Writing Practice Prescription

by

Ellen Taliaferro, MD

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

–Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude

Got a problem? Get a journal. Let your journal, and you the author of what goes into it, be your caring friend.

There is no substitute for a listening ear. About 400 years before Christ, Hippocrates noted that every person had a doctor inside him or her. The trick is to bring out that doctor and activate his or her wisdom. So often we know what is wrong with us or in our life but we just don’t know what it is that we know. Thus the common observation among many writers that they “write to know.”

Journal writing affords the private opportunity to express feelings, examine reactions to stressors, and explore feelings. Journals keep their secrets while you can let yours out by confiding in the pages of the journal.

What to write about?

Folks new to journal writing often wonder what to write about and where to start. The simple answer is to start anywhere and write about anything as long as it is about you. How do you:

• Feel about something
• Delight in what you see in the clouds
• React to distress

When you engage in such writing, you lay the path down to establish an ongoing writing practice. At first, it may seem that you need to force the words out but if you keep writing an amazing thing happens. Words begin to emerge on their own. Then they might even dress themselves up and try evoke different responses. You know you have arrived in the right spot when you go back an read a journal entry and then think to yourself, “Gee, I didn’t know that I know this.”

Jump-start exercise

Take a painful event that happened to you at sometimes in your life. Write it down on the top of a blank page and then start writing about how that event impacted your life. Write without thinking or editing and write steady for at least 15 minutes a day three times a week. If you wish, write longer than 15 minutes in each session and write more often than three times a week.

Big events extract big costs. It’s OK if it takes you many sessions to write about how an event impacted your life. Just keep writing. Past research has shown that this type of ongoing writing about stressful and painful events builds and restores health.

Write on!