Opening Up by James W Pennebaker Chapter Thirteen

And finally I come to the last chapter of this book which is so rich with information and reasons for why writing is so essential to the wellbeing of those who have experienced trauma, who are faces challenges, or who just aspire to be able to put things in perspective.

But Pennebaker does not overlook that writing, like any other tool to facilitate, can be used to hinder progress than foster it. His list of questions is provocative and cautionary, questions every journal keeper should occasionally revisit to ensure that the purpose of journaling has not gotten lost along the way.

The Downside of Writing
Are you using writing as a substitute for action?
Is your writing an intellectual rather than a self-reflective exercise?
Are you using writing as a forum for uncensored complaining?
Is your writing an exercise in self-reflection or in self-absorption?
(194-196)

I know I hear a lot of people lament the pointlessness of writing out the same thing over and over again. Perhaps they have forgotten that writing about something doesn’t mean you don’t have to do anything else. I’ve also heard people say that their journals just sound like so much complaining and there never seems to be anything reflective about what they are writing.

I know I have been guilty of using my journals irresponsibly. And perhaps there is a time to do these things. We don’t always have to immediately talk or write about things. Nor do we have to dive into the deeper, darker, parts immediately. There is something perhaps necessary about taking this idea of writing about trauma slowly.

There is nothing magical about writing in a self-disclosing manner(197). No, there is nothing magical about writing. In fact, this kind of self-reflective writing takes work. It means looking at yourself in new ways, of daring to be transparent at least with yourself. I don’t think many people actually do this. Self-awareness is not as common as perhaps it should be but that is more a confirmation of the challenges that are implied in choosing this path rather than a negation of the rightness of writing.

Pennebaker offers another list of the benefits of writing:

Writing clears the mind
Writing resolves traumas that stand in the way of important tasks.
Writing helps in acquiring and remembering new information.
Writing fosters problem solving.
Freewriting promotes forced writing. (190-191)

I have benefited so much from writing, I didn’t need this book to tell me that it works. But reading about Pennebaker’s search for answers, his methods for doing the research, and the results help reinforce, even validate, what I know to be true in my own life. There have been times of silence in my life. These are few and far between. I don’t promise that I won’t fall into silence again at some time. I only know that I will return to this practice of writing because it is always there for me, always ready to hear whatever I have to say, and never judging nor advising me. In my journals I am free to be the Satia I don’t bother to share with others. Or perhaps the Satia I don’t want anyone knows lies deep beneath the seemingly transparent surface.

Opening Up by James W Pennebaker Chapter Twelve

I am skipping a couple of chapters because, although I have a few quotes from them, I cannot relate what I read to myself and, although this blog is not as focused on myself as my others, I am trying to keep it intimate as well as informative.

When I first began reading and there was a comparison done between confession and inhibition I knew where I fell on the continuum. If confession were on the right and inhibition on the left, I would definitely be closer to the left than to the right. I have no problem baring it all. I am more likely to confess things inappropriately than to inhibit myself.

Holding things in is not my forte.

And this chapter is all about how confession is used by religions and political groups, by psychiatrists and self-help advocates. It is all about how these organizations manipulate situations to create an environment where confession is most likely to happen.

Do I sound a little hostile, saying “manipulate” when it comes to doing something that is helpful? I suppose that is how I feel. While interesting I found the whole chapter rather disturbing and a challenge to discuss because I have tried to make what is explained in the chapters applicable. Short of telling you to go to a priest and confess your perceived sins or paying a psychologist to listen to you in hopes of getting healing, what can I draw from this chapter that will help the average person at this very moment, sitting before their computer, reading my words?

What if I were to ask you to write out your darkest secret right here, right now? Could you do it? Is there something that was done to you or that you yourself have done that you have never shared with anyone else? Will you get a book and pen this moment and begin writing? Probably not. Putting it into a book might mean having it read someday. Even if you were to tear out the pages and burn them, the missing pages would create a tension by their absence. Is it enough to write and abandon what was written?

Yes. Apparently it is. Like the Biblical scapegoat on whom the sins are placed and that is then released into the desert. But I concede, there are details I have not recorded in my journal. I have typed them out and deleted the file immediately. I didn’t even save it. I just hit the X to close the document and when asked if I wanted to save it said No.

No, I do not want to save these things. But if I don’t write about them, if I don’t formulate them into words, then I am saving them. I hold onto them. As Pennebaker explained in a previous chapter when describing how listing helps the mind be able to focus on something other than what needs to be packed for an upcoming trip, writing down these details frees me from their constant presence. Maybe I’ll need to write about them more than once. Maybe I’ll need to write about them in different ways. I can write about them in my journal and tear out the pages, if I am so inclined and don’t mind having pages of gap in my book. Or I can typed them out and delete without saving. I can take the experience and explore it in a poem. Or I can recreate it in a short story. I can even rewrite how things happen so maybe there is no trauma.

