Need to heal? 5 ways how healing through writing works
Repeat after me: If it hurts, start writing
Writing — 7 powerful letters forming one of the oldest crafts of humankind.
Healing — 7 needed letters on the road to health.
Writing has a powerful way of healing: Ask anyone keeping a diary. Ask those having gone through grief or trauma and now writing an autobiography.
As a psychotherapist in training, I see it at work every day: Adults fighting old demons within, sometimes simply their parents or a spouse or just parts of their own identity.
They write letters to liberate, to get something over and done with, to find words for feelings.
Following are 5 ways (out of potentially hundreds) how writing can help you to heal and recover:
Writing helps you understand your own thoughts
Writing makes you feel light-headed again
Writing enables you to communicate what you deem uncommunicable
Writing offers a break to breathe, reflect, and look back
Writing acknowledges the existing, gives it shape and makes it stay and leave at the same time
Now let’s jump into more details.
1. Writing helps you understand your thoughts
Ever felt overloaded in your brain, not even you understanding any longer what you are thinking about? Ideas after ideas, thoughts after thoughts running down the unstoppable stream.
Writing helps you break your thinking into small pieces, sort it, and pinpoint the main issues you are dealing with.
2. Writing makes you feel light-headed again
Ever bore the weight of a busy mind and head? Not being able to slow down in the evenings?
Writing helps you brain dump all thoughts. Once out of the system, you do understand what weight you were bearing all the time and re-focus again on simply being, breathing, sensing.
3. Writing enables you to communicate what you deem uncommunicable
Ever suffered the lack of words, drowning in feelings so strong they were nearly impossible to communicate? Standing before a loved one, not knowing how to say what you desire to communicate.
Writing helps you find words, describe full-scale pictures and combine the visual with the imaginative, helping you finally “say” what you previously were unable to.
4. Writing offers a break to breathe, reflect, and look back
Ever felt lost in your timeline? Wondering where you are headed, where you are coming from? Asking yourself, did I make the right choices and am I moving in the right direction?
Writing allows you to take a break from daily life, reflect on how you are doing and feeling right now, look back on your past, and ponder about your future.
5. Writing acknowledges the existing, gives it shape and makes it stay and leave at the same time
Ever felt unseen? Talking but not being heard? Speaking into the void, echoing into oblivion?
Writing enables you to acknowledge yourself, your feelings, and your thoughts with words written. Words help to give shape to the abstract, thus making it possible to be accepted. What you write down stays if you like it to stay. At the same time, what you write down, finally leaves your daily thought carousel. It feels settled, if not forever at least for the time being.
Healing one paragraph at a time
It does not matter what path you choose for healing: Healing remains an active process, needing time and place.
More often than not, healing does not happen overnight. Neither medication nor psychotherapy can do wonders.
But healing through writing can be a powerful path, one paragraph at a time:
Sometimes you need to be heard to heal. Sometimes you need to confront yourself to heal. Sometimes you need a break to heal.
Writing offers you all this. It helps you to heal, clear the past, be in the present, and be ready for the future.
More by Amir Mohsenpour
Here on Substack, I have set up the Therapeutic Thursdays publication. Once a week, I post one concise story of value to the reader. I write on all things public (mental) health, working in psychiatry and productivity for mental well-being.
Over on Medium, I write on various topics. I love to play around and try out different formats and different topics.
Hit me up on Twitter and LinkedIn, too. I promise to be more active on those platforms in the future.