Mindful writing for healing from trauma is a powerful practice to support wellbeing. I have loved writing for as long as I can remember. I’ve been practicing mindful writing for transformation with committed regularity since my mid-thirties following my aging mother’s relapse with addiction, near death by suicide, and eventual death from cancer. Mindfulness and writing have been two of the most powerful practices in my journey of healing from those losses.
A great deal of research has shown that creating a coherent narrative encourages healing from traumatic events. There is a considerable body of research that suggests that writing about difficult events can support us in healing from them.
Research has also shown that people who possess the personality trait of mindfulness experience greater benefit from expressive writing about difficult events. I’ve been incorporating mindful writing into my work with trauma survivors for many years and never cease to be surprised by the benefits of this practice in healing from trauma.
When writing about difficult events, it’s important that we learn skills that help us stay within our window of tolerance so that we don’t get overwhelmed or retraumatized by writing about them. Mindfulness meditation and other practices can help us to find our ground before we begin writing and can serve as touchstones to come back to if we feel ourselves approaching the edge of our window of tolerance while writing.
If you have found that journaling is making you feel worse, you may find it interesting to know that research has shown that journaling without direction can increase rumination, reinforce negative pathways in the brain, fuel the inner critic, and lead to feeling entangled in negative emotions rather than having some distance from them to give us perspective.
Therapeutic writing can help us to make a sense of order from what feels like chaos following traumatic or difficult events. It can help us to transform difficult events and make meaning from them. The stories we tell about our experience determine how we heal. When we transform the difficult events of our lives through writing, we are able to more easily focus on the meaning we have made from these events than on the pain, and this, too, supports our healing.
What stories are you telling yourself about your own difficult events? Do these stories leave you feeling more alone and hopeless? Isn’t it time to transform these stories and make meaning from them?
Jen Johnson is a mindfulness coach, counselor, and author with 40+ years of experience teaching mindfulness and meditation. She offers 1:1 mindfulness coaching and therapeutic writing coaching worldwide via Zoom. Learn more about therapeutic writing coaching with Jen