Writing as therapy

The 15th of March was my father’s birthday. It would have been my father’s birthday. I’d taken a few days off and was travelling. I’d been thinking about that day for weeks. When it came, I thought about it at many moments and surprised myself at how well I was coping. The day went by without my mentioning anything about it to the people around me; I told myself it would be easier to get through if nobody asked. When night came, I told myself I had “made it through the day successfully”, without really knowing what that meant in this case. And then I replied to a WhatsApp message someone had sent me a few hours earlier: an important person, someone I have a deep connection with, but whom life has placed at a distance, far away. For reasons that don’t matter here, we hadn’t spoken for a while, and chance (call it what you like) had it that this person chose that very day, without knowing what date it was. Although it had nothing to do with the conversation, and without really knowing why, I wrote: today my dad would have turned 67. As the words appeared on my phone screen, all the tears I hadn’t shed that day, or in the weeks before it, appeared too. All of it. Luckily I was alone at that moment, which allowed me to let go. I didn’t let the person on the other side of the screen know what was happening either; there was no need. In fact, they had fulfilled their mission without even knowing it.

Writing that sentence was, in a way, giving the situation a voice. Making it real. And, in a way, accepting that reality. The tears were just the outward sign of that “realisation”. A full-blown insight.

“Writing is the painting of the voice.”

Voltaire

Writing has immense power over us, both when we pour words onto paper and when we become their readers, whether the words are our own or someone else’s. That’s why I always tell my patients to write down the tasks I set them, or to put their thoughts on paper whenever they feel it’s useful. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a beautiful notebook, on a scrap of paper they’ve found lying around the house or in the notes app on their phone, as long as they write it down. That they write for themselves. And why? There are several reasons:

• Because writing helps us put our thoughts and ideas in order. It helps us get clear.
• Because writing helps us put into words feelings, sensations, emotions… that we sometimes find hard to identify. And when we identify them, we have more power.
• Because writing helps us let off steam. A sheet of paper isn’t a person, but sometimes the best and deepest release is the one you find in front of the page, which in the end is a release with yourself, the most personal of all.
• Because writing helps us face our fears, starting with the fact that it helps us admit things we might not otherwise admit.
• Because writing leaves us a record of how we’ve changed over time.
• Because writing down our catastrophic predictions and then comparing them with reality helps us reflect, and is extremely useful.
• Because writing helps us correct irrational ideas more easily. Especially at the beginning, when we don’t yet know how to argue with our enemy ideas, the ones that cause needless suffering.
• Because writing often helps us find solutions to certain problems or dilemmas, or reach clearer conclusions.
• Because writing can help us cry, get things out, let go… and that soothes. And in a way, at some levels, it heals.
• Because when dark times come, you can turn to what you’ve written in your own hand, to the work you’ve done over the months, and see that not so long ago you were convinced of what you wrote, and that if you thought and felt that then, you can think and feel it again once you come out of the dark place you’re in.

Writing is therapeutic. Depending on each person’s problem and circumstances, it may or may not be enough on its own, but in any case it’s a positive practice worth encouraging, both in therapy and outside it.