their readers can understand it. Doing so eliminates the physiological effort needed to suppress the memory and allows the individual to store and/or forget the memory more efficiently (Pennebaker 12).
Organizing an experience into a simplified narrative allows writers to then find patterns in their thought processes, behaviors, and overall identity. In his essay, “Writing about Suicide,” Jeffrey Berman discusses a “Literary Suicide” graduate course in which he asked students to write anonymous diary entries. The option of anonymity allowed the students to disclose personal information without feeling coerced. One student, Jonathan Schiff, revisited his entries months later and noted they gave him “a basic awareness of how [his] mind operates” (qtd. in Berman 302). He also realized he would not remember trivial events had they not influenced “the workings of [his] unconscious mind” (qtd. in Berman 303), which inspired him to pay attention to his memories.
In her essay "Pathography and Enabling Myths: The Process of Healing," Anne Hunsaker Hawkins discusses how pathography-writing about diseases-can help writers recover their sense of identity when illness threatens both their physical existence and their sense of identity (Hawkins 241). Emily Nye explored this aspect of pathographies in a case study that became the topic of her essay “‘The More I Tell My Story’: Writing as Healing in an HIV/AIDS Community.” In this essay, Nye describes how she worked with members of a writing group at an AIDS center to analyze how writing about their disease affected them (386). Nye organized the concepts writers wrote about and discovered patterns that indicated what most concerned group members, such as understanding their lives, expressing wishes and regrets, and advising readers (400).
Writing about their experiences allowed group members to find meaning in their lives. Most stories included a "turning point" in which writers identified or created meanings in their lives (Nye 403). For example, one member found new meaning by meditating and studying as a monk, which gave his life meaning by introducing a lifestyle that improved his mental state. Another member found new meaning by fulfilling his lifelong wish to become a DJ; by doing so, he boosted his self-esteem by achieving a significant long-term goal and contributing to society. A third member's turning point came when he met a woman who stayed with him despite his diagnosis, which showed him that members of society still valued and supported him. Through describing and analyzing their experiences with AIDS, the group members found new meanings that gave their lives a sense of purpose.
Nye encouraged the members to analyze how and why the experience changed their thoughts, emotions, and behavior by giving them a summary of her findings after the study and asking for their feedback. Whereas analyzing the traumatic experience allowed them to understand how the experience affected their lives, analyzing how the writing and sharing process affected them allowed the group members to understand their identities in general.
One writer explained that people try to avoid "that closeness stuff" because they don't want others to know about their own negative feelings and because they don't think they deserve support (qtd. in Nye 410). Another stated, "The more I tell my story [...] the less the bad stuff has power over me. It changes how I look at the disease. As I change the story, I change myself" (qtd. in Nye 409). These statements show how the writers discovered new aspects of their identities by reflecting on how and why both their experience with the disease and writing about it influenced them.
Empowering the Writer
Writers who recognize and examine the experiences’ effects on them gain control through the writing process by choosing what to think, feel, and do about the experience. For example, when Berman asked his students at the end of the semester if writing about emotional experiences allowed them to “understand those conflicts better and find constructive ways of dealing with them,” fourteen out of the sixteen students agreed (Berman 307). According to Hawkins, writing pathographies gives writers a sense of control over what she calls "the drastic interruption of a life of meaning and purpose by an illness that often seems arbitrary, cruel, and senseless" (224).
Pennebaker states that part of the distress caused by unresolved emotional experiences comes not only from the events themselves but also from the individual's emotional reactions to the events (8). Thus, writers who recognize and examine the experiences’ effects on them gain control over these effects by choosing what to think, feel, and do. For example, when Berman asked his students at the end of the semester if writing about emotional experiences allowed them to “understand those conflicts better and find constructive ways of dealing with them,” fourteen out of the sixteen students agreed (Berman 307). According to Hawkins, writing pathographies gives writers a sense of control over what she calls "the drastic interruption of a life of meaning and purpose by an illness that often seems arbitrary, cruel, and senseless" (224).
Individuals who experience complex events may benefit more from writing about their experience than individuals who experience less complex events. Complex events require more effort to examine and organize because they affect multiple aspects of an individual's life; Pennebaker e gives the example of how being left by a lover can affect our relationships, finances, self-perceived identity, and daily routines (11).
