7 Ways Writing Heals Us—Even After Terrible Trauma
On an icy February day, as the wind beat at the house and a gray sky lowered, threatening more snow, my phone rang.
It was two o’clock on a Monday afternoon. I sat at the kitchen table, tugging at a reluctant plot thread in my latest novel. The phone was a jangling interruption; my thoughts scattered like marbles on a frozen lake.
When I picked up the phone my husband told me, “Someone from Kiewit just called. Kyle didn’t show up for work today.”
Kyle. Our son. Who never missed a day of school or—later—a day of work.
I closed the laptop. Outside, the wind found its way under the eaves and howled. Cold settled in my lungs.
As a novelist, essayist, and writing instructor, I’ve learned first-hand that writing is a powerful tool for healing. My life has been pockmarked with tragedy—a wildfire that took everything. My brilliant mother’s slide into dementia. My father’s suicide. A phone call on a Monday afternoon.
My writing students are primarily combat veterans carrying plenty of trauma; I began teaching as part of a collaboration between the Department of Defense and the National Endowment of the Arts to bring healing to veterans.
Writing has helped my students and me. In the form of essays, journals, poems, and novels, writing has been the thread that leads us out of the maze of our post-traumatic stress.
The science is real: Writing helps us manage our response to trauma. It boosts our immune system. Multiple studies conducted by scientists like James Pennebaker and others have shown the success of a writing practice in coping not only with trauma, but with day-to-day depression and anxiety. Writing returns a sense of control to our lives when they’ve been torn apart.
Whether you’re journaling for yourself, writing novels and short stories, or sharing posts on a social media platform like Substack, here are seven ways writing can help.
Processing our thoughts and fears
To paraphrase Joan Didion, we write to understand what we think. Writing in all its forms helps us process our experiences and make sense of them. Because we’re narrative creatures, even a chaotic dump of thoughts, memories, to-do lists, ideas, goals, and more will begin to organize itself the more we write. We’ll find the narrative thread amidst the chaos and fill in the details of broken memories. This ultimately allows us to form a coherent life story.
In a clinical setting, this technique is known as Narrative Exposure Therapy. A police officer likened this writing process to sending a fragmented hard drive (your memories) through defragmentation software (your writing). At some point, the memories fall into an orderly, recognizable pattern which—in turn—enables you to view and process these memories in a calm, straightforward way.
Even NFL team members are getting into it the power of writing. Exposed to constant criticism and forced to perform well under intense pressure, these players are keeping journals that allow them to organize their thoughts and dump their worries on the page. Doing so, they say, makes them better players—and better people.
Learning self-regulation
When the emotions sweep over us, driving us to our knees or making us want to smash something, writing offers a ready de-escalation. By writing about the intensity of our emotions—even if we channel it through a fictional character in our current work, we regain a sense of control. Writing helps us regulate our emotions and move toward calm.
Using catharsis
Catharsis—κάθαρσις in ancient Greek—means “cleansing” or “purification,” especially of negative emotions. It’s been used as a function of the arts at least since the ancient Greeks. One of my students couldn’t write about his own experiences in Iraq. But he was fascinated by poems and stories from World War I. Witnessing what soldiers underwent on the Western Front allowed him to safely process the experience of war from a distance, and purge some of his more negative feelings.
Managing triggers
Triggers, in the mental health world, are objects or events that can bring on or worsen negative feelings. Writing allows us to safely work through our triggers. Grab your journal or open your short story and capture your emotions on the page before they spiral out of control. When I suddenly remember a beloved object lost in the wildfire, I will sit and write about that object and why it has meaning for me. Often, the object’s value is tied to someone I love, and writing about that person—even when they’re gone—settles me.
Finding purpose
One of the best ways to build resilience and create the meaningful life that trauma threatens to take from us is to have a purpose that extends beyond our day-to-day. When we commit to completing a writing project—however small or large—we find direction and momentum. I’ve spent hours and days feeling like an insect caught in amber; writing helps open the world.
Creating community
Like a sense of purpose, having a community is a well-known buffer against PSTD, depression, and anxiety. Writing allows us to create in-person and online communities—Substack, Zoom writing groups, coffee shop meetups, etc. When we share our writing, whether as blog posts, short stories, essays, or novels, we’re reaching out and touching other lives, other minds, other hearts. And they are touching ours.
Enjoying distraction
This is plain vanilla, maybe, but extremely effective. Rather than numbing ourselves with Netflix or alcohol, creating a story or crafting an essay can take our minds off our troubles, at least for a time.
For me, after that Monday afternoon phone call, all seven of these elements would come to my rescue.
Minutes after we hung up, my husband and I were on the highway to our son’s apartment an hour away. There we found him in his bed, a victim of SUDEP—Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy. He died alone the day after Valentine’s.
After his death, I sank into the twilight of winter. Outside the confines of my home-turned-prison, Covid wracked the world. Still, some form of life ground on: I was under deadline for my novel. My editor told me to take whatever time I needed to grieve. But while the wind played banshee at the windows, and the only signs of life were animal prints in the snow, I began to think about my son’s work ethic. And how distressed he would be to know that his death had brought my writing to a halt.
After some weeks, I picked up the novel again, but with a few differences. First, I brought a new understanding to my characters’ struggles against prejudice and trauma and the constant vicissitudes of life. Secondly, I began to work through my grief by working through theirs. And, finally, I leaned into research that fascinated me, that took me back to my studies as a medievalist in college.
Through my writing, I remembered who I was before I lost so much. And I began to believe I could find my way back. I’ve written four novels since losing Kyle. All of them are laced with my sorrow for the people I’ve lost. But my books are also filled with a determination not to give in to pain.
Check out Barbara Nickless’ The Drowning Game here:
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