When Writing Does NOT Make You Feel Better

Write about a painful memory for twenty minutes a day for three days, and your stress levels will go down, your health will improve, and you’ll live happily ever after!

Myth or magic? Well, okay, the living happily ever after part is definitely myth, but the rest? Today, for me, it all feels like a myth. But how can it be? I’ve been a True Believer and a perpetrator of this advice for years. If you look at the menu bar below my header, you’ll see a link to an archived blog titled Writing for the Health of It. Hundreds studies have been done around the world validating successful outcomes for even short bouts of expressive writing. That is NOT a myth!

However, I just ran into a personal brick wall. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve spent at least twenty hours fine-tuning and polishing a story about how a nurse practitioner in a local hospital blew off my reports of pain and gave me a meaningless, fluff diagnosis. Had he asked even two probing questions instead of jumping to conclusions, surely he would have caught my predictable, textbook case of pericarditis hours after pacemaker surgery.

While I cannot prove anything beyond the words he wrote in the record I accessed through my online portal, I am 100% certain that if I’d known what I actually had, I would have avoided landing back in the hospital four months later with what became life-threatening complications. I might have had recurrences, but they could have been simply handled without more than $300,000 in medical costs and two months of non-productive time.

My anger knew no bounds when I finally felt well enough to start digging around in my records to make sense of it all and found his words there in black and white. I have filed a formal complaint that’s now under review by The Compliance Process Committee. It’s too late to change my outcome, but I hope to avoid future mishaps like mine for others.

I had also hoped to find personal peace and resolution through writing. That has not happened.

I am angrier today than I was before I
began writing. So what do we do when writing apparently fails to help?

I have a hunch that I expected too much too soon. The writing to heal research is full of admonitions about not writing too soon. We do need to let things mellow. I thought I’d done that, but now I see otherwise. My fingers began to fly the minute I read that report! I still want revenge! And that is never a good place to write from, at least for the public.

Also, my anger was amplified last week when, three days after my discovery, my husband had a completely different life-threatening experience in the same hospital. And my daughter is facing brain surgery three weeks from today (in a different hospital, thank heavens!). 

Yes, my score on the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale is currently near the top. It’s too soon for me to be writing polished accounts and expecting closure. I needed the polished account for the review process, but aside from that, I should stick to journal entries and/or 20-minute writing sessions for three days and breathing deeply. And not reading world news reports! I shall sit with my anger and fully experience it. I’ll let insights like the one about wanting revenge surface. What else will I learn?

Have faith in the process and don’t stress if it takes more than three days. And stay tuned. I’m contacting others who have survived writing trauma-based memoirs. I shall share their wisdom with you as it accrues.

And please, if you have thoughts or experiences to share, post a comment, or email me at ritergal (at) gmail (dot) com.

Lessons Learned about Lifestory Writing, Part 2

My previous post gave the background for lessons I’ve learned about lifestory writing since The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing was published ten years ago. This post continues the list.

5) Stories without shadows are flat — It’s not easy to share stories about embarrassing or hurtful memories. But these are precisely the stories that add heart and connect with readers. Shadows add the third dimension to stories.

6) When you change your perspective on life and the past, life changes – several years ago as I began writing about growing up in Los Alamos, I hesitated. How could I write about my chronic feelings of being outside the group, of not fitting in and being different? I did not want my classmates to know they had hurt me, and I didn’t want to make them feel bad or sound like a victim. Using tools I’ve described in previous posts and will include in my new book, I realized most of those feelings were in my head, based on my assumptions and perceptions. I felt like the door to a  prison cell opened and began discovering legions of others felt the same way.

7) Sharing our stories connects us with others – My term for daring to show emotional vulnerability in writing or daily life is “baring your belly” in the sense of exposing  a vulnerable body part. Baring your belly takes trust and guts. It is true that a few readers may sneer at perceived weakness or feel squeamish. Far more will relate and feel empowered to bare their own bellies in story.

8) Neuro-science based guidelines for connecting with readers – A growing body of research relevant to writers is rendered approachable by authors like Lisa Cron. In her book, Wired for Story she translates the technical into easily understood strategies. She provides clear, convincing strategies for grabbing readers by the eyeballs as mirror cells wake up in their brains. Active mirror cells create an effect much like total immersion in a holographic version of the author’s experience. Learning how this works and how to apply it is a work in progress.

9) Writing is good for your health — After The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing was published, I learned of the work of James Pennebaker, whose pioneering research on the healing power of expressive writing has been replicated hundreds of times. These studies uniformly show that writing about traumatic, troubling memories, even for a short period of time, helps resolve those memories and improves physical and mental health in countless ways. My archived blog, Writing for the Health of It, includes dozens of posts on this topic.