Through reading DeSalvo’s book and now Pennebaker’s, I am learning that, while the need to confess and not inhibit is essential, how we go about confession is not singular and is as varied as the individual needs of each one of us who have things in our lives that need our healing, that need our attention, and perhaps need our love and forgiveness.

Opening Up by James W Pennebaker Chapter Nine

Pennebaker makes a surprising but understandable connection between love and grief. I say surprising because I don’t think that most people equate the experience of falling in love with the suffering implied in grief. I say understandable because, from my own experience, I’ve never really noticed much difference between the two. Reading this chapter, I found myself nodding and smiling in complete agreement.

The author describes the stages of both grieving and falling in love. There is the emotional activation stage in which your thoughts continually focus on the other. Then there is a plateau stage during which life goes on, thoughts don’t continually return to the loss or love, and when they do there is less emotional response, the thoughts are more reflective and subdued. Finally, there is assimilation. The lover is a part of your life; their loss, whether through death or the relationship ending, eventually becomes bearable (132).

So let’s think about this for a moment. You meet someone and they are fabulous, wonderful, make you feel fabulously wonderful or wonderfully fabulous. Or both. And you annoy the hell out of all of your friends talk talk talking about this other person until they wish you would both just go away already.

Or your lover leaves—either they die or they don’t want to stay in the relationship. All you can think about is your loss. You cry. You scream. You ask questions that really have no answer. And you try to lean on friends who should understand but who only offer to buy you ice cream or a drink as if either would offer any real solace.

Yep. That first stage sounds very familiar and similar. My mother says, “All relationships end badly; either one of you dumps the other or one of you dies before the other.” Rather pessimistic but true.

Also true is the fact that sometimes other people can’t handle our grief. They don’t know what to say in the face of our pain so they avoid us altogether. Strange but also true is the fact that sometimes our friends don’t want to hear about our happiness either. There is nothing quite as annoying as your friend who is falling in love just when you’re having doubts about your own relationship. Or when you are marking the one year anniversary of a loss you had hoped never to experience.

What surprised me is that inhibition, whether we are hiding a secret or biting back our joy, is not good regardless. I could understand and even appreciate how hiding the truth can wear a person down but it never occurred to me that not being able to share the happiest moments can also be emotionally damaging. “Living a lie is living a life of inhibition. People who are unable to talk about significant personal experiences are at increased risk for a variety of diseases” (127).

Wow! I confess, I sometimes have a hard time writing down the little joys in my life. Not because I don’t want to treasure them but because I often feel that they lose their power when I write them down, that somehow they don’t feel as wonderful when put into words. And this is true. Just as exploring trauma in writing can make the trauma more manageable, writing about the greatest joys will do the same. Pennebaker validated this perception when he writes, “Immediately after writing, our euphoria may briefly intensify. Over time, however, self-reflectively writing about the sources of our strong affections brings about an understanding and eventual diminishing of passion” (132).

I would imagine that for some people this would be all the reason one needs to not write about the best things that happen in life. For me, given my personality and my spiritual beliefs, this is a reminder that I should not neglect writing down these joy-filled details, as frivolous as they may seem, along with the troubling details.

With that said, I close with this reminder from the book: If you are in the unhappy position of not being able to express your euphoria after a wonderful event, write and laugh about it while you are alone (124).

I am off to write, laugh, and celebrate now! I hope you will go do the same!

Opening Up by James W Pennebaker, Chapter Eight

There is not necessarily a coincidence about some things. I was thinking about friendships and how they often fall into degrees of intimacy, often based on how honest both parties feel they can be. Very often, this is not a balanced exchange. One person may be able to be more honest while the other withholds information. I know that I have often allowed myself to be the confidant of another person while not reciprocating. In fact, I can think of times when I have done this intentionally.

For me, there is a great deal of truth in what Pennebaker says regarding journals.

If you use a journal to explore your deepest thoughts and feelings, you can be completely honest with yourself. No one will judge you, criticize you, or distrust your perception of the world. Writing, however, has its drawbacks. It can be a slow and painful process. Many people find it difficult to express themselves on paper. Sometimes people’s perception of their own world can be distorted (110).

I don’t know that I feel an absence of having a confidant because I have long learned to write my confessions into a journal. And there have been times when I know my perceptions are not precise. I also know that my journal has forced me to face my misperceptions, to address them and make the necessary changes.

There have been times when I could not do this alone and I have used counseling to help me through some of the more difficult challenges in my life. I remember one counselor who remarked that I would make a great deal of progress between sessions. I know that this has more to do with my journaling than it did with my commitment to being healthy. After all, at the time I did not know that writing made such a difference, had so much potential. I knew I wrote because I needed to write. I did not know why I had this need.

