“Research from Arizona State University has shown that writing could lower your cholesterol and give you a healthier heart. Yes, by simply WRITING. It seems that if you write affectionately about loved ones for 20 minutes, 3 times a week you could receive this added bonus of a reduced cholesterol level.”

Can this be so? I cannot at this time find the original study, so in mulling this over, I find myself reflecting on Miller’s Law of communication: “Assume the communication is true and then imagine what it can be true of.”

My take on this blog entry, when I assume the presented information to be true, generates theses reactions:

• Stress can influence cholesterol levels. (read more)
• Expressive writing can lower stress because such writing often results in disclosure, emerging insights, and the ability to reframe and learn from what has happened to us.
• When we write to honor others, we honor ourselves. This can raise self-esteem and lower or prevent depression–a very bad emotion for heart health.

Most of all, this news underscores that we can use a writing practice to help ourselves prevent illness and distress which trumps having to turn to writing to recover from illness and distress.

Improve your writing by including information about troubled childhoods poisoning life by becoming acquainted with with the decades-long, ongoing ACE Study. When you learn about the ACE Study, you will know what problems might plague your adult characters.

ACE stands for adverse childhood experiences (ACE) associated with addictions as well as adult health and well-being problems. To date, ten such experiences have been identified in children younger than 18 who grow up in a household with:

• Recurrent physical abuse
• Recurrent emotional abuse
• Sexual abuse
• An alcohol or drug abuser
• An incarcerated household member
• Someone who is chronically depressed, suicidal, institutionalized or mentally ill
• Mother being treated violently
• The loss of one or both biological parents
• Emotional or physical neglect

Any one of the above ten items receives a score of one, no matter how many times it occurred. For instance, if you were sexually abused once or many times as a child, your ACE score is one and only one. The higher your ACE score, the more likely you will be to experience a wide range of health and social problems in your adult life.

Recently, Dr. Felitti, one of the founders of the ACE Study, spoke in San Mateo, CA, and presented an overview of the findings from the ACE Study. He noted that the official questionnaire for determining an ACE score was several pages long and needed to be professionally evaluated. However, recently the ACE Study Group developed a “self-test” version of the questionnaire. This survey has only ten questions and can be explored and taken by clicking the link below.
Click here to download a copy of the ACE survey

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.