10) Lifestory writing can be transformational for writer and readers alike – Wouldn’t it be awful if we had to learn every life lesson first hand? Who wouldn’t prefer to learn lots of the tough stuff by reading about someone else’s experience? Quite possibly the plethora of survivor memoirs today is due in large part to brave pioneers who began the trend of what several have called “writing themselves naked.” If someone else overcame (addiction, abuse, incest, deaths of dear ones, etc.), readers may be inspired to do likewise.

Note that this list does not include additional mastery of topics like writing dialogue or description or piecing stories together along a story arc. I’ve made no mention of creating eBooks, selling books, or other technical skills. Those are craft topics. I’ve stuck to the heart of lifestory writing in this list.

I would not have learned any of these lessons if I hadn’t gotten my fingers moving all those years ago. Writing, especially life writing, is a lifelong journey. If you haven’t begun yet, pick up a pencil or head for your keyboard NOW!

Write Away Election Stress, part 2

In my previous post I touched on Expressive Writing as a way of dealing with post-election stress. I need to expand on that. Writing for stress relief takes more than one form, and spontaneous writing in real time is best known as journaling.

I can attest from personal experience that journaling my heart out has been hugely helpful in coming to grips with anger, confusion, and other chaotic emotions. I highly recommend it, and if your topic is a tender one that could cause the chaos to spread of others near and dear to you happened to read it, write it into the fireplace, or the shredder, or delete the file.

As great and powerful as journaling is, I’m not aware of any studies showing that it has long-term health benefits. Nor is it reliably useful for calming currently chaotic emotion.

Expressive writing is especially powerful for resolving stressful memories after the fact. This research was pioneered by James Pennebaker and expanded upon in over 200 replications in situations ranging from prison populations to cancer patients and outplaced high tech industry personnel.

In Pennebaker’s original research, people were asked to write about “a trauma, emotional upheaval, or unsettling event that has been influencing your life, spinning obsessively in your mind, and maybe keeping you awake at night” for twenty minutes on each of four consecutive days.

Subsequent studies have found similar results by having people write for as little as five minutes. They have scaled the four days back to one or two. They’ve left it consecutive and spread it out. Research in other directions sheds even more light.

Almost without exception, results showed durable health benefits. In the case of the tech workers, the ones who wrote according to the experimental protocol found new jobs significantly sooner faster than the control group.

So in concert with what I posted last week, I urge you to journal about current fears and frustration. In a few months or more, if it’s still troubling you, switch to the Pennebaker Process. Meanwhile, if journaling current stuff triggers traumatic old memories, do the four day routine with them now.

In fact, most readers here are writing lifestories anyway. Part of the healing value of expressive writing is the way it turns endless rumination loops into coherent story with context and meaning. So take this process one step further and turn the results of those 20 minute sessions into a coherent, meaningful story worthy of passing along.

Write for the health of it!

Image credit: Prawny, posted on https://morguefile.com/creative/Prawny

Write Away Election Stress

As much as we’d like to forget it all, it’s hard. Who can forget the finger pointing, the name calling, the conversations you tried not to have before November 8? We hoped it would end the next day, but we knew, most of us knew anyway, that it wouldn’t.

Here we are now, stressed, burned out and perhaps more divided than ever. Half the country is rejoicing that they managed to Trump the so-called self-righteous, socialistic feminists represented by That Woman. “Change is finally possible,” they crow. “We can get back to true values, to democracy as it was intended to be.” And on it goes.

On the flip side are those who were Hillary’s True Believers as well as many who may not have preferred That Woman, but they claim a trained seal would be better than that devious, inexperienced, misogynistic bully. The sudden triumph of Trump seemed unimaginable and that half of the country is in deep mourning, highly traumatized.

“How can they believe all that stuff?”

“How can they just throw out all the progress we’ve made?”

And on it goes.

We’ll see how things unfold in the future, but for the present, our collective national life stress index is off the map.

The medical community has been warning us about the negative health effects of stress for over fifty years. We know it leads to cardiovascular problems, lowered immunity, depression, and a host of other ills. So what's a person to do? Lists of stress management techniques abound. A search for "stress management" turned up 16 million links. WebMD has two pages of tips, and many more of links and articles.

Fortunately, one of the simplest ways to offset the stressful effects of trauma is to pick up pen and paper and write about your thoughts, feelings, fears and perceptions. Original research showed that writing for as little as twenty minutes about troubling topics may boost your immune system and lead to numerous health benefits reversing the ravages of stress. Research has repeatedly shown enhanced cardio-vascular function, lower blood pressure, reduced asthma and arthritis symptoms, decreased need for pain medication in many instances, and more. Emotional health benefits such as relief from depression, better sleep, and enhanced sense of well-being are also common.