Sometimes, in spite of my experience and the studying I am doing, I can’t say that I fully understand my own “why.” Still, it is not easy to find any one person who meets the various criteria for a good confidant.

Self-disclosure will change the nature of your friendship.
Hearing your traumas can be a trauma for the listener.
Social blackmail exists.
The expectations of the listener can affect the content of the disclosure.
People’s motivations for disclosing their secrets are not always pure. Telling and holding secrets can be a maladaptive substitute for taking action. (116-117)

Aside from professional counselors, who can honestly claim that complete honesty would not change the nature of a relationship? That they would not withhold truth if they saw that their words inflicted pain upon the listener?

I know that I have had my confidences betrayed by friends who claimed they only did so because they cared, because they believed it was in my best interest. And I am not sincerely capable of listening without judgment. I know this and I suppose, for this reason, I suspect this to be true of even my most beloved friends.

What I would encourage anyone reading this to know is that a journal can serve as a foundation for much growth, strength, and healing but it cannot do all of the work. If you find yourself writing about the same circumstances, if you begin to feel that journaling is useless and serves no purpose.

When you burnout on journaling, there is usually a reason and this should be a warning, a clarion bell encouraging you to move beyond mere journaling. Journals are subjective and it is necessary to have some objectivity. Even habitual journal writers cannot be objective about everything and this is most often manifested, at least initially, in some journaling burnout.
And it reinforces the final point, that keeping a journal is not a substitute for making changes. If you are complaining about the same things repeatedly in a journal to the point that you are “tired of writing the same thing day after day,” stop. Stop writing about the same thing and start asking what you can do to make some changes. And if you have no answer, know that the time may have come to move beyond the pages of your journal. Read books. Find a support group. Seek professional help. Be honest. Be ruthless. What you may lose weighs nothing against what is gained.

Opening Up by James W Pennebaker, Chapter Seven

In this chapter, Pennebaker addresses something about which I was curious. There are various forms of art therapy which incorporate visual arts or dancing as a means of working through trauma. I wanted to know if these were as effective or not. Apparently they are effective but they ultimately draw on the same necessity of talking to explain or clarify what was expressed in the art or movement.

During or after dancing, drawing, or singing, clients are strongly encouraged to talk about their emotional experiences. In other words, non-language-based therapies rely heavily on language once the clients’ inhibitions are lifted (101).

Ultimately, putting the experience into words is where the healing happens. I love the analogies Pennebaker uses. He describes how, when getting ready for a trip, he will think about all of the things he must do, running them through his mind over and over again; but, if he makes a list of these things, then his mind is free to focus on other things rather than the details of what needs to be done before he leaves. He uses a perfect metaphor, explaining that this is similar to downloading a file or printing it to be stored elsewhere, leaving space on the hard drive of our brains for other things (98).

I definitely understood this and am glad to have my expectations reaffirmed. Pennebaker also mentions Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which may be familiar to most of you. When looking at this pyramid it is obvious that journaling, writing things about, is inevitably going to be a part of self-actualization. You don’t need to journal to survive, to have food, clothing, shelter. You don’t necessarily need it to have a feeling of love or build relationships with others (although it helps, from my own experience). You may not even need a journal to build self-esteem, especially if you have a strong support system that lovingly communicates their appreciation of you on a regular basis. But to get to the point where you understand yourself, where you accept things as they are, to reach self actualization (which literally means to make the self real), you have to make time to know yourself, to think about things, to gain the necessary objectivity to accept things as they are. As Pennebaker says, “[w]riting promotes self-understanding (92).”

He concludes the chapter with a summary of the benefits of putting traumatic experience into words, of translating experience into language. I think it is enough to say that we have a choice—we can carry these unspoken and avoided burdens inside or we can dump them onto paper or in therapy and thus free ourselves to fill those spaces with healing and love.

Opening Up by James W Pennebaker Chapter Six

In this chapter of Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, Pennebaker describes more research, this time with college students transitioning from life at home to life on campus and with Holocaust survivors. On the surface, it doesn’t seem that either of these would be applicable to most readers. For instance, I’ve already graduated college and I am too young to have survived the Holocaust. So what is there for me to learn from these studies?

Plenty. From the research done with the college students I’ve learned that writing about circumstances does not have a permanent effect. Discouraging? Not in the least. Frankly, a person’s commitment to emotional, spiritual, psychological, and physical wellbeing and wellness is not a one time deal. Surgery is a one time deal and who wants surgery? A lobotomy can give the individual a sense of being emotionally and psychologically balanced but I am not raising my hand to volunteer for one. Yes, it is challenging to write about things that hurt, to put into words the pain or even trauma one has faced. But ultimately it is worth the commitment. As Pennebaker explains:

In general, writing about coming to college promoted health for a little over 4 months. By the fifth month after writing, however, students who had written about their thoughts and feelings were getting as sick as everyone else. . . .Within 3 months after writing, students who had written about coming to college reported being as happy or happier than those who wrote about superficial topics (82).

