Writing The Fears

In my work with teenagers, after the first visit I used to propose a task: for the next consultation if they wanted they could bring me a letter about their life. The extension was free, he told them: from half a page to a notebook, as they wanted. The important thing was that they tell me about themselves and their feelings. That way I could get to know them a little better and more quickly, which would make it easier for me to help them.

The most interesting thing was that, even many of those who accepted the proposal with frank annoyance, returned to the next consultation bringing me something written, almost always several pages or even a notebook, accompanied by a title labeled in colors: “My life.” Just by seeing him I already knew that therapy would be on the right track.

I have always been fascinated by the therapeutic power of sitting in front of a blank page and pouring out what we feel and think. I myself have spent long hours of my life writing endless letters or diaries that I still keep stacked in boxes. Writing for me has always been a pleasure and a therapy and that is why I have used it extensively with my patients.

James W. Pennebaker was one of the pioneers in investigating the benefits of writing as therapy, what is known as “expressive therapy ”: writing what we feel, expressing it freely and in maximum detail.

In a classic experiment carried out in the 1980s, he found that simply asking a group of volunteers to write in detail for four days about their feelings about the most traumatic or painful events in their life produced an important benefit on their health. So much so that in the following months they visited the doctor much less than the other group of study participants who were asked to write about nondescript subjects on those same four days.

The experiment led to an in-depth investigation and development of narrative therapy through writing as a valid technique to heal the enormous emotional charge that is repressed when there is a trauma.

Thus it is known that writing about what one feels, be it in the form of a journal, letters, or lists serves to heal. What is new is that a study has now shown that not only does it allow us to address the past, it also serves to face the future with less worry.

Hans Schroder and James Moser have shown how the most anxious people, those who worry chronically, when they write down all their fears at once before performing a task, they perform much better. Somehow overturning the fears in advance leads to a liberation to the mind that makes it possible to face the following tasks or jobs with much more efficiency.

Write your fears to say goodbye to them, or at least, dedicate a little attention to them so that instead of fears with capital letters of those that block you, they become fears of walking around the house …