More recent studies have shown measurable results from writing for five or ten minutes a day, or even writing once for a few minutes. It’s undeniably clear that expressive writing is good for your health! Expressive writing is not a panacea intended to replace medical care, but it often serves as an effective adjunct, enhancing effects of any treatment you may undergo. It's affordable for anyone, and can be done anywhere.

In our current situation, you can make it even more effective by expanding your writing to include attempts to understand the perspective of those on the other side of the electoral divide. Think and write as deeply about their fears, hopes and concerns as you do your own. You may find you have more in common than you imagined. You may discover deeper compassion for others as well as your self and begin to rebuild community that may have suffered over the last several months.

Please leave a comment about ways you are using writing to recover from election stress, along with any other tips you may have.

Memoir: Process or Product?

With any form of expressive writing, from spontaneous journaling to polished, published memoir, the writing process produces 90% of the benefit, at least as far as the writer is concerned.

To be clear, this 90% figure is an intuitive assessment, but not a wild guess. I extensively studied the healing value of expressive writing and wrote about it in a series of blog posts, Writing for the Health of It. I also base it on a stream of student comments that stories they wrote for class shed new light on past events, changing their perspective.

This may be especially good news if privacy concerns deter you from writing. It’s okay to write for a readership of one. In fact, that may be your healthiest, most gratifying course of action. You’ll get  most of the value even  if nobody else ever sees a word of it.

In fact, if your story upsets others, the resulting controversy and turmoil may offset the proven benefits of writing. You are well-advised to use caution when you have doubts how your story will be received. Carefully weigh your risks and benefits, and don’t risk what you’re unwilling to lose.

Other reasons people avoid publishing are more pragmatic. When you put your life on public display, you want clean copy. You want it to make sense and be free of embarrassing typos and simple grammar errors, and you want it to look nice on the page. You want it to look professional, without sacrificing authenticity.

Moving from draft to polished publication is a daunting task. Not everyone wants to exert that degree of effort. Not everyone knows how or wants to learn. You can pay people to edit your story and make it look like a million dollars. That’s like investing in custom framing for a picture you painted – nice if you can afford it. With diligent promotion, you may recoup some of the cost of professional assistance, but it’s not prudent to spend more on publication than you can afford to write off.

Finishing the draft of a memoir pays huge dividends. Polishing it pays more. The more you ponder story elements, which to include and how they interrelate, the deeper your insight and sense of meaning become. The more you study the craft of writing and contemplate  fresh ways of describing people, places and experiences, the more open you become to the world around you.

Whether you do it to contain costs with group editing or for the fun of it, joining a lifestory writing group or class provides further benefits as you bond with others and enhance writing skills through the power of story and collaboration.

Everything to the point of uploading your file to a printer is part of the process. When you choose to share your story with others, whether it takes the form of a rough stone or a polished gem, the process still holds most of the value for you. You may eventually reap huge  royalties, but whatever the financial rewards, you have created a historical document that others will treasure. That’s a mighty sweet cake. Inspiring others piles on icing – your gift to the world.

What is your aspiration? Process or product? How do you view this reward balance?

Write now: pull out your Story Idea List, select a topic and write that story!

How I Realized that Poetry Alone Was Not Enough to Convey the Story in My Memoir

Guest Post by Madelyn Sharples

Madeline Sharples’ memoir began as a collection of poems, that she thought would suffice to record her memories of living with her son’s bipolar disorder and subsequent suicide. In this invited post she explains how she realized poetry alone would not suffice.

My memoir, Leaving the Hall Light On: a Mother’s Memoir of Living with Her Son’s Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide consists of a mix of prose, poetry, and photos. And if I could have put music into it I would have.

I originally dreamed about publishing a memoir in poems. I had a finished poetry manuscript early on and since poetry came out almost miraculously from my pen soon after my son died, I thought telling his and my story in poems would be most appropriate.

But I was soon convinced the poems could not stand-alone. My book would lack the details, characterization depth, and the thoughts and feelings of my husband Bob and surviving son Ben that were necessary in the telling of our whole family’s story. The poems provided the chapter themes and emotional impact, the prose provided the details and descriptions, and the photos helped to make the story seem more real.

Early on my son Ben introduced me to a former literary agent who asked to read the poetry manuscript. After her reading she suggested I use the order of the poems as a way to organize my book’s chapters. And that organization stayed mostly intact in the final book manuscript. This young woman also generously gave me writing prompts that helped me flesh out my story in prose. I worked with her in developing the first draft of my memoir for about a year.

As I began to introduce more prose into the manuscript, using my huge supply of journal entries, pieces I wrote in various writing classes, and my advisor’s wonderful writing prompts, I formed chapters each starting with a poem. Then I began to worry that interested agents would reject my book because of the poetry. That concern was not unfounded. As I looked for appropriate agents I found more and more who did not want to be involved in poetry books in any way. I even work-shopped the book and was advised by my instructor to take the poems out.

