The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [57]
Looking back on it all, the very worst thing was that I couldn’t talk to my mother anymore. I had to keep a wall between us. If I wasn’t careful, the wall might crumble and I’d tell her everything. The same was true of my friends. I’d go out with my girlfriends and we would all giggle about boys and dating. Their giggles were real, mine weren’t. If they had known what was happening in my bedroom they would have died.
I have heard or read variations on this theme hundreds of times over the last twenty-five years. In Laura’s case, the fondling was horrible but the collateral effects were worse. All of her close relationships with family and friends were damaged, her physical health deteriorated, and she was not able to talk about the experience to anyone until several years later.
Not talking about a major emotional upheaval violates our natural ways of behaving. As we have seen, emotional events provoke conversations. If we witness a terrible accident, discover that our favorite sports team has won an important game, learn that our closest friend has just left her husband, we feel the need to talk about it. This urge to talk about unexpected and upsetting events is fundamentally human. It is found in all cultures that have been studied. People talk about emotional experiences to learn more about them. Talking, it seems, is one of the primary ways that we are able to understand complex experiences. Conversely, when people are not able to talk about emotional events, they tend to think—even obsess or ruminate—about them.
TRANSLATING SECRETS INTO WORDS: EXPRESSIVE WRITING
As described in the first chapter, the links between secrets and illness motivated me to turn this idea on its head. If we encouraged people to talk or write about upsetting experiences, would their health improve? The answer turned out to be yes. In our first experiment, college students took part in a writing study where they were initially told that they would be writing about assigned topics for fifteen minutes a day for four consecutive days. After agreeing to participate, half of the people were told that they would write about deeply traumatic or stressful experiences for the four days. The other half of the students were instructed to write about superficial topics, such as describing objects or events.
Overall, people who were asked to write about emotional topics exhibited better physical health than those who wrote about superficial topics. Those in the experimental condition who wrote about traumas went to the doctor at half the rate of people in the control condition in the six months after the experiment. Later studies found similar patterns. Writing about traumatic experiences improved people’s physical and mental health.
Other researchers soon found that expressive writing affected immune function and other biological processes associated with health and illness. Josh Smyth from Syracuse University and his colleagues published a powerful study with arthritis and asthma patients showing that writing influenced the course of the diseases. Other projects with people dealing with AIDS, cancer, heart disease, depression, cystic fibrosis, and a range of other physical and mental health problems benefited from expressive writing. Now, almost twenty-five years later, over two hundred scientific articles have been published pointing to the power of writing.
The early writing studies were the impetus to develop a text analysis method that could help us figure out why writing worked. Awakening people’s emotions about earlier upheavals forces them to think differently about them. Exploring emotional topics demands that people look inward (as we see by their increasing use of first-person singular I-words). It helps them to organize their thoughts and construct more meaningful