The Healing Power of Writing
When I reflect on my own personal experiences with writing and what happens with writing in schools, there is often a disconnect. Writing can be a healing tool. And, yet, we don’t often embrace that for ourselves or teach that to students. And, if I am being honest, there have been moments in my life when I forgot that for myself.
As a teenager and as a new teacher, I wrote a lot. I started my career teaching introductory writing courses for first year college students. Then, as a young teacher I joined the National Writing Project, so I was steeped in theories of writing to learn. I participated in a writing group of fellow teachers who met monthly. I kept a writing notebook. I read about writer’s notebooks and studied the writing rituals that different authors had.
Then, I had children. All I could do was eat, sleep, feed others, plan lessons, grade papers. All time for my self and for my own writing stopped.
I reconnected with writing as a tool for healing when I was a school principal. In a desperate attempt to manage the overwhelm of that experience, I went on a writing and meditation retreat with Mark Matousek. He helped me remember the power of writing and its different purposes. He talked about writing in multiple ways—writing as emotional hygiene, writing as (re)awakening, and writing as craft.
For the last several years, thanks to that turning point experience with Mark, I have been cultivating a writing practice that has helped sustain me personally and professionally.
Most mornings I spend 10-20 minutes in bed writing in my journal before work—emotional hygiene. Some evenings, I write before bed, often flipping to a prompt from Mark’s book or from another book of prompts. When I am too tired, I will just open my notebook and copy a poem or a quotation from something I have been reading. On weekends, I often carve out a couple of hours to work on a writing project, which right now is a poetry course I am taking.
I have been wondering as I watch my own children, who are now in high school and in middle school, and as I work with schools as a part of my job, why it is that we don’t actively teach this secret about writing as healing to students in schools? Maybe part of it is because we haven’t experienced writing in this way ourselves as educators. Maybe part of it is because the standards focus on writing as external communication and as craft. It is that and so much more. How do we make space for ourselves and for students for “the so much more” of writing?
Here are some books and articles that include research about the power of writing as healing. May they inspire you as much or more than they have inspired me to consider how writing can heal us all, especially now:
“Writing Can Help Us Heal from Trauma” by Deborah Siegel-Acevedo in Harvard Business Review
Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo
Fearless Voices: Engaging a New Generation of African American Male Voices by Alfred Tatum
“Writing Our Way to Happiness” by Tara Parker Pope in The New York Times
“Writing and Storytelling for Healing” by Diane Raab in Psychology Today
“What’s All This About Journaling?” by Hayley Phelan in The New York Times
“The Evolving Field of Narrative Medicine Reaches the Core of the Human Condition” by Mariah Bohanon at Insight Into Diversity
“Warrior Voices” by Cecelia Capuzzi Simon
Writing to Awaken: A Journey of Truth, Transformation, and Self-Discovery by Mark Matousek
