#expressive-writing

#expressive-writing

When my youngest foster daughter was in treatment for her severe eating disorder, one of her therapies involved writing a trauma narrative. In 11 single-spaced, both sides, she documented all the obstacles she had overcome in her young life: the death of her father, her mother's alcoholism. Then, in what her counselor called a destruction ceremony, she shredded her words, stuffed them into balloons, and set them sailing on her way outside of the residential treatment facility where she was living at the time.

Writing can bring old memories to the surface with surprising clarity. You might worry that once you let your suppressed feelings surface, you'll feel overwhelmed by sadness, anger, or anxious thoughts and have no way to "turn it off." But I would encourage you to view it in a different way: writing to heal can show you how heavy a weight you've been carrying for far too long, and how much you deserve to finally set that weight down.

As I've shared before, when I was 12, I was playing at a friend's house one hot August afternoon when I was told I was needed at home. As I turned into my long driveway, I saw the lights of an ambulance, a stretcher being loaded into the back. The doors slammed shut. The whirling lights threw red streaks across the oaks as it sped past me out of our driveway. No one noticed the small, pale, immobilized girl standing by the mailbox.