Writing is not foreign to therapy. For years, professionals have used logs, questionnaires, journals, and other writing forms to help people recover from stress and trauma.
Scholars trace the idea of writing as therapy to the time of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, around 1,200 BC: the entrance to his royal library declared: “House of Healing for the Soul.” American Unity Minister Samuel Crothers coined the term “bibliotherapy” in 1916, and in the late 1980s, James Pennebaker led the modern writing therapy movement in a seminal research study that showed potential health benefits. “Expressive writing” in emotional disorder.
In the last two decades, writing therapy has joined dance and art therapy as a legitimate therapeutic tool, and this has sparked growing interest in a type of writing that focuses on the healing power of putting feelings into the paper or on the screen. In this Psychology-Online article we will discover together 8 simple and creative therapeutic writing exercises.
Writing, giving materiality to the non-existent, allows you to feel and see yourself from another perspective. Hence the psychological importance of writing in our way of prefiguring change, of giving ourselves a new image of ourselves, of foreseeing for ourselves an “authentic self”, all to be discovered and reconstructed.
Writing means putting yourself in relationship with yourself and others and training both the ability to tell yourself, discovering the uniqueness and beauty of every essential novel, and the equally important ability to listen. Writing as therapy leads to come into contact with, and sometimes discover, one’s own inner timethe page becomes the white space on which to say the unspeakable because it is too intimate, or unknown even to oneself.
The ultimate goal of the writer is contact, so in writing therapy it can be a tool to reach the other fully. Writing is support in the therapeutic process as a creative act whose purpose is to promote the spontaneity of the self at the limit of contact, overcoming the blockage and achieving full contact: thus, writing in therapy becomes a curative-creative act. .
Writing and its development, first individual and then collective, strongly demands a greater understanding of the other, a marked predisposition towards those who are telling about themselves, a more heartfelt and natural attention for those who are listening, a willingness to welcome the new sense of the lives of others and our own, in a climate characterized by an indisputable and omnipresent trust.
James Pennybacker, professor of social psychology at the University of Austin (Texas) and leading student of the therapeutic effects, both physically and psychologically, of writing, has shown how useful it is to write as long as it is done with a certain consistency ( in his laboratories he proposes write for 15 minutes every day), and that not only the facts are told, but also the emotions related to them and consequent.
- Writing seems to function as an active strategy to cope with situations through the construction of a narrative text that transforms disorganized emotional and sensory memories into a linguistic structure with a precise spatio-temporal dimension.
- The more coherent and vivid the story, the more it achieves understand one’s own history, capture its peculiarities and give it meaning. For example, the person who writes a traumatic event is forced to translate it into words, that is, to arrange, organize and present the information in a linguistic structure, which implies cognitive changes immediate.
- Furthermore, it is obliged to face emotions related to the traumatic event narrated and to control its impact.
- Another benefit of therapeutic writing is that, little by little, they are also introduced changes in social relationships and in the way of speaking to others.
Once we have seen the multiple benefits of therapeutic writing, you may wonder what the best therapeutic writing exercises are. Whichever format is chosen, writing therapy can help the user stimulate their own personal growth, practice creative expression, and experience a sense of empowerment and control over the writer’s life. Below we will see 8 simple and creative therapeutic writing exercises.
1. The personal diary
The essence of our psyche is given by the changes that seem to escape observation: the personal diary captures life, through words, a collage of lived moments is represented and continuity is provided to the variation of existence. Journal writing can be, for example, an essential part of the process of resolving loss, grief, or grief. In this article we talk about the.
2. Free writing
Also called “journaling,” this therapeutic writing exercise allows the person to put things that come to mind on paper. There is no censorship or judgment involved in the free writing process; it’s about writing everything that comes to mind. In some cases, thoughts may be coherent and complete, while others may be partial sentences or isolated ideas. Writing can include both positive and negative feelings, but people are encouraged to accept and acknowledge them all.
3. Poetry
Although some people find writing poetry intimidating at first, in some cases the process can be incredibly therapeutic. Therapists will usually guide this task in some way, giving the person ideas about what to write or how to organize thoughts into readable prose. Once again, the words that go on the paper must be recognized and accepted without judgment for the simple thoughts and ideas that they are for writing to be therapeutic.
4. The letter
This therapeutic writing exercise can be especially helpful for people who are struggling with an individual or a relationship. This letter can be written to express feelings towards the other person, whether it be happiness, anger, anger, rage, etc. The letter could include many things that people want to say to each other face to face, but can’t for various reasons. The message should not be sent to the other person, it is a therapeutic exercise for oneself.
5. Automatic writing
A great way to avoid judgment from yourself and others or continued mental wear and tear is to write automatically, random words which seem to have no connection with each other. However, they almost always contain a deep truth: they are suggestions, concepts, hopes, desires that come from that portion of consciousness that is normally erased from the mind. To discover what message comes from the conscious use of automatic writing, after a few days the words you have written will be read automatically.
6. The autobiographical story
Another exercise to continue practicing therapeutic writing is to recount one’s own life. Writing one’s own autobiography is not a mere list of dates, names and events. On the contrary, creating an emotional story, immersing yourself in the role of the protagonist and facing the vicissitudes that life proposes is a great way to find meaning in one’s own existential experience and build an identity more balanced.
7. Writing the problem
Another very useful therapeutic writing exercise is the one we can practice in the case of problems we face. Start with the ten-minute writing technique without stopping to describe the problem in front of you. Next, identify the main obstacles and analyze them one by one, spending even ten minutes per point, per problem. Finally, write down what you really think about these problems and identify possible solutions. The solution may not come right away, but don’t despair because this is where the thought process that will lead you to finding the solution is generally triggered.
8. Deconstruction
We have to start from something that is part of our life and we consider problematic and then, thanks to the continuous rewriting of the “problem”, divide it into smaller problems. This exercise allows us to give the appropriate dimension to the problem and see it from a new point of view, possibly with fewer worries, generalizations, and trivializations.