Journaling as Self-Care

You never know what you can learn by reading serendipitously. I will be doing this, later, after my subconscious las had its turn processing.

A short one, but I hope an important one, for those who are suffering through painful memories of traumatic experiences.

Chapter 24 of Roland Allen’s remarkable book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Allen, 2023) is dedicated the topic of writing in journals as a means of performing self-care. The chapter is titled: Express Yourself: Journaling as Self-Care.

The story starts with Dr. Jamie Pennebaker, the person who did the seminal research on journaling as a way to recover from deeply traumatic experiences both physically and mentally. I won’t delve into the details of the chapter, because it is worthwhile to read what the author has to say for themselves.

Pennebaker started researching traumatic emotional factors which may physically affect a person. He conducted a study where half the group were asked to write about any topic of their choosing for three days, while the other half was asked to write about the most traumatic experience of their lives for three days. The writers were asked to explore how that experience affects and connects with how they live and think after the experience, how the experience affected their relationships with other people: family, friends, partners, co-workers, etc., and how, in their estimation, the experience affected their personal development since that experience. They were asked to take a deep dive into their emotions resulting from the trauma.

The first surprising result was that none of the participants who were asked to delve into the painful memories of their traumatic experiences were reluctant to write about it. Second, Pennebaker’s research group found a definite correlation with those who wrote about the traumatic experiences honestly and the writer’s general wellbeing, both physically and mentally, in the weeks after the writing exercise. This study was repeated throughout the world and the results were repeated.

Pennebaker named the writing exercise Expressive Writing. The ground rules were simple.

·       The writer chose what they considered to be emotionally traumatic, not the researchers. It was entirely up to the writers.

·       There were minimal instructions.

o   There should be very little constraints placed on the writers.

o   Any structure that was imposed on the writing came from the writers, not the researchers.

o   The rules serve the purpose of allowing the writer to freely explore their emotions, and their memories of the trauma. Their assumption was that any kind of constraint serves to limit the writer’s ability to dig in deeply into the recesses of their memories.

·       The writers stated their own beliefs about the benefits of the experience.

·       The writers were encouraged to express their own coping strategies rather than having strategies suggested to them.

·       The writers were encouraged to avoid just cursorily recounting the facts of the trauma.

·       The writers were encouraged to explore their deepest feelings, to help them get to the core of their mental anguish and express them freely.

Pennebaker suggests that the benefit of Expressive Writing is represented by more than just measurable health metrics, the personal feeling of well-being in those who have done the writing were also boosted, this is of course self-reported.

When researchers in the area were asked to explain why they thought this kind of self-care was so effective, their explanation reminded me of a quote I recently read in another context. 

“What is honored will be cultivated.” Plato

To paraphrase: by recalling and exploring the memories of the traumatic experience, the writer is giving it attention rather than ignoring or suppressing them. I doubt the word honor is appropriate, depending on the circumstances of the trauma, but the sentiment is valid, by specifically culling the recesses of the long-term memory to bring those memories to the surface, it allows the person to consciously dissect and analyze what they felt about the trauma and more importantly, what their perception of the trauma from long ago. The comparison of their emotional reactions, then and now, gives the writer a chance to re-examine and analyze experience in hindsight rather than processing the traumatic memory in the moment.

One specific postulated benefit is the conjecture that the writer can relieve the detrimental effect that the memory of the traumatic experience has had on their working memory. The human working memory is sometimes also called short term memory and is known to be limited in capacity. The memory of traumatic experience usurps the already limited memory capacity of the working memory, it manifests itself as a constant drain on the working memory capacity, as the person is constantly preoccupied with the trauma, which causes a steady state of distraction, which also makes the person less effective cognitively.

Interestingly, the researchers also examined whether this one-time processing the trauma through journal writing had a different effect on those who are regular journal keepers versus those who are non-journal keepers. As it turned out, the regular journal keepers did not have an edge over the non-journal keepers.

Pennebaker also suggests that Expressive Writing should not be done immediately after the trauma; instead, he recommends a waiting period of at least two months after the trauma. I would hazard to guess that the amount of waiting period is commensurate with the degree of trauma elicit in the person. This waiting period allows the subconscious to examine the trauma from different emotional perspectives and to avoid emotional rebounding effect when examining the salient details of the traumatic experience.

Why did this chapter in Allen’s book resonate with me enough to spur me to write this short note? I know many of my friends are suffering mentally. I am suffering as well and I was looking for a way to process traumas. I happen to be reading this book and by sheer serendipity, this chapter caught my attention. I usually read linearly from the beginning of the book to the end of the book, but for some reason I chose to skip to Chapter 24 this time. Part of my motivation is selfish, hoping Journaling for Self-Care can help me deal with emotional trauma, past, present, or future; concomitantly, I am hope that this mechanism will help my friends.

References

Allen, R. (2023). The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. Windsor, Ontario: Bibliosis.