Should You Write as Therapy?

Nobody wants to read your diary entries

The scientific community is split on whether writing is helpful, harmful, or does nothing when it comes to patients’ physical and psychological health. Some studies say writing helps process emotions and potentially even improves immune system function. Some say it can make difficult emotions worse. Writers themselves disagree whether writing provides catharsis, or if that is even the point.

Here’s what writing can and can’t do for me. I’m curious if you agree or have a different experience.

Writing helps with some of my behavioral traits, like perfectionism

This only works if I publish the writing. Even after six months of weekly essays, it’s still a struggle to follow through on my commitment to publish something every week that is not perfect, is unfinished, is a work in progress.

I was overwhelmed with all the things I thought I had to understand before allowing myself to write anything. I thought writing and publishing every week would force me to figure things out so I could publish masterpiece after masterpiece. I realized, too, that my perfectionism had a sliver of narcissism. My essay had to be perfect, because people were what? Just waiting at the edge of their seat for what I had to say? Experiencing that most times when I publish something, nothing much happens, of course, hurts my ego, but it also frees me to not take things quite so seriously. It’s just an essay. It’s just a negative comment. It’s just a mistake. It really, actually, truly doesn’t have to be perfect.

I gave up on big, profound, cohesive ideas. I have little shards of stories, fragments of meaning, and a few glittery realizations sprinkled in. Through the writing itself, I’ve realized how much I don’t know and don’t understand, and how much there is to learn and discover. I need to meet myself where I am and let my words become markers of different stages and phases of my life.

It goes against my perfectionism to publish something that I might disagree with or cringe at in one, five, or ten years. It’s humbling to continue writing and publishing, even though I haven’t figured out anything. But the more I do it, the easier it gets, the more grace I give myself.

Writing and publishing help me accept my imperfect, human self.

Writing helps me identify the bullshit stories I tell

When I started writing and publishing regularly in May 2021, I didn’t know how long it would last. I thought I had a handful of stories, and eventually, I’d be all out. The opposite happened. We all have default stories about ourselves that we have told the same way for years or decades. You know the ones I’m talking about. The one our families can recite word for word, while they give us that not again look. Or the one we always tell a new friend when we’re taking our relationship to the next level (it must be appropriately vulnerable without being too jarring). Or the one that exemplifies our childhood and our view about our parents perfectly, but our parents or siblings always disagree with us on what really happened.

The difference for me this time around is that I’m not writing to confirm whatever I’m already thinking about myself or someone else or life in general. I start writing a story by asking myself “so, what really happened?” and seeing where it takes me. I often end up somewhere unexpected, and that is precisely what keeps me writing this time around. My curiosity often wins over the fear and bullshit, not always, but often enough to keep me going.

I write to discover, not to confirm.

Writing makes it harder to lie to myself

Writing gives me a little distance from what I’m writing about, so I can turn it over in my mind and look at it from different angles. While writing is just giving voice to what’s already inside of me, it’s the putting-into-written-words, that externalizing thought and emotion creates a little buffer, a tiny crack that illuminates connections and underlying themes. While I also talk to externalize thoughts that way, I often fall into the conversational traps of white lies, hyperbole, and half-truths. There is nothing like writing to take my insides out of me and look at them. They stare back into my face, saying you don’t really believe that. Dig deeper, that’s almost true. Say more, say more, say more. Yes. Right there. Tell me about that.

T Kira Maddenmakes the case that“The Story is not The Life”in her gorgeous essayAgainst Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy. Especially writing memoir, we (writers and readers) often expect the writing process to be healing, but what T Kira says about the writing merelycreating distance between us and the thing, the story, rings more true to me:“I may have believed that to write The Thing down is to take one more step away from The Thing itself, one more step removed, one more page and another and another until there is a thick stack of proof, of growth, of Tada! — the restorative salvation.” I agree that writing feels an externalization, almost a disconnection fromthe thing, which is the opposite of my experience of therapy.

I write to create distance from an experience, so I can look at it from different angles.

Writing doesn’t “heal” my issues, but it illuminates them

Writing helps me get to the bottom of my fears. And often at the core of the fear is my need to control things, people, or situations. The writing itself doesn’t help me fix or change anything. I’m still scared. I still want to default to controlling things I’m scared of. And giving up attempts at control doesn’t fix difficult situations or necessarily make things better. But, the writing helps me untangle my core motivations from all the shit I’ve dumped on top of them over the years. That alone allows me to be clearer about who I am, what I want, and what I see as the issue to be addressed.