I also remembered the words of a good friend. She told me no one had the right to tell me that I had to take something out of my book if I, the author, felt it belonged in it. So, I kept the poems in although I didn’t mention their existence in my query letters. I thought I’d discuss the poetry later if it ever came up. Even then I was still waffling about leaving them in or taking them out.

Although I never found an agent to represent my book, I happily contracted with a small traditional press. My publisher asked me to revise my book in many ways, but her only suggestion about the poetry in the book was that I should add more. She resonated with my final decision to include poetry in my memoir.

Madeline Sharples studied journalism in high school and college and wrote for the high school newspaper, but only started to fulfill her dream to work as a creative writer and journalist late in life. Her memoir, Leaving the Hall Light On: A Mother’s Memoir of Living with Her Son’s Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide, tells the steps she took in living with the loss of her oldest son, first and foremost that she chose to live and take care of herself as a woman, wife, mother, and writer. She hopes that her story will inspire others to find ways to survive their own tragic experiences.

Madeline’s mission since the death of her son is to raise awareness, educate, and erase the stigma of mental illness and suicide in hopes of saving lives. She and her husband of forty plus years live in Manhattan Beach, California, a small beach community south of Los Angeles. Her younger son Ben lives in Santa Monica, California with his wife Marissa. Click to visit Madeline’s blog, Choices, and on Red Room.com.

Read my Amazon.com review of Leaving the Hall Light On.

Write now: if you write poetry, find a poem or few and write a narrative version of the story they tell. Those like me, who lack the poetry gene or muse, can find a photo and do the same exercise.

You Grow into Your Story

“You grow into your story.” I was surprised to hear these words come from my mouth the other day as I met with a new group of lifestory writing students. I’d never thought of things quite this way, and their truth was a bolt of psychic lightening.

The sentence emerged during a discussion about the need for every story to have a “moral.” Moral is a word with a lot of baggage.  We came to an agreement that strong stories include some element of change or growth as a result of events and experiences included in the story.

As mentioned in the previous post, it isn’t always apparent what that insight is. I pondered for a couple of days as I reflected on the lesson learned in “Grabbing Grannie’s Dishes.” Only as I adapted this previously written story for the Gutsy Story contest, did I realize that the initial version, written a dozen years ago, was an extended vignette, lacking the insightful closure that adds impact and meaning to a full story.

As I explained to the class, I was not ready to discover these lessons a dozen years ago. I had to spend hundreds of hours writing hundreds of draft stories – I know now that they were drafts – at the time I thought most of them were polished and perfect. But most are merely vignettes, lacking the full closure of a complete story. They do a good job of documenting experiences, so they remain a valuable contribution to family history. Far more than enhancing the message for others, the primary value in taking them the next step is the personal insight I’ll derive in the process. 

For many years I had to write simple stories, to practice putting memories on the page. Only recently, much later, have I begun to see the structure of stories and be able to analyze what I wrote earlier to see the gaps and voids, to recognize what’s missing to make them complete on a literary level as well as a personal one. As I see this, uncover the missing parts, my life perspective is coming more sharply into focus, with deeper meaning.

It’s become more clear than ever that writing your lifestory will always be a work in progress. No matter how thorough you are or how “mature” your story becomes, there will always be another angle, another way to tell your story, perhaps better, perhaps with specific application to a new purpose.

If you are just starting to write, please, don’t worry about digging deeply for meaning. Write your stories. Write one hundred stories. Write five hundred. This is a case where more is better.

When you do feel ready to dig more deeply into a story, use some or all of these questions to shed new light on the situation and add impact to your story:

• What does this story mean to me?
• What did I learn from this situation?
• How did it change or affect my life?
• What would I do differently today in light of what I learned?
• How might (that other person) view this situation?
• What other situations does this remind me of or apply to?
• Where is the tension in this story?
• What is the most true part of this story?
• Is any part of it not true?  

Ultimately, the only way you can grow into a story is to start writing.

Write now: look through your collection of “finished” stories and find one you’d like to revisit. Use the list of questions above to explore other ways of looking at it. Explore your thoughts with freewriting. Rewrite the story to incorporate new insights.

If you are new to lifestory ory writing, draft a pile of stories, setting each aside to polish and probe later.

Image credit:  Brian Lane Winfield Moore;

Fear Is a Story We Tell Ourselves

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe.
      —Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail

The minute I read this stunning line I recognized Truth in every fiber of my being, not related to any specific personal fear, but about fear in general. In a flash I realized it’s not just huge fears, like plane crashes or being attacked on the trail by a hungry bear, that cause distress. We all have daily irritations we choose not to confront because we fear that speaking out will be worse than stuffing our anger. We mutely mutter on, largely unaware of the story underlying our choices – or even that we are making choices.

