The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [56]
Most people need social support after an upheaval. One of the most striking phenomena my students and I have seen in studying blogs is the degree to which people seek and receive support from others. When people are distressed after an upheaval, they merely mention their emotional state and a flood of well-wishing comments from friends and strangers follows.
As part of her doctoral dissertation dealing with the language of diet blogs, Cindy Chung tracked what factors led to successful weight loss across several hundred dieters in a diet blog community over several months. Many of the bloggers focused on the details of losing weight but the majority also wrote about their relationships, life experiences, and emotional issues. Many dieting experts would recommend that the best way to lose weight is to obsessively list the foods you eat, the number of calories you have taken in, and the amount of exercise you have done on a daily basis. Not true according to Chung’s research. Instead, she found the very best predictor of successful weight loss was being involved in the online social network. That is, the more comments or posts a person sent out and received, the more successful they were at losing weight. In addition, bloggers writing about personal and emotional issues were far more successful in losing weight than those who wrote only about their foods and diets.
THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF TRAUMAS: HOW WORDS CAN HEAL
As the blog data suggest, most people initially cope with a traumatic experience by seeking out friends and family. The ways people talk or write about the upheavals vary considerably and may not involve any deep emotional discussions.
If people could always respond to emotional events the ways they wanted or needed, there would probably be less of a demand for therapists and physicians. Traumas, even highly personal traumas, are deeply social. If I have been raped or mugged, I may be hesitant to tell others because of the humiliation or the fear that others will treat me differently. Consequently, my natural reactions to talk openly about the experience will be stifled. Similarly, I may need to appear strong and happy to my family to avoid their becoming anxious or depressed.
THE DANGER OF SECRETS
Events that are shameful, embarrassing, or could damage one’s reputation are often kept secret for years. I discovered this early in my career when I included a questionnaire item that asked people if they had experienced a traumatic sexual experience prior to the age of seventeen. In surveys of thousands of adults, approximately 22 percent of women and 11 percent of men said they had. Particularly striking was that this same group had terrible health compared to people who had not had traumatic experiences. Later studies showed that the problem was that the sexual traumas were almost always secret traumas. Any type of major upheaval that people kept secret from others tended to compromise their physical and mental health.
Big emotional secrets are toxic for several reasons. One of the first interviews I conducted that illustrated this was with a thirty-five-year old woman I’ll call Laura, who had been about twelve when her mother remarried. Starting a few months after the marriage, her new stepfather, Jock, would occasionally sneak into Laura’s bedroom in the middle of the night and fondle her. Terrified, she tried to get him to leave even though he would make light of the situation. This continued off and on until Laura was fifteen, when she left home to live with an aunt. As she described it:
I had always been close to my mother. The divorce had nearly killed her and she was so happy with Jock. If she had known what Jock was doing to me, it would have broken her heart. I wanted to tell her so much. Do you know what it is like to be in a family like that?