I write hard and clear about what hurts (Hemingway), which doesn’t fix the hurt.

Writing helps me figure out, but not change, who I am

As I’ve said above, writing helps me tease apart, dig up, and reconsider many thought patterns, favorite stories I’ve told myself, and beliefs I’ve held for as long as I can remember. The distance or buffer writing provides between myself, and what I think/feel/believe, helps me understand how I constructed my identity. I am not my thoughts. My identity is not eternally intertwined with my beliefs. My emotions are not my personality. This may seem obvious to you, but for me, if someone told me they didn’t like a thing I did, I thought they rejected me as a whole. If someone criticized my actions or words, I heard “you’re a bad person.” If someone questioned a belief that felt integral to my identity, I got defensive. Now when I get very defensive, emotional, or rigid, I take that as a clue that I’m too invested in whatever that thing is. I then write about it so I can look at it closely and honestly, without automatically considering it a part of my identity I have to defend.

I write to discover who I am and who I want to be.

Writing can change relationships, for better or worse

Writing about personal experiences and memories may piss off people in your orbit, whether they’re family or friends. Saying certain things out loud may create friction in relationships, or in some cases an end to the relationship. For me, writing resulted in some painful personal losses. I am still grieving what I had or thought I had. But now I am also realizing that these losses and changes have created space (and time and energy) that is being filled with new relationships of a different kind, and deepening existing relationships that have become more meaningful. I was so worried about losing what I had, that I didn’t anticipate what I would gain.

Writing can change relationships, but doesn’t necessarily heal them.

Writing provides a similar release as talk therapy, but with none of the follow-up or professional guidance

The thing that kept me from writing for a long time is worrying about whether what I write will hurt or offend people in my life. I have censored myself for years. I only started writing about my childhood after my parents’ death. I have been accused of airing dirty laundry in public, but I’ve also experienced the feeling of freedom and relief that comes from writing, like opening a window and letting the air circulate in the stale room of my memories. It is not more important than the potential hurt it may cause other people, but it is not less important either. I have often weighed whether to write something based on how it will affect others, not how it will affect me. There is a price for writing about hard things, and there is a price for keeping silent.

I write and I go to therapy, because I need both.

Personal writing is completely different from writing for an audience

Whether you call it journaling or stream-of-consciousness writing, the kind of writing that is just for my own eyes is nothing like my writing for an audience. I’m much more scared to do my personal writing than putting together my weekly newsletter or essays. My personal writing is much more in-depth and raw, and therefore more exhausting and difficult. It is often writing from the wound and into the wound, which is great for my own processing, not so great for pulling in readers. Anything so personal and raw that an audience would be merely shocked at my words, rather than being able to identify with them or put them into the context of their own lives, is better left to marinate.

Roxane Gayis teaching students how to write about trauma in a way that is“more than just catharsis.”Gay goes on to explain how memoir writing is not therapy, not for the writer and not for the reader:“We don’t talk a lot about the messiness of recovery, because people like to believe that it is a contained and discrete experience. […] You heal, but sometimes the wound reopens, and it heals again and then reopens and scar tissue develops, and so on. […] This is not therapy. This is just a memoir.”Doing actual therapy for years is what allowed her to finally write about her own trauma.“I had edited an anthology called Not That Bad, a compilation of women writing about their experiences with rape culture. Most of the submissions were just straight testimony. They weren’t essays.[…] It got me thinking, how do we teach people how to take a trauma — whether it’s theirs or someone else’s; a cultural trauma, collective trauma, so on — and write about it in ways that can be more than just catharsis?”

This raw kind of writing about personal trauma in a journal or diary is not wasted or lost because it has no audience. I may go back to the words later and realize a pattern, question a story I’ve told myself, or disentangle a complicated memory. But more than that, it is a way to witness my own life, especially the parts that nobody else might ever see or understand.

Personal, private writing is the foundational work that will echo into everything I write for an audience.

And then this is my personal bottom line: Writing is not therapy for me, but it gave me the impetus to call a therapist and make an appointment. Writing doesn’t heal me on its own, but it helps me identify the sore and tender places that need attention.

Writing doesn’t take away my fear, but it gives me courage.

Note: This article was first published in CRY Magazine on January 27, 2022.