Looking Up at the Starless Sky:
My Journey with Expressive Writing
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” —Socrates
November 5th, 2017. I stood behind my friends, eagerly waiting for my turn to climb up the ladder. The junior production of Young Frankenstein had just concluded, and we had been left to our own devices backstage while the adults mingled in the theater lobby. One by one, my friends disappeared into the dark abyss above us. Suddenly it was my turn. Perhaps a bit hesitant, I climbed upwards, following the cacophony of young voices emerging from what I assumed was the roof.
A hand reached out, presumably to pull me up. I grabbed hold as my friend, let’s call her Sarah, pulled me up the rest of the way.
My assumption had been correct—with the roof revealing itself under the light of the moon as I stepped out onto the gravel platform. I ran forward and embraced Sarah in a hug, with no intention of letting go.
She pulled away but I remained planted in my spot, unable to move while simultaneously trying to enjoy the moment to the fullest extent. Looking up at the starless sky—something I never do, given the colossal pit in my stomach when my mind wanders to the topic of space—I “realized that this would be a memory that I would remember forever” (Bernardi, Journal 2). I was face-to-face with my biggest fear and all I could think about was how much I’d miss this moment once it was gone.
“And as I climbed down the ladder, I left behind all my worries and stress, if only for a moment. I pushed back off the ladder and jumped towards the safety of solid ground. Of course, I had to trip over my own feet and fall backward, but Sarah was there to catch me. It was then that I realized: there is always going to be someone there to catch me. Even if it isn’t Sarah, someone will always catch you when you fall. Someone will always love you when you think you don’t deserve to be loved” (Bernardi, Journal 2).
And as I drove home that night, I knew in my heart that I would never again be the same.
And when I got home, there was only one thing to do. Write.
So I did.
I wrote seven pages detailing the events of that night. What I did, how I felt, what this meant for me as a self-aware human being, I wrote it all down. As I did most nights after experiencing something so profound.
I do not believe that I would have remembered that night had I not taken the time to create such a well-constructed narrative. I also don’t believe that I would have remembered a great deal of my life without the aid of my journals. Blame it on mental illness, blame it on my forgetfulness, it’s entirely up to you. Either way, I can assure you that I would be an entirely different person today if not for the constant chronicling of my experiences throughout the years.
I have never, not once, taken for granted my ability to articulate my thoughts and emotions through language. One of my most valued and sacred relationships, you could say that me and writing go way back. My love for words could have stemmed from many sources; the fact that my parents read aloud to me every night, the adoration that my grandmother has for the written and spoken word, my overactive imagination and incessant need to explore far-off worlds within my mind. I do not plan to uncover that mystery here, nor do I expect that the answer would be anything other than riddle-bound and convoluted. What I do plan to explore are the ways in which writing has saved my life by providing a space for me to safely process my emotions and explore otherwise daunting topics that I may not have had the courage to confront.
An overtly creative and headstrong child, I often found myself struggling to connect with my peers when it came time to “play.” No one really wanted to engage with me, nor did they have the stamina. I would often drag out role-playing games much longer than one might deem acceptable, incorporating perhaps too much nuance for other six-year-olds to grasp. Thankfully, after all my engines had sputtered to a halt, I could always turn to my journals for the comfort and camaraderie that I so desperately lacked.
Writing was safe—it met me with open arms and swaddled me against its chest—though I can understand how it may seem like nails on a chalkboard for someone who prefers to feel their emotions rather than intellectualize them. It was something to look forward to at the end of a long and arduous day, something to keep me going when the light at the end of the tunnel would start to flicker. Persisting from elementary school through university, journaling has continued to play a cardinal role in my life and development. As I neared the end of my time as a student at the University of Michigan, I began to wonder whether writing in my journals was affecting my psychology.
Thankfully, I wasn’t the first person to ask this question. In an article for the Scientific American, author Scott Kaufman refers to the idea of expressive writing (EW), writing about subjects that trigger strong emotions, something I have unknowingly practiced for years and years. He implies that engaging with this kind of writing for just 15-20 minutes per day can help people derive meaning from otherwise stressful situations and better deal with their emotions, both positive and negative. While I’ve never sat down and actually timed how long it takes to write one of my entries—therefore, one cannot be sure that I meet the exact criteria for my writing to be counted as “expressive”—you would be hard pressed to find an entry less than two or three pages long. The average journal entry contains 250-300 words, therefore my average would have a relatively higher word count. After a brief consultation with the internet, I have determined that it takes around 30 minutes to handwrite a 500-word journal entry, exceeding the suggested time frame for engaging in expressive writing. I guess I meet the cutoff after all!