The opening quotation occurs at the beginning of her solo adventure along the Pacific Coast Trail. Cheryl had plenty to be afraid of: a woman hiking alone in the wilderness is at risk from both two and four-legged predators (she met both). She might get lost (she did). She might run out of food or water (that was close). She might sustain an injury (she did) or get sick. Perhaps her biggest risk of all was the total ignorance and lack of backpacking experience that she finally admitted to herself as she heaved her unmanageable pack onto her back for the first time.

Cheryl faced most of these risks and other staggering obstacles head-on at one time or another, and  her new story worked. It kept her walking all the way from Mojave, California to the Bridge of the Gods on the Columbia River.

We can follow her example and use the power of new stories to alter or transform the direction of our lives. For stories with extra punch, explore your fears on the page, even the little ones, and write your new stories as insights emerge.

Why write?

Renowned psychology professor James Pennebaker postulates that a key factor to making expressive writing such a powerfully healing tool is that as people write about a troubling event over a period of days, chaotic thoughts begin coalescing into structured, meaningful stories. Writers who also begin exploring alternate points of view derive the most potent benefits.

Taking this one step further, an obvious conclusion is that those who explore alternate points of view create a new story to explain the past and guide future perceptions and choices.

Cheryl told herself one small story to enable herself to begin moving along the trail. By the end of her journey, she had told herself a new story about her entire life and justify the subtitle of her memoir: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. I urge you to pick up a copy of this best-selling book and use her experience as a guideline for a presumably less physically rigorous adventure in restorying your life.

Write now: about a recurring circumstance in your life, preferably something you’d like to change. As you write, pay close attention to thoughts that run through your mind, especially those that sound like messages. These connect you with your underlying “story.” Get that story on the page, then write a few alternative scenarios. Explore options you might consider impossible. You may be surprised at the new story options that pop out of nowhere onto your page. Leave a comment or send me an email about your success with this exercise.

Photo credit: Sharon Lippincott

The Transformative Power of Memoir

Some people write memoir to celebrate, some to inform, some for self-exploration, some to heal. In her second guest post on this blog, Samantha M. White explains that the results can go beyond your initial intention. 

Writing my memoir transformed my life. Not only my day-to-day present, and my future, but even the past about which I had written!

Transformation was not my goal. I wrote it because I had a story pent up inside me, pressing to be told – to share what had happened to me, and how I had found my way out of pain. I wanted to assure readers of the universality of suffering, and the reality of healing and finding new joy. I felt driven, and afraid that if I died before publishing the book, an important message wouldn’t be heard.

I had read that one-third of trauma survivors never recover, and another third make it back to approximately where they were before the trauma occurred. Following the violent death of my daughter in the wake of two other major life losses, I knew I didn’t want to end up in either of those two groups. I couldn’t bear to waste the pain. I needed to honor her life.

So I set my intention to land in the remaining third – those who grow from trauma, become stronger, deeper, wiser, and more effective at bringing about positive social change. How I accomplished that is the subject of my memoir, Someone to Talk To: Finding Peace, Purpose, and Joy After Tragedy and Loss. The book gestated in me for years before I actually began the writing, and took fifteen grueling months of daily writing to complete. The results of all that effort were multiple: I enjoyed the great satisfaction of having completed something that felt important to me; I reached and helped people in need whom I didn’t even know; I was acknowledged for my achievement, and received a prestigious award (a 2012 Nautilus Book award); I even got a flash of something feeling like fame when a short clip of a TV interview of me ended up on YouTube; and a new identity: I introduced myself to my new neighbor (“Hi, I’m Samantha White,”) and she gasped, “The author?”

But the big prize at the end was that my painful past had morphed into something else – a happy past!

None of the facts had changed – my first marriage was still over, ended tragically, I had been betrayed, and my daughter was gone from me forever. But many of the other hurtful incidents, the lies and insults, the feelings of shame, and even my anger – had fallen away, lost their importance in the larger picture. The woefully long story of my personal suffering had been whittled down to what mattered, and the rest, I realized – well, the rest didn’t matter. Instead of continuing to passively allow my crippling memories to assault me, I could begin to choose what to remember and what to forget.

I choose to focus now on what I’m grateful for, and what fulfills me. I have resumed doing something I enjoyed before my daughter’s death – public speaking – and am making new friends, learning new things. I have a new husband and a life rich with music, laughter, and love. My book seems to be flying on wings of its own to people who want to learn how to triumph over trauma, and in that way honors the memory of my daughter.

It wasn’t catharsis, as people assume. Catharsis went on for many years before, when I wept and spoke of my sorrow, over and over again. This was not merely a final emptying of the deep well of my sadness. It was a penetrating examination of what was causing my pain, resulting in a metamorphosis, what some Buddhists call “turning the pain into medicine.”

