The happy writer. Really?

Can we write our way to happiness?

On first blush this question oozes self-indulgence and privilege. More woo-woo bullshit.

On second blush, “can we write our way to happiness?” could be the rhetorical tagline for those enticing writers’ workshops in Tuscany.

But there is actually a body of scientific research on the health and mood benefits of writing and rewriting one’s one narrative. (Google “expressive writing and health” for many citations.) There is significant research on story-crafting and behavior.

We all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of ourselves and the world(s) in which we live. We create that narrative. We construct stories out of experience. We listen to others tell us about ourselves. We learn–even if we don’t think we are learning, even if we don’t want to– what is expected, what is acceptable, and how we fit (do not fit) in. Over time, a grand narrative emerges. And we recite it to ourselves. Over and over. We believe it. We inhabit it. For some, this can be harmful, limiting, even debilitating.

What if we wrote it out this story. Looked at it. And then learned to tell another plausible tale, an alternative narrative, based on the same information.

That’s what researchers at Duke University did with a group of freshmen who (because of bad grades) told themselves they were losers, that they were unfit for college. That was their narrative. These students underwent a “story-changing intervention” during which they got information (and were exposed to inspirational videos) about students who struggled during freshman year but improved as they adjusted to college. The “loser freshman” story could then be recast into an upward trajectory, “this is just all part of growth and adjustment” story. And guess what? Students who had been prompted to change their personal stories improved their grades and were far less likely to drop out than the control group with no intervention.

I thought about the notion of writing one’s way to a more positive self-image, a healing place, an invigorating place, a place of power and self-worth every time I sat with my writing group at Oregon State Penitentiary. They were all serving life sentences for murder. To move beyond debilitating shame and endless guilt, they wrote about the men they were learning to become, the men they had become. They were changing the narrative of their lives.

I think about the woman in my recent university seminar, emotionally brutalized at one of those “bad teen” bootcamps, who is, more than a very tough decade later, writing her way to stability and health. I think about the women in the workshops I am now teaching who use writing as a way to process the pain they have tried so long to ignore.

It is talk therapy when you do the talking. It works.