

In one of my leadership development workshops, we invited participants to write up and present an account of a difficult experience. We ended up with more than we had expected when Simon, a senior executive at an oil company, told the group about a harrowing experience that he had never properly digested.

On an assignment in Nigeria, Simon and five colleagues visiting one of the company’s oil rigs had been taken hostage. Two of the other hostages were killed in front of him almost at once and he was only released after long and drawn-out negotiations on the size of the ransom. He told us that he had never been able to put the experience behind him and was still plagued by nightmares.

But he also told us that writing up an account of this experience for the workshop had been somewhat cathartic for him.

On one level, this is not that surprising. As long ago as 1895, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud explored the value of dealing upfront with traumatic experiences in their famous book, Studies on Hysteria. In it, their famous patient, Anna O, called the procedure the chimney-sweeping method or the talking cure. Breuer would later refer to it as the “cathartic method.” But this insight can be traced back much further if you reflect on traditions around confession that are common to many cultures.

This doesn’t mean, however, that just talking about painful experiences will necessarily help you get better. Healing depends on your interpretation of what happened, which is where the process of writing up the experience rather than only talking about it can be of great additional value. The combination of reflective writing and talking about certain key experiences creates a powerful force to help us surmount difficulties and can hasten our capacity to come to terms with (or to digest) events and move on.

The unconscious working of the brain makes interpretation of what a painful experience is all about difficult. We all have an inner world of thoughts and sensations, habits, fantasies, and dreams, and much of what happens to us is beyond conscious awareness. This makes many of us strangers to ourselves, unaware of how we truly feel at any one moment of our lives. Indeed, much of our behavior is automatic; we tend to resort to repetitive habits and attitudes that don’t really express who we are, or what we want to become.

To take the journey into our interior—to understand ourselves better—we need to help our unconscious to construct new meaning out of our experiences. Reflective writing about a painful experience becomes very complementary to talking about it because it engages a different part of the brain. Brain scans suggest that talking is more related to the right than the left hemisphere. As writing has a greater influence on the left hemisphere, it may stimulate parts of the brain that are not affected by talking.

What we get out of reflective writing, therefore, may be more explicit and analytic than what we get out of talking. Talking uses the part of the brain that seems to be more associated with what we think of as our unconscious mind and what we say may to a large extent be determined by habits of thought so deeply embedded that we are no longer aware of them. Our written judgments and interpretations, which engage more the conscious part of our brain, are likely be less formulaic and much more thoughtful than merely talking about it.

Confronting painful episodes like Simon’s through reflective writing, therefore, involves breaking down and translating the event into a meaningful narrative, enabling cognitive and emotional integration, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of what had happened. Through the process of reflective writing we can take a greater responsibility for our own narrative and move on.

I am not alone in believing that writing can have a stress reducing and revelatory effect. A research psychologist at the University of Texas, James Pennebaker, has conducted a number of controlled experiments that confirm the effectiveness of writing as a therapeutic tool. He found that writing about thoughts and feelings arising from a traumatic or stressful event—what he calls expressive writing—helped many people cope with the emotional fallout of the events, and they experienced less mental and physical damage in the long run.

Pennebaker also found that writing had long-term effects on diseases such as asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, and arthritis. It turns out that when people write (or use dictation) approximately twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days (preferably at the end of the day), they will likely have fewer medical visits (half the rate of the people who don’t write or use dictation).

You have to be careful about using the tool, however. Pennebaker cautions that writing about trauma may initially trigger temporary distress. He also emphasizes that the timing of the writing matters. Studies have shown that people who write about a traumatic event immediately after it has occurred may actually feel worse after writing about it, possibly because they are not yet ready to face it. Pennebaker advises his clients to wait at least one or two months after a traumatic event before writing about it.

It has been my experience through my workshops that getting executives to write about difficult episodes gets them to behave differently. By creating a new narrative by writing about painful episodes they are able to reframe difficult events in a more balanced way and can move beyond angry brooding. What’s more, although writing seems like a solitary activity it actually helps people build relationships. When we open up privately about a traumatic event through writing about it, we are more likely to talk with others about it afterwards. In other words, it makes us more likely to reach out for social support given through talking about painful experiences, thus helping us in the healing process.

Of course, nobody really knows exactly how reflective writing affects the brain. But from what I infer from working with executives, verbally venting emotions is not necessarily enough to relieve stress and improve physical and psychological health. As the members of the workshop clearly saw, it was writing that had helped Simon to put into meaningful words the feelings and anxieties that he was previously unable to understand or even describe. Better yet, he was able to take those reflections home with him and found that the new insights transformed what had become a difficult home life in the wake of his trauma. As he and many others have discovered, the pen can take us to places that we need to be but where our unconscious cannot go.