The pain itself, which drove me to write the book, became the cure for not just my losses, but for my life, now renewed. My past no longer hurts me. Writing about it turned it around and helped me see it as something else . . . as the platform for my growth and (here’s that word again) transformation.

In my line of work (psychotherapy), it’s what we call “reframing.” Remove an old, murky, indistinct painting from its battered frame, dust it off and rotate it, examine it to find what’s hidden there, choose a truer frame, and hang it in a better light. Voila! – from a tired, old scene emerges a fresh, new view.

That’s what writing memoir can do, did do, for me.

You can read Samantha’s previous guest post, Accessing Intuition, here. Visit Samantha’s website and read more of her insights on her blog.

Write now: Do some freewriting about how writing has transformed your life – or how you hope it will if it hasn’t already. In the latter case, dream big. Make a list of topics to explore in writing that you’d like to understand better or see “detoxified.” Keep that list and write your way through it, but take your time and don’t rush. Leave a comment about your thoughts or plans.

Pearls from Perls

In and out of the garbage pail
Put I my creation,
Be it lively, be it stale, Sadness or elation.

Joy and sorrow as I had
Will be re-inspected;
Feeling sane and being mad,
Taken or rejected.

Junk and chaos, come to halt!
‘Stead of wild confusion,
Form a meaningful gestalt
At my life’s conclusion.

-- Fritz Perls
In and Out the Garbage Pail

Sometimes we read things before we’re ready and miss much of the meat. That was the case with this poem, which serves as a preface for the “free-floating autobiography of the man who developed Gestalt Therapy.” I read this book in 1977 while working on my master’s degree in counseling psychology. I read a pile of books about Gestalt therapy, many written by Perls.

Today I readily admit that most of the material was over my head, but a few concepts stuck, like Gestalt as a sense of the whole. Over the intervening decades I’ve continued to develop and further appreciate that concept, along with my ability to look at an overview or bigger picture.  Gestalt techniques such talking to an empty chair are directly applicable to expressive writing exercises so valuable to those who write to find deeper meaning in their lives.

More than twenty years ago my collection of Gestalt books joined dozens of shelf mates on a journey to the library used book sale to clear space for newer acquisitions. As I became more involved with the healing aspects of writing, I began regretting that decision, especially when I found that libraries have made the same one for the same reason.  How frustrating to be unable to look back at those old volumes to reassess and further mine the rich ore I now recognized.

Last week, while attending a high school reunion in Los Alamos, I decided to check out the imposing concrete library that replaced the windowed one of my youth. I found a gold mine just beyond the door: half a dozen Gestalt titles I’d given away greeted me from their perch on Free Books carts in the Friends of the Library book sale area. I gratefully whisked all of them into my arms, clutching them close as I toured the building. 

I just opened the covers of In and Out the Garbage Pail in hopes of finding a short poem I’ve spent years searching for. I’m sure it was written by Fritz Perls. I do hope to find it in one of these books, but first I am pausing to fully savor this delightful Garbage Pail poem I was not mature enough to appreciate the first time around.

Today I realize I couldn’t possibly have understood that poem before I began writing lifestories. Now I recognize the message.   I’ve tossed editions of my own story in the garbage pail (or its digital equivalent, the Recycle Bin) countless times as it continues to shape-shift in a tantalizingly mysterious dance. I toy with selected memories, working to connect these story dots into a meaningful Gestalt. Perls renews my faith that I will solve the puzzle – hopefully before my life’s conclusion.

Write now: Anne Lamott’s advice to “write a shitty first draft” fits ever so well with Perls’ overview. Use Anne’s advice to write a draft of a story you’ve been putting off. Let Perls give you the freedom to toss it in the pail, then remove it again as you reassess. Don’t be deterred by all the shape-shifting. Hang in there with it and finish your story, however long or short.

Expert Advice: The Pro’s and the Con’s

If you haven’t discovered the TED Lecture series, I suggest you waste no time exploring their phenomenal videos about leading edge ideas, presented in TED sponsored programs.  I’ve embedded one of my favorites for your viewing pleasure. Noreena Hertz is an expert speaking on the dangers of becoming addicted to the advice of experts.

Her words appealed to me on just about every level, perhaps because I was raised in a family of die-hard do-it-yourselfers who lacked the resources of Google to solve every problem. We didn’t even go to the library. We just figured things out and did them! That’s a hard mental habit to shake.

Over the years I’ve come to have a healthy respect for those who know more than I do about any given topic, and I’m eager to benefit from their experience. But I’ve learned the hard way to listen to those skeptical whispers.

Those lessons are part of my Story. But the real tie-in for this video in this blog is an inferred message for writers in any genre. We can and should study the work of others. We’ll benefit from reading books about the craft of writing and taking classes to get more guidance. We’ll benefit from participating in writing and critique groups, forums, and writing organizations. We may even benefit from hiring editors and coaches.

