Expressive Writing as Therapy

In Moments of Being (1985), Virginia Woolf comments on the impact of writing To The Lighthouse on her feelings towards her mother, “I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and laid it to rest.” In this instance, expressive writing became a therapeutic action, allowing Woolf to come to a better understanding of the emotions she had never dealt with after her mother’s untimely death. While Woolf’s words are personal speculation, a study conducted last October by Baddeley and Pennebaker (2011) set out to test whether expressive writing would prove a valid form of therapy for soldiers recently reunited with their spouses after deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan. Upon return, soldiers are more prone to develop mental illnesses such as PTSD, and also face an increased risk for domestic violence in their marriages.

For Baddeley and Pennebaker (2011), expressive writing means something rather different from Woolf’s experience in penning her novel. Participants write from their own point of view about traumatic, stressful or emotional events (Pennebaker and Beall, 1986). In this case, soldiers were instructed to, “to write about one’s deepest thoughts and feelings about the transition from deployment to being reunited at home.” They then completed surveys that evaluated their marital satisfaction at the beginning of the study, after one month, and then finally after six months.

Findings revealed that when soldiers engaged in expressive writing, their marital satisfaction increased within one month of the exercise as compared to those who wrote unemotionally. Interestingly, the change was even more pronounced for couples in which the soldier was heavily combat-exposed. For the same couples, yelling also decreased by six months.

While their work is preliminary, Baddeley and Pennebaker (2011) have shown that the possibilities for writing go far beyond aesthetic or monetary purposes. For soldiers, who are at such a high risk for mental health problems and emotional trauma, expressive writing might be another therapeutic outlet through which such issues can be resolved. Beyond that, it will be interesting to see if expressive writing will have a positive impact on those facing different kinds of trauma and mental illnesses.

By Kristen Delancey