Writing Practice Prescription

by

Ellen Taliaferro, MD

In a previous post, What Is Your ACE Score, I noted that the founders of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study reported 10 adverse childhood experiences that impact your current state of health. That post also provided a link to a site that will let you determine what your ACE score is. (You can request of copy of the self-scoring test by clicking here.)
The question arises, now that I know what my ACE score is what do I do about it?

Dr. Vincent Felitti, Founder of the Department of Preventive Medicine in Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, and his colleagues in San Diego begin addressing a patient’s ACE score with two steps. First they ask the patient how a particular adverse childhood experience has affected his or her life.

Then they ask the patient to write:

“Autobiographical writing is often used as the next therapeutic step at Kaiser Permanente. For example (after interviewing the patient,) ‘Before we meet again to discuss this further, I’d like you to start sending me, by email attachment, a detailed autobiography of your life in five year segments.’

James Pennebaker at the University of Texas has studied this approach in depth.42 We have found autobiographical writing acceptable to patients, useful, and affordable. The effect of this retelling the story in detail is to allow the patient to start becoming desensitized, through repeated exposure in a supportive setting. It also allows patients to reanalyze the causal relationship of various life experiences to outcomes later in life, including medical problems.”

–(Reference: Chapter Nine, page 83 of The Physician’s Guide to Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse.)

You don’t have to be a certified Kaiser patient in San Diego to benefit from Dr. Felitti’s experience and wisdom. Join your health care management team by dedicating some of your personal writing-practice sessions to these exercises:

1. Think of an emotionally charged and costly event of your past life. In your notebook, write this question, “How did this (event) impact my life?”
2. What do I remember about my life during the time between ages:

1. Birth and age five
2. Age five and age ten
3. Age ten and age fifteen
4. Age fifteen and age twenty

During each writing session, write for at least 15 to 20 minutes a day. Don’t think. Just write as fast as you can with no regard for editing or worrying about what others might think.

At the end of each session or later in the day, read and reflect on what you wrote. Make a note of any insights that emerged from your writing.