So it is not enough to sit down for a few days and write and then do nothing. It is not enough to say what you are thinking and feeling to a therapist and walk away without looking back. It is necessary to be honest, to write for however long it takes, and to be prepared to sit down and paper again at some point in the future because life will inevitably bring more pain, some new grief, another reason to write.

And from the Holocaust survivors I’ve learned that it is never too late. Trauma and pain can take root and while it may seem to make sense not to expose others to the pain you have experienced, protecting someone else will not keep you from suffering more. I can understand why the survivors didn’t want to tell their children about what happened to them. I can appreciate why they would say that others couldn’t understand what really happened.

I know I don’t. I know I never will. I also know that it is hard to listen to the stories, to know what happened even from a distance. When I read about these things, I can close the book. When I see them on the television, I can change the channel. I don’t have to look at the images. I can close my eyes. What if, when I closed my eyes, I saw it all replayed forever in my mind because it is not something I know about intellectually but something I survived personally?

I am tired as I write this. Just the thought of reliving in words what these people lived is exhausting. But I digress from the focus of the chapter. Forty years later, when these survivors were invited to discuss their experiences, no matter how horrifying the recollections were, they benefited physically from speaking about what happened if they were high level disclosers. Even medium level disclosers were found to have reduced heart rates and, after the interviews, were less likely to seek medical attention than their low level disclosers did. Remarkably, many of the survivors who had never told their story before had not only viewed their taped interviews but shared them with loved ones.

Finally, I learned that not everyone grieves in the same way. The traditional five stages of grief are not necessarily experienced by everyone. Some people simply cope differently from others.

Not all people feel or express overwhelming grief when faced with terrible traumas. Furthermore, many people who do not get particularly upset or depressed following major loss may actually be psychologically well adjusted (78).

I am a “navel watcher,” by which I mean that I tend to observe things in myself constantly. Every now and again I manage to just live in the moment and feel what I am feeling. More often than not, however, I will think about why and what and how. I’ve been journaling for so long I don’t even know if I could let a life experience go unwritten. It is both a blessing and a curse. But I have slowly come to recognize that my way is not the right way. A lesson I have learned from my son who takes so much as it comes. He’s unflappable, really. So when I read Pennebaker’s assurance that people who don’t react to trauma are not necessarily in denial, I took great comfort from that.

At the end of the chapter, Pennebaker offers a summary of ideas:

Many people cope naturally with traumas. Not everyone progresses through the stages in grieving or coping.
The degree to which coping can be accelerated is limited. Coming to terms with any major upheaval takes time.
Potential problems if you are still in the midst of crisis. . . . [W]riting or talking about your experience will tend to improve your health and, over time, and psychological adjustment. However, confronting an ongoing crisis may very likely make you more distressed temporarily.
The trauma has long since past and you are still living with it. . . . If you are currently living with a trauma from years gone by, writing or talking about your
thoughts and feelings associated with it can help you to get past it.
And the usual admonitions. . . . In your writing, explore your deepest thoughts and feelings in a self-reflective way. Set aside a specific time and location to write continuously. If you talk to someone else, it helps if the person is objective and not personally involved. Don’t be surprised if you feel somewhat sad or depressed immediately after writing. The work of self-reflection can sometimes be painful even if the benefits are clear. (87-88)

I want to reiterate that last part: The work (because this is work) of self-reflection (not blaming or raging but really looking at the self and its responses) can sometimes (more often than not) be painful (to say the least) even if the benefits are clear (and even when the benefits are not immediately experienced or felt).

Hopefully, as I continue sharing what I am learning, the benefits will become increasingly clear.

An Article on Vertigo

A friend of mine sent me a link to a very interesting article on vertigo. She hesitated to email it to me because it does not offer any answers nor is it particularly encouraging. Of the three people in the article diagnosed with vertigo, one has had to give up his career, another is taking an extended leave of absence. Only the third person seems to be able to continue her life with some normalcy.

Only one of the three.

On the other hand, it is so wonderful to read that other people are dealing with this frustrating situation. I am not alone. I laughed when the one person was quoted as saying something about knocking over someone’s grandmother. And I know how sweet it is to be able to say that you significant other still holds onto a hope that a cure or cause will be discovered. When I told Rob about this article, he leaned over and said something that once again reminded me that he has so much hope for me. Far more hope than I have. And that is good. I need him to keep hoping. Just as much as I need to come to terms with accepting that this is not going to change.

I emailed the author of the article hoping she would let me quote directly from the article but I haven’t heard back from her. Nevertheless, it is a good article and I wanted to share it with those of you who are reading this blog because this article reflects some of what I am experiencing.