Kaufman relates EW to the process of rumination, or the obsessive replaying of events in your head to make sense of ideas, situations, or choices in one’s life. In my own experience, when recalling my emotions it is best to do so through the lens of a narrative that has happened recently, explaining (and exploring) how it made me feel by thinking critically about the event itself. An example of this in the media might be the pensieve from Harry Potter—a shallow basin filled with collected memories. Pensieves are enchanted in such a way that they can recreate memories so accurately that they become re-liveable. One must dip their head into the bowl, giving them the ability to view the memory from a 3rd person perspective. Just as one can reexamine their experiences through the use of a pensieve, so too can you analyze your real-life experiences through rumination and the written word.
While rumination typically begins as an adverse and likely unintentional phenomenon, it can, over time, become organized, controlled, and deliberate. Once controlled, rumination can be combined with a strong support system and healthy emotional outlets, leading to a higher potential for growth. While I did not always have these things, I have since grown to have a strong support system and healthy—healthier—emotional outlets, both through life experience and through therapy.
Writing therapy (WT) is the act of writing with the aim of fostering self-healing and personal growth, subsequently investigating one’s own personal thoughts, feelings, and past experiences (Ruini & Mortara, 2022). There are many different ways in which WT is implemented: gratitude letters/journaling, guided autobiographies, and the creation of a trauma narrative, to name a few.
When it comes to myself, I’m an external processor. What that means is that unless I am writing or speaking out loud, I will continue down the unfortunate path of intellectualizing my emotions. For someone like me, WT is the perfect method to understand my madness.
In context, WT has been shown to yield therapeutic effects on symptoms of various disorders (e.g. depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic illness, etc.) and emotional distress, as well as promote psychological well-being (Ruini & Mortara, 2022). Though it can be easily integrated into other forms of therapy, WT and EW have been proven to be just as effective when administered as standalone therapeutic interventions (Reinhold et al., 2018). What this means is that however you choose to use it, writing can be a powerful tool to increase one’s standard of living. Ruini & Mortara (2022) compiled a list of WT’s goals: strengthen relationships, enhance well-being, promote emotional regulation, and spark self-awareness are just a few of those goals.
The idea of expressive writing comes from James Pennebaker, the first man to study the therapeutic effects of writing on the psyche. His method consisted of putting one’s thoughts and feelings into words to cope with traumatic events or distressing situations (Pennebaker & Chung, 2007). To understand whether EW had a positive effect on student well-being as it related to PTSD, he conducted an experiment (Pennebaker, 1986). A total of 50 college-aged participants were randomly assigned to either the traumatic or the non-emotional group. They were then tasked with writing about their experiences—whether the writing was traumatic or non-emotional depended on the participant’s group assignment. Just as he had thought, students who had written about their traumas made fewer trips to the university’s health center than those who did not (Pennebaker, 1986).
Something that we as psychological researchers can do to increase the strength of a study is to repeat it. Pennebaker repeated the study multiple times, this time collecting data from groups of varying educational and writing levels. Thankfully, his original study had not been a fluke, and no significant difference was found between the results of the first study and those that followed (Pennebaker, 1986).
“When people are given the opportunity to write about emotional upheavals, they often experience improved health. “They go to the doctor less. They have changes in immune function. If they are first-year college students, their grades tend to go up. People will tell us months afterward that it’s been a very beneficial experience for them.” —Dr. Pennebaker
Two years had passed and Pennebaker was still hooked on the topic of EW and how it could benefit people who had been traumatized. He decided to conduct a repeat study, similar to what he had done previously, this time to hopefully discover the more material benefits of EW. The study was conducted similarly to that of his previous experiments, the only difference being what he measured. Not only was there again a reduction in visits to the university’s health center, but there were positive, measurable changes to student immune systems (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988). These changes were consistent with an improved bill of health (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988).