Physical Effects of the Writing Process
James W. Pennebaker published an article in The Journal of Literature and Medicine titled "Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative" in which he discusses studies he and his colleagues did to examine the benefits produced by writing about emotional experiences. According to Pennebaker, suppressing important emotional experiences drains energy, prevents the individual from exercising cognitive processing and thus prevents understanding, and isolates the individual from others by creating a disconnect in communication and understanding (15). Addressing these emotional experiences, therefore, produces not only mental benefits but also social and physical ones as well.
In their first experiment, Pennebaker and his colleagues asked participants to write for fifteen minutes a day for four days. Participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. While the investigator told members the control group to write about non-emotional topics, the investigator told members of the experimental group to write their "deepest thoughts and feelings" about the most traumatic experience of their lives (qtd. in Pennebaker 4). The investigator also suggested that the latter connect their topics to the participants' relationships with family members, lovers, and friends; to their past, present, or future; or to who they were, who they wanted to be, or who they were at the time (Pennebaker 4). This focus encouraged the participants not only to describe and analyze their experiences but also to reflect upon how those experiences influenced their identity and the identities of others.
When Pennebaker and his colleagues reviewed the results, they found that most participants considered the experience "extremely valuable and meaningful," and 98 percent of the experimental participants said that "if given the choice, they would participate in the study again" (4). In addition, students who often submitted weak academic essays wrote coherent, grammatically correct essays about their personal experiences (Pennebaker 5). This may suggest that allowing students to write about personal topics gives them an additional incentive to engages themselves in their writing and improve their writing skills.
Pennebaker and his colleagues also recorded the participants' visits to the university health center for several months before and after the experiment to observe how writing about traumatic experiences affected the participants' health. They found that experimental participants' doctor visit rates fell "drastically" compared to the control participants (Pennebaker 5).
In addition to the results of his experiments, Pennebaker also cites the results of studies done by scientists around the world that varied from one to five days and from fifteen minutes to thirty minutes per session (7). The studies' writing topics sometimes varied too; some participants wrote about their thoughts and feelings about coming to college, about the experience of getting laid off, or about an imaginary (indirect) trauma (Pennebaker 7). The participants in each study, however, explored their emotions and thoughts regardless of the topic.
These studies link writing to improved mental, emotional, and physical health, including improved immune function including t-helper cell growth and antibody response (Pennebaker 16), reduced pain and medication use among arthritis sufferers, improvements in asthmatics' lung function markers, and lower levels of depression in students taking exams; these writing benefits span across a variety of professions, social classes, and racial/ethnic groups (Pennebaker 5).
Writing about traumatic experiences did distress participants for several hours after writing; however, participants reported feeling "as happy as or happier than" control participants at least two weeks after the study (Pennebaker 6). The better participants felt before writing, the worse they felt afterward and vice versa; for example, writing about these topics immediately improved the moods of "highly distressed" participants (Pennebaker 6). Another study reported that hostile and suspicious individuals benefited more from writing than individuals who lacked these traits (Pennebaker 6).
One study found that university staff members who write about emotional experiences miss fewer days than those who do not (Pennebaker 16). I experienced this effect during my first semester of graduate school. Over the summer, I experienced what I consider a significant emotional event that produced several of the negative emotions and behaviors Bosticco and Thompson identify in their essay as symptoms of grief. Because I keep a diary, I continually wrote about the experience before, during, and after it occurred.
Although I still experience some of the negative effects, I noticed how writing about the experience affected me by reducing the frequency and intensity of negative emotions. Most importantly, I have not missed a graduate class or a class that I teach, whereas in previous semesters, I missed between one and two weeks of classes due to upper respiratory infections, ear infections, conjunctivitis, and the seasonal flu. I need to make sure I take into account other factors that influence my health, though.
During his studies, Pennebaker found that writing benefitted participants specifically because it requires cognitive processing. He points out that if writing about emotional experiences benefits participants because it allows self-expression, then other forms of self-expression should produce the same benefits. However, research done on this topic suggests that only forms of self-expression that require cognitive processing produce benefits (Pennebaker 8). Pennebaker and his colleagues did a study in which participants either (1) expressed a traumatic experience by using movement, (2) expressed an experience by using movement and then writing about it, or (3) exercised ten minutes per day for three days (Pennebaker 8). The groups who used movement to express themselves reported feeling happier after the study, but only the group that wrote about the experience showed "significant improvements in physical health and grade point average," what Pennebaker calls "long-term physiological changes" (8).
