Louise DeSalvo book: Writing as a Way of Healing

This here's an amazing book. Turns out there's credible research showing that if you write for 20 minutes a day, four days in a row, about traumatic or dramatic events in your life, how you felt about them then, and how you feel about them now, you actually get healthier and stay healthier. Mental health, physical health, the works. More writing, more healing. But even four days will make a difference.

Apparently the constant mental stress (which expresses itself physically as well) of deliberately avoiding memories of painful events gradually wears down your capacity to resist present day threats and troubles. You'd think that facing that kind of stuff and writing about it would make us obsessive about it, but in fact we obsess about it even more when we avoid it. Think about it: when you write about it, you accept it and integrate it into your overall story of yourself so it just becomes part of the fabric -- the experience loses its separateness; when you avoid it, it's always there, distinct, tapping you on the shoulder, bugging you, but NOT GOING AWAY, so it's a continuing focus of negative attention. Accept it into your life story, and you're that much more whole and that much more accepting of who you really are and really have been.

It's an internal process of healing, so it doesn't matter whether anyone else reads what you've written. You can let folks read it if you want to, or you can stash it away, or you can burn it or whatever. But don't burn it. Think how fascinated you would be if you found such genuine, personal, truthful stories written by your great-great-grandfather, someone you never even knew but who is part of your family history. How much more that person would be to you now than just a name, a couple of dates, and an old photo. And then think how meaningful and helpful this could be to your own great-great-grandchildren. Your story is real and true, and well worth the telling.

So write about what happened, how you felt, and how you feel now. It may be a painful process, but it can yield tremendous good. The truth will set you free.