On the other side of the world, Elizabeth Broadbent, professor of medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, was conducting her own research on EW and its effects. Her main question was whether writing about one’s traumas could make physical wounds heal faster.
To test her hypothesis, Broadbent recruited 49 healthy adults between the ages of 67-97 and asked them to write about upsetting or neutral events for twenty minutes, every day, for three days. One notable difference between Pennebaker and Broadbent’s studies was that Broadbent left two weeks between the experiment and consequent analysis. The purpose of this was to allow any residual negative feelings stirred up by recalling negative experiences to pass, thus, reducing the chances that those feelings could affect the results.
This part of the experiment made me a bit skeptical, as there is no way to control the timeline with which someone interacts with EW. In my experience, I write when I need to, but otherwise, my journal remains shut. Perhaps in the future, there can be more studies that capture the variety of timelines when it comes to personal journaling.
To keep track of the rate of physical healing, researchers took a biopsy of each participant’s arm. For the next 21 days, sequential photos of the wounds were taken to record the healing process and duration. By day 11 of the experiment—halfway—42% of the neutral group had fully recovered; however, this was boldly overshadowed by the 76% of EW participants who had healed. Broadbent says this: “We think writing about distressing events helped participants make sense of the events and reduce distress.”
But what makes writing so therapeutic? According to Pennebaker:
“...What makes writing therapeutic is that the writer openly acknowledges and accepts their emotions, they become able to give voice to his/her blocked feelings and to construct a meaningful story” (Ruini & Mortara, 2022).
Picture a time in your life when you had something weighing on your chest, something you needed to tell someone, anyone. Think back to the tightness in your chest, to the lump in your throat. Isn’t the most terrifying thing about a secret the thought of telling someone else?
Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser (1988) hypothesize that the benefits of EW lie in the inhibition of traumatic experiences, or rather the expression of those experiences. They claim that writing about your trauma can help process related emotions because it removes the added stressor of revealing your secrets to another person. Pennebaker himself argues that disclosure is a “powerful therapeutic agent,” which is one of many reasons why I believe that writing can be used as a legitimate mental health intervention (Pennebaker, 1997).
Furthermore, writing is a private and anonymous act. There is no reason or need to share your personal thoughts with anyone other than yourself. In situations such as therapy, there is the added issue of being perceived by the listener. Not only that, but they have to actually understand what you’re saying, too! The words in my journal are mine alone, sacred secrets between me and my pages.
Traveling back to the Harry Potter universe, let’s expand upon the idea of the pensieve as a metaphor for expressive writing. While describing the purpose of a pensieve to Harry, Albus Dumbledore says this:
"One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form." (Rowling, 2014, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)
It is a portmanteau of the words “pensive” and “sieve,” drawing from the French “pensive,” originally from the Latin word “pensare,” meaning “to ponder.” In English, it can be defined as a thoughtful or reflective state. Thus, the pensieve allows one to sift through one’s thoughts or memories.
Those who use the pensieve are transported into their chosen memory, reliving the vignette almost as an episode. Where once they may have forgotten, users have the chance to peruse past happenings and revisit critical points in their history.
Almost identical to the function of a pensieve is that of narrative recall, a method of EW. With narrative recall, one can make causal links between life experiences, one of the most influential facets of WT. Engagement with these connections gives way to an increased capacity for introspection (looking within oneself) and reflection (thinking retrospectively about one’s behaviors/thoughts/etc.).
If you were given the chance to relive parts of your life, wouldn’t you want that experience to be accurate? Personally, I write everything down because I know that one day I’ll look back on my life and realize I have no clue what happened to me, hence the journals. Each one serves as a metaphorical pensieve—giving me the great gift of time travel and a few more chances to understand why things went so wrong.
An interesting detail often observed among trauma survivors is the benefit of writing from a first-person point-of-view. People often write about trauma in the third-person when it’s fresh, as it allows them to separate themselves from the incident and further detach themselves from the trauma. First-person allows you to be the perpetrator of the trauma and take an active role in the story. There aren’t many situations where it is acceptable to be fiercely narcissistic—take advantage of this one!