Both Pennebaker's studies and dozens of other studies from researchers around the world provide evidence that writing about emotional experiences produces measurable, empirical improvements in mental and physical health. Those benefits do come with minor disadvantages, such as feeling upset directly after writing, but the benefits appear to outweigh the costs. Pennebaker also explains why writing benefits individuals; it requires cognitive processing.
The Effects of Sharing the Experience
"…Silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one,
and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion” (Levi 88-89)
Writing about emotional experiences allows individuals to understand and resolve experiences, but sharing their work to others further benefits writers. For example, sharing anonymous diary entries and hearing their classmates’ entries affected Berman’s students in three ways: it engaged them more, boosted their confidence, and caused them to empathize more with others.
Hearing from Others
When writers share their experiences, whether anonymous or not, they influence their audience in two ways: they boost the audience’s confidence and cause the audience to develop empathy toward others.
Hearing how other people react to emotional experiences gives the audience the confidence to risk writing about more personal experiences. For example, almost all of Berman’s students gave him permission to read their anonymous entries aloud. They did so to see their classmates’ reactions to their experiences while protected by anonymity. When Berman read the anonymous entries aloud, the students showed interest in and identified with the entries, which them realize others shared their experiences. This collaborative trust, which Berman calls “distanced intimacy,” gave students the confidence to examine more personal experiences (Berman 294).
As the class continued, this distanced intimacy developed into empathy. In his fifth diary entry, Schiff explains how hearing other classmates’ stories makes him feel as though he vicariously experiences the events. As a result, whenever he sees his classmates, he feels concern for them even though he does not know which entry was theirs (Berman 303). This anecdote limits the extent of the audience’s concern to the classmates, however, so further studies should be done to determine whether or not sharing diary entries causes students to extend this concern, intentionally or unconsciously, to other members of society.
Sharing Experiences
In his book The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi argued that communication is not only always possible but unavoidable because we are biologically (and thus socially) programmed to communicate, particularly through language" (Levi 88-89). Many writers recognize their need to communicate long before they share their stories.
For example, Nye's AIDs/HIV writing group members explicitly expressed wanting to be acknowledged (Nye 406), a social act that Hawkins claims prevents isolation by fulfilling the writer’s need to communicate "a painful, disorienting, and isolating experience" with others (224). Sharing their experiences not only allowed group members to see their audience recognizing and understanding their words but also to educate others. One group member explicitly stated that he wanted to "save one life;" teaching others about the disease gave the writers a sense of control and a way to "fight back," promoted compassion, and strengthened the community (Nye 405-406).
Writers share their experiences to connect with others, thus fulfilling the need for social interaction. Schiff wrote that seeing his classmates’ interest in his entry made him feel much less ambivalent about attending class (Berman 302). Writers also share their experiences to get feedback, and the feedback often increases the writer’s sense of self-esteem and confidence. In fact, Bosticco and Thompson noted that feedback acknowledging the writer’s emotions makes the writer feel valued (Bosticco and Thompson 260).
Berman’s students gained confidence in their writing through seeing and hearing their classmates react to their entries. For example, Schiff wrote in his sixth diary entry that it moved him to see his classmates listen and respond to his entry about his father’s suicide, a reaction that acknowledged the significance of the event and validated his reaction to it. Previously, Schiff had assumed nobody could understand his problems, and he even stated that had he not seen his classmates’ sympathy toward his entry, he would not have felt confident enough to further explore and analyze his father’s suicide and how the experience affected Schiff (Berman 302).
The Significance of Sharing Experiences
Sharing experiences benefits both the writers and their audience. It creates trust between writer and audience, which both triggers empathy and strengthens social ties. Sharing experiences also boosts the writer's self-esteem and the audience members' confidence to explore their own lives. While writing about emotional experiences benefits the writer, sharing those experiences with others benefits both the writer and the audience.
Potential Use of Personal Essays in the Classroom
Therapeutic benefits
Exploring emotional experiences produces therapeutic benefits, such as allowing students to develop emotional literacy and thus overcome emotional inhibition, find meanings in previously unexplored experiences, recognize aspects of their identities, and understand and control the negative effects of their experiences.
While instructors should avoid attempting professional therapy, they can still encourage students to explore emotional experiences. Teaching effective writing methods allows students to develop emotional literacy, which helps them overcome emotional inhibition and can improve their overall health. Should they choose to further explore emotional experiences, doing so can allow them to learn not only how to effectively organize information and recognize patterns but can also reveal meanings in their lives and aspects of their identities. Students can then understand and control the effects of their experiences.
