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.

Memoir Writing on Steroids

 It’s the memoir writing process on steroids! I thought. These scholars are creating a memoir of civilization in the Andes. …

For over a dozen years I've dreamed of visiting Machu Picchu, and I would have been quite content to go directly there and come straight home. That dream has come true on a much larger scale, and the ton of bonus insights I derived in the process have caused my understanding of Story to explode like a super nova.

Some people spend weeks or months boning up on a location before going there. Not me. I hit a place cold, get an overview from guides and local resources, then fill in the blanks later. In this case, I was ahead of the game. I'd watched a few documentaries and done a little reading about the Incas, but I was totally unprepared for the fire hose gush of compelling pre-Inca history that our guides saturated us with for over two weeks.

Over the last decade or so, teams of archeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, linguists and others have made remarkable progress in piecing together fragments of information from multiple sources to give an expanded picture of life in various times and regions. For example, they have now discovered that although the Incas and others did not use writing as we know it, they did have a system of recording detailed historical information. They embedded stories in weaving and painted them on pottery. They recorded words and stories in knotted strings along with complex accounting records.

Before this trip, I had no idea that the Incas were merely the capstone on a vast pyramid of previous Andes civilizations and empires. Through a combination of enticement and coercion, the Incas united the Quechua, Aymara, Moche and assorted other people in the Andean region into a single, loosely knit empire. They were astute enough to take the best each culture had to offer, assimilating and building upon the accumulated skills and wisdom of those people.

As I listened to accounts of how old assumptions are being reinterpreted to incorporate new knowledge, I got goosebumps. I realized that in a very real sense, historians are now creating what amounts to a mega-memoir of Andean civilization. What they are doing is remarkably similar to what we as individuals go through in compiling memoirs. We also sort and compile memory fragments into cohesive stories of times, events and experiences. 

One thing that especially struck me as I pondered this epiphany was the fact that these experts didn’t just keep digging for more artifacts. They have continually pondered the significance of what they already had and developed new tools for analyzing it. They have not shied away from the occasional need to challenge assumptions and edit the big picture as the need arose. 

A major key to recent progress has been the growing levels of collaboration among researchers in a wide variety of disciplines. Each brings a unique perspective has resulted in much deeper, multidimensional understanding.

There’s a major lesson for memoir writers in the Andean discoveries: we can also benefit from reassessing what we already know, perhaps with the help of a team of others to provide new perspectives. We can also use tools like old photos (not just family ones – check the web for photos of places and things from various decades in your past), old phone books and other historical documents, music, and conversations with relatives and past acquaintances. 

Perhaps the most important cue these researchers give us as we explore explore new perspectives is to question assumptions and perceptions. Look for the roots of current attitudes and beliefs and follow them to new conclusions. Follow the researchers’ example and put your memoir writing on steroids. 

Write now: spend time on research to deepen your memories of the past and write about them. You don’t have to write an entire memoir. Vignettes and essays are enough to answer questions in years to come. Leave a comment about resources you find especially helpful.