Something I still want to know more about is the most beneficial timeline when it comes to writing about trauma. Is it better to wait some time and let it settle before revisiting the traumatic event? Is it even more traumatic to have to relive the event every time you revisit the entry? When is the ideal time to write about trauma? Does writing before bed increase the probability of having a nightmare?
What I’ve gathered from all my research is this: writing is a process of resilience. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. Putting negative feelings into words is often the spark to search for solutions and ultimately move towards a healthier mindset. What this does not mean, however, is that there are no downsides to writing about one’s traumas. Often, writing about trauma can cause crying, extremely low mood, or lead to a breakdown. Perhaps this is the fault of our own analysis, kickstarting the process of rumination discussed earlier. As mentioned in the Scientific American article by Scott Kaufman, rumination can be a cruel mistress.
If you’re reading all of this and thinking, ‘Well, I haven’t been majorly traumatized…what good will writing about my nonexistent trauma do for me?’, you aren’t alone. At first glance, EW is just another treatment for those who struggle with their mental health, but that could not be farther from the truth. It is an incredibly accessible and effective method for getting in touch with your emotions and processing recent (or very very old!) traumas. “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives,” says Pennebaker. “You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are — our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.”
Outside of the professional opinions I have just presented to you, I also have a few things to say on the topic of EW. As someone whose journals exist almost as an extension of themselves, I wholeheartedly believe that without writing about my life as I lived it, I would be a completely different person today. Even now, I find myself flipping back through the pages just to get a glimpse of the person I used to be. It could just be the teacher’s pet in me rearing its ugly head, but I truly do enjoy making connections with my experiences to better understand myself. There will never be a time that I do not advocate for writing as a method of self-reflection, self-understanding, and of increasing self-efficacy.
Don’t forget that you can always have too much of a good thing. Just because EW has been proven to improve mental health and well-being, that doesn’t mean you should be doing it daily. “I’m not convinced that having people write every day is a good idea,” says Pennebaker. “I’m not even convinced that people should write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel gazing or cycle of self-pity.” To mitigate negative side effects, he encourages those engaging with EW to avoid writing about extremely recent trauma or any topics that might prove to be too much for the writer to handle.
While all of this is important to keep in mind, it should not deter you from writing every day. You don’t have to engage in EW every time you pick up a pen. You don’t even have to write every day. In my experience, I write when I need to, and don’t when I don’t. There are periods of my life where I can identify that I was going through a difficult time because of the inflection of journal entries. My recommendation is to keep a journal at all times, regardless of whether you write in it or not. Knowing that there’s a place for you to retreat to safety makes a world of difference.
Those who study EW do so with the understanding that each participant is acting within a vacuum—there is no interaction between writers, nor is there any consultation with a licensed professional. I find that odd because some of my biggest breakthroughs have come from conversations with other writers, either in class or out in the world. EW research doesn’t consider the benefits that writing and discussing one’s writing can have on someone’s mental health and well-being. In my own life, I often find that someone’s reaction to a piece of writing or a poem is the best way I can gauge the extent to which I am being understood. Though I understand why the (sometimes excessively sterile) field of Psychology does not engage with this kind of artistic/creative ideology, I still believe that it is important to mention. Should you want it to be, writing is an extremely collaborative process—that’s what makes it so uniquely personable and beautiful.
All this to say, there was a time when the night sky terrified me, a time when I couldn’t go outside at night without having a staring contest with my toes, or wearing a baseball cap, or squeezing my eyes to the point that pitch black became kaleidoscopic. There was a time when I would have given anything to forget about it. To move on with my life like any other person.
That time is not now.
Now, when I find myself looking up at the starless sky, I am thinking of something else entirely. I am reminded of that night on the roof, of the laughter shared between kids, of a time when I could call myself a “kid.” I am reminded of the fear deep in my stomach as I climbed up the ladder. I am reminded of the anxiety I felt behind my ribs, much too close to my beating heart. I am reminded of all the reasons why I write—to remember, to feel, to agree, to argue, to discover, to live, to breathe.
Take a moment the next time you find yourself face-to-face with your starless sky, whatever that may be. Where might you put the stars if you had a say? What can’t you bear the thought of forgetting? What stories would they tell?
P.S. Make sure to take good notes.