Literary benefits
Exploring emotional experiences also produces literary benefits, including the ability to connect literature to their identities and to real-life contexts, as well as strengthening creative and reflective writing skills. Connecting literature to identity promotes a deeper understanding of both and engages the individual. For example, Schiff states in his sixth diary entry that the context of the diary entries and class discussions made his reading assignments seem “so much more real,” and that he felt closer to Virginia Woolf than he had felt before taking the course (300).
Writing diary entries also strengthened the students’ creative and reflective writing skills; they wrote more than they expected, and their writing tended to be “insightful and eloquent” (Berman 310). For example, in his third diary entry, Schiff uses three images as metaphors to refer to psychological concepts. He references images from earlier entries: a bottle of insecticide, a key, and a house. Schiff explains how he thought his father died from drinking a bottle of insecticide, which rested on the top shelf in the family’s tool shed. Beside the bottle, his family placed a key for the children to let themselves into the house after school.
Schiff uses these three images as metaphors when he refers to the key as the means to “unlock his father’s secret,” the poison as a “real-like example of family skeletons in the closet,” and the house as the truth behind his father’s death (qtd. in Berman 297). He also describes his older brother and sister as being able to reach the key more easily because they could remember their father, while Schiff did not remember his father and thus had to strain “in order to reach the key and enter the house” (qtd. in Berman 297). This also reflects Bosticco and Thompson’s explanation of how emotions can be disconnected from memory and how writing can bridge the disconnect by evoking the memory.
Another metaphor Schiff uses is one in which he draws a parallel between his father’s unresolved suicide and the Beatles’ song “Revolution Number Nine.” He describes how the singer repeats words while a cacophony of noises plays in the background, and though the singer repeats the words to “block out the chaos around him,” the background noise drowns out his own words (qtd. in Berman 304). Schiff then reflects on what he accomplished by addressing his father’s suicide in his diary entries: using words to “address the noise, not block it out” (qtd. in Berman 304). This metaphor connects the song’s meaning and Schiff’s purpose in writing diary entries, thus helping Schiff understand both.
In addition to drawing connections to other texts, writing also encouraged students to do the same with real-life contexts. Analyzing and discussing their experiences with suicide made Berman’s students less likely to romanticize suicide in literature than students in classes that did not write and share diary entries (Berman 309).
Conclusion
I support critics of bibliotherapy who warn instructors to avoid attempting professional therapy, and more research needs to be done on the contrary results experienced by experimental participants suffering from PTSD. Yet I also support writers like Brand, Berman, Bump, and MacCurdy who promote helping students explore their mental and emotional identities. The overwhelming amount of research I found suggests that exploring emotional experiences produces both therapeutic and literary benefits.
While instructors should not force students to explore disturbing experiences, merely teaching them how to write effectively and then encouraging them to explore their life on their own can improve every aspect of it.
References
Allen, Guy. “Language, Power, and Consciousness: A Writing Experiment at the University of Toronto.” Teaching Composition. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 65-98. Print.
Anderson, Charles, and Marian MacCurdy. Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000. Print.
Anderson, Charles M., Karen Holt, and Patty McGady. “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages that Heal.” Anderson 58-82.
Bishop, Wendy. "Writing Is/And Therapy?: Raising Questions About Writing Classrooms and Writing Program Administration." Journal of Advanced Composition 13.2 (1993): 503-516. Web. 4 December 2010.
Berman, Jeffrey, and Jonathan Schiff. “Writing about Suicide.” Anderson 291-312.
Bosticco, Cecilia, and Teresa Thompson, Teresa. “The Role of Communication and Story Telling in the Family Grieving System.” Journal of Family Communication 5.4 (2005): 255-278. Web. 25 October 2010.
Brand, Alice G. “Healing and the Brain.” Anderson 201-221.
Bump, Jerome. “Teaching Emotional Literacy.” Anderson 313-335.
Downs, B. “Lessons in Loss and Grief.” Communication Education 42 (1993): 300-303. Print.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. "Pathography and Enabling Myths: The Process of Healing." Anderson 222-245.
Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.
MacCurdy, Marian M. “From Trauma to Writing: A Theoretical Model for Practical Use.” Anderson 158-200.
Nye, Emily. “‘The More I Tell My Story’: Writing as Healing in an HIV/AIDS Community.” Anderson 385-415.
Pennebaker, James W. “Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative.” Literature and Medicine 19.1 (2000): 3-18. Web. 25 October 2010.