BUT, when all the books, classes, and feedback are finished, regardless of the source, we need to listen to that little voice within reminding us, “This is my story.  This is what I need to say, and this is how I need to say it.” When it comes to your life, your Truth, YOU are the expert!

Speaking of experts, I modestly proclaim that I’m developing more than average expertise on the topic of the health benefits of expressive writing. Earlier this week “Writing With Feeling Feels Good,” my first post of a monthly series on this topic, debuted on the Women’s Memoirs site. The content is relevant to anyone, so you fellows are warmly invited to click over and take a look too. Don’t be deterred by the name. Matilda and Kendra assure me everyone is welcome.

Write now: do some journaling or free writing and conduct a written dialogue with your Inner Critic. Explore the whispers you hear urging you to defer to expert opinion. You may want to make this a round table and include your Inner Cheerleader to remind you of your own wisdom, power, voice and skill. Write about following the experts in your writing life and life in general. You may want to expand some “expert stories” into story form to share with others.

Lessons from Michelangelo

After twenty years or so, my growing collection of hard drives has bits and pieces of old material hidden away in odd places. I opened one of those odd places today and found a short piece I’d searched for while writing a recent related post about Michelangelo. I wrote the original piece for a newsletter. Don’t be fooled by the third-person parable form; it is a true account of personal experience. The story follows, unchanged from the 1982 original:

One day when Laurie was visiting Guru, he told her a fable about a small boy who asked Michelangelo how he was able to carve a horse out of a solid block of marble. The maestro explained that it was quite simple. He looked at the block, saw the horse inside, and chipped away all the marble that did not look like the horse.

Another day Laurie saw Guru again and, in the course of their conversation, she told him how a mutual friend had, for the avowed purpose of helping her become a better, more successful person, used her as the dumping ground for a tremendous amount of anger and frustration. Even though Laurie had realized that nearly all this anger was expressed at the self-image reflected in the mirror of her face, it still hurt, and a huge gap grew between them.

After a time she did learn some lessons from the experience, more valuable than the ones her friend had intended, and the traumatic memory became a source of strength. Her wound healed, and their friendship was renewed, growing even stronger than before.

Guru listened intently. When she finished, he nodded his head a bit sadly, saying, "I'm happy for you, my dear, but there are always scars..."

His response did not feel quite right, and she thought for a minute. Then she reminded him of Michelangelo's horse and explained that she had no scars. Quite the contrary. In this process, several chunks of marble which had not been part of her true form had been knocked off.

Guru had been right, as far as he went. There were scars. And they remained as long as she continued to feel angry, bitter, and vengeful. The scars were part of the marble which kept her from being fully herself, and once she was able to forgive the friend who inflicted them, those chunks fell away. She emerged, able to move ahead more freely and rapidly with the lightened load.

Like Laurie, we all move around under the weight of chunks of marble we haven't lost yet. For some the chunks may be made of anger and bitterness like they were for her. For others they may be fear, feelings of despair, or self-imposed limitations. They are always attitudes or beliefs, and they always slow us down, keeping us from being all that we could be. We can continue to carry them around, or we can allow them to drop away. The choice is always there, and it is ours to make.

As I recall, I wrote a few unsent letters before those chunks of marble fell away, so a type of journaling was part of the insight process, and a precursor to this story. I’m happy I found this file, because it’s an example of one of my early forms of published life writing, composed before self-disclosure was accepted form. It documents an important life insight, and it illustrates the versatility of life writing. I still like the parable form I chose, because it gracefully accommodates the generalization at the end.

Write now: experiment with writing a short memory in parable form, or as a short story using third person and an assumed name. Contrast that with the same story written in first person as your own experience. If you belong to a writing group, ask for input on the strengths and weaknesses of each form. If you’re looking for a(nother) writing group, you are welcome to join the Life Writers’ Forum. We don’t post much writing, but we have great discussions about writing.

Love Letters — Good for Both Heart and Soul

Cupid has got to be behind this synchronistic web discovery. Just hours before St. Valentine’s Day I found a link to a PsyBlog post explaining that Affectionate Writing Can Reduce Cholesterol.

Previous posts here have explained how writing about trauma is good for your health, and also that writing about happy stuff is good for you. But love letters and affectionate notes had not made the list, and I have not previously seen reduced cholesterol linked with any form of expressive writing. This is great news!

Based on the simple report on PsyBlog, this study appears to be among the hundreds of variations on the Pennebaker research model that has people write for about twenty minutes on three to five occasions:

According to new research, writing down affectionate thoughts about close friends and family can reduce your cholesterol levels. Floyd et al. (2007) randomly assigned participants to one of two groups: one experimental and one control. The experimental group wrote with affection about one person in their lives for 20 minutes on three occasions over a five-week period. The control group wrote mundane descriptions of their activities over the week, jobs they had done and places they had lived.

