How to Harness the Power of Writing for Healing Purposes

When I set out to write my memoir, When Skies Are Gray: A Grieving Mother’s Lullaby, about the sudden stillbirth of my first child, my daughter, Nora, I did so without knowing it would heal my heart. At the time, I was a young psychotherapist. I began therapy soon after my daughter’s death to process my grief. 

(4 Types of Smaller Grief We Need to Talk About.)

Even though I was not yet a writer, I intuitively turned to writing as the primary tool to help me through those early moments, months, and years of mourning. Along the way, I’ve learned that writing can be a powerful and transformative tool for healing because the human brain is hardwired for stories to help us understand our lives. Research has even shown that writing our stories can improve our psychological and physical health by reducing the severity of chronic illness symptoms to decreasing negative emotions of depression and anxiety in our everyday lives. 

I know firsthand the transformative power writing can have because it allowed me to lean into my grief and helped me find my path toward healing. Here are seven ways you can harness the power of writing for your own healing purposes.

1) Create a Comfortable Space

Before you sit down to write, find a time where you can be alone and free from distractions to regulate your nervous system. Try grounding yourself in your body and making sure you’re in a safe space to delve into reflection on harder topics. It’s important to keep in mind that while you may be writing about past painful events, you are not actually in the past experiencing your pain. You are, in fact, in the present, putting pain onto paper as a way to heal.

2) Unlock Healing in Just 15 Minutes

When you sit down to write with the goal of healing your heart, you don’t have to do so for long periods of time. James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who developed an expressive writing paradigm for healing purposes, found that almost all participants in his study on using writing with the intent to heal reported a significant drop in their emotional distress around the event they addressed in their expressive writing. They did so with just 15-20 minutes of expressive writing a day for four consecutive days. This was enough to experience healing benefits from the practice.

3) Be Purposeful and Specific

To achieve an emotional release through writing, you must be purposeful in what you write. Once you start writing, your goal is to be specific. You want to not only focus on what happened during the hard event you are attempting to heal from but also describe in detail how it made you feel as well as the thoughts you had during the stressful time. Eventually, you may want to include the thoughts you have now about the event as well. It can also help to play around with writing your narrative in the first or third person to gain a different perspective on the event. When we write in this reflective way, we are better able to put our story into a narrative that is easier for us to hold as we integrate the painful parts of our past into our present.

Check out Lindsey M. Henke’s When Skies Are Gray here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

4) Write for You Only

When you write to heal, your writing is for you and you alone. This allows you to write without the worry of others reading your writing. It opens you up to be more authentic and vulnerable, which helps the healing process along. To do this, let whatever comes to mind flow out of you and onto the paper without judging your writing. Do not worry about grammar, punctuation, spelling, or having the story make sense. When we write without judgment, we allow space for our imagination to help guide our narrative into a more healing one.

5) Share With a Safe Confidant

If you would like, you can share your story with a confidant when you are ready. Sharing your story helps you feel connected to others, and their validation can contribute to your healing as well. Be sure to choose people who are empathetic and non-judgmental. They must be worthy of your story and capable of holding your story safely for you. Sharing with someone safe can create space for even more healing.

6) Consider Writing a Letter

Writing a letter is another form of writing that can offer healing. Writing in this traditional format allows us to address a loved one who died when we sadly can no longer share our thoughts and feelings with them. It can also be used to help us extend letters of gratitude, forgiveness, or compassion to those still living when we feel it wouldn’t be helpful to our relationship to share these letters with them. We can even write letters to past versions of ourselves from the perspective of our current self, extending hope and healing to who we were during the traumatic events of the past as a way of healing ourselves in the present. With writing in this creative and perspective-shifting way, the options for how it can foster healing in your life are endless.

With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!

7) Create a New Narrative

The beauty of writing about our painful pasts is that we have the opportunity to craft the narrative of our story in the present. When we write about our pain from a growth mindset, externalizing events, and processing our thoughts and emotions, we are taking control of the narrative arc of the story. This narrative shift gives you power, affirming that you are the main character and the writer of your story, which means you have the ability to make meaning out of your story and shape its ending. The narrative shift that meaning-making provides through writing about our past gives us a sense of agency over our heartache and opens us up to a new understanding of our pain.

Using the above techniques of harnessing the power of writing to heal can help us address our painful life experiences by expressing our deepest emotions and making meaning out of our stories. This ultimately leads to a healing narrative we can carry with us into the future that not only increases our mental well-being but can positively impact our physical health too.