(read full article)

Note that the experiment involved writing three times. I’m inclined to think that writing to more people, more often could amplify the results and have the same stress-reducing effect as keeping a Gratitude Journal. This could be worth turning into a habit or way of life!

Write now: pen a loving note to a special person in your life. For best results repeat often, at least once a week. You may get even stronger results by using pen and paper rather than sending an e-mail!

Picture: Sharon Lippincott © 2011

Mushrooms Grow in Manure

How often do you stop to think about the source of mushrooms when you slice one up for an elegant meal you’re preparing? Did you know that commercial mushrooms grow in manure in dark caves?

“Wait a minute,” you may be thinking. “Are you trying to spoil my dinner? And what on earth do mushrooms, manure and and caves have to do with life writing?”

More than you would have guessed. Mushrooms are a gourmet item, turning many a mundane meal into a foodie’s feast. Stories perform a similar function, perhaps livening conversation at that feast. Though not all stories have mushroom-like roots in dung, and not all originate in darkness, some of the most compelling ones do.

I mention this to urge you to look back through your life and explore a few of those dark moments you generally prefer to leave behind closed doors in the dungeon of memory. Grab a pen and paper and fling open that door, fearlessly facing the never-quite-forgotten. Do this with a strong sense of hope and confidence that your exploration will result in a feast of flavorful story (perhaps for an audience of one), freeing you from the tyranny of secrecy, and you’ll experience significant health benefits as a result.

Don’t be surprised if your emotional temperature begins to rise as you explore this mental manure. Before mushroom spore is planted in horse by-product, the offal must ferment or “cure” for three to five weeks. The pile becomes quite hot in this process, killing harmful organisms like weed seeds and pathogens. Mental manure has a similar effect. It’s quite common to feel some distress as you recall dark, upsetting memories and events. When you’re done, the memory is “cured,” and succulent Truth mushrooms can grow from it.

Rest assured as you do, this is a sign the process is working, and after three to five days, your mushrooms will be planted. It will be time to shut off the cave again and let the mushroom stories grow and mature. Go outdoors and bask in the light. By the way, writing about happy positive memories has been shown to have the same health benefits as writing about dark ones.

After a suitable period of time, recheck your cave, and don’t be surprised to find a long list of stories ready to be transcribed.

Here’s a link to a collection of blog posts about the Pennebaker research and process and how to use it, along with others related to mining those mental mushrooms.

Write now: make a list of ten memories you could use as manure for growing mushrooms. Set aside some time to begin curing your compost and get started.

Photo credits:

Mushroom cave: ChestofBooks.com

Portabello Bake: Jules.stonesoup

Lifting the Clouds of Depression

“Lifting the cloud of depression is one of the documented benefits of expressive writing, aka life writing, especially in the form of journaling, rants or freewriting.”

I got sidetracked after I wrote that sentence and before I sat back down to finish this blog post, I checked my e-mail. There I found the latest edition of Amber Starfire’s stellar Journaling Through Life Ezine. The first sentence in her feature article reads, “A recent article on health said that feelings of helplessness and lack of control are significant factors contributing to depression, particularly for women.” Well, hey! You know the saying, “Great minds run in the same channels.”

Back in the ‘70s when I was a psychology grad student, Locus of Control was all the rage, and research papers and theses (including mine) in psychology departments all over the country incorporated Rotter’s Locus of Control Inventory. A strong correlation was found between a strong external locus of control and depression.

Translated to Plain People Language, that means that the less control you perceive yourself to have over your own life, the more likely you are to become depressed.

Back in the day, I scored high on internal locus of control. I just found a self-scoring version on the University of North Carolina’s psychology department site. I don’t recall finding the test irritating thirty years ago, but today my preferred answer would be “neither one” for most questions, rendering my score personally meaningless. My path to that change of perspective could make a excellent personal essay topic.

In spite of being out of sync with questions on that scale today, I still subscribe to the message of Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning that others can control every circumstance of our lives, but they cannot control our attitude. To me, that’s the ultimate in Internal Locus of Control. To date, the most powerful tool I’ve found for maintaining attitude control is “root writing”, a term I introduced in my Tree of Life Writing post.

By root writing I mean rants, freewriting about puzzling situations, and journaling in general — personal writing best done “underground” and left unshared. This writing helps synchronize head and heart and maintain that sense of personal control.

Which brings us back around to the well-documented value of expressive writing for lifting the cloud of depression. Or maybe keeping it from settling in to begin with. There’s nothing like a good session with my journal for maintaining serenity and optimism.

Write now: click over and take the Locus of Control Inventory, then journal or freewrite about the thoughts you have about your score. If you are subject to depression, try using James Pennebaker’s formula for exploring some of the “out-of-control” circumstances that may be contributing factors.