How to let go of pain: pick up a pen and paper

I’ve long been an advocate for writing as a means of healing. Putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, has been the best weapon in my arsenal for plumbing the depths of my emotions and moving past hurts – particularly when an issue involves another person.

The other day I came across some academic endorsement of the catharsis I have experienced via the written word (yay science!).

In her book Rising Strong, vulnerability expert Brene Brown references research from James Pennebaker at the University of Texas. James says: “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are – our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organise the experience.”

Pennebaker’s study, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found that participants who wrote about traumatic experiences for four consecutive days reported greater happiness three months later, visited the doctor less than usual during the following six weeks and seemed to have a healthier immune system compared with the control group who wrote about superficial topics.

Essentially, he says, translating painful and confusing experiences into words helps us get to grips with what happened, which helps us navigate our way through. We become active creators in our own life stories rather than passive bystanders.

I’ve never tried the four-day exercise that Pennebaker advocates, but I did use writing as therapy recently when a friend did something really shitty to me that left me reeling. My first instinct was to contact him and force him to explain his actions, but my wounded pride would not let me. I’m glad I hesitated, because communicating with him before I had got my thoughts in order would mean I would have likely launched some personal attacks that I would regret forevermore (and looked like a dick in the process).

What I did instead was write him a letter (using pen and paper, so I’m less likely to edit it as I go) being very specific about why I was upset. I wrote two pages, and when I read it back, I could see a very clear pattern. My tone had changed from being angry and accusatory to being self-reflective. Which is a helpful progression. I’d expressed my pain without having to confront him, and had managed to make sense of it to the point where I recognised how I had contributed to the situation by having unrealistic expectations of his behaviour. I was still unhappy about the event but I was no longer furious at him. Anger, after all, is a secondary emotion, masking a deeper fear – if we want to move past what happened, we need to find out the issue underlying the anger. I did not send the letter; I did not need to.

When you feel overwhelmed by emotions sometimes you just don’t want to do the things you know will help. You feel justified being angry, so you don’t *want* to move past it. But I know from experience that if I can funnel my emotions onto a piece of paper, I will process the experience in a much more helpful way. And when the lesson has been learned, the Universe won’t send me that situation again.

This entire blog is testament to the power of the written word to ease the pain of the human heart, and build a bridge to peace. Almost every post I have written has reshaped my emotional landscape and empowered me to be proactive in working through the challenges I face.

If there’s something you’re struggling with right now, I’d recommend you try writing about it. Don’t worry about being clever or lyrical or creative, just be honest about how you feel. It might not resolve your pain but I bet it will give you some clarity to move forward. 

RELATED POSTS: In praise of writing. How to make every moment count.

How trying to be happy can make you very unhappy

Here’s something I’ve noticed about the self-help industry: sometimes it’s not that helpful. 

If you look at the colossal amount of space the self-help section occupies in your bookstore – you guys still visit bookstores, right? Please do; bookstores are struggling and they really need our custom – one theme occupies the most shelf space: the pursuit of happiness.

That makes sense – we all wanna be happy. But if you read the back covers, many of these books are promising a magic formula for designing a life where every moment is happy. I don’t want to criticise books on happiness across the board, because I’m sure they have helped people, but my opinion is that this approach is problematic.

What concerns me is the underlying message – that we should expect to be happy all the time. To me, that idea is dangerous, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Last week I went to a panel session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival with the compelling title How To Live. The comments which struck a chord with me the most came from Paul Dolan, a London-based, internationally renowned expert on happiness and behaviour.

“The happiness industry is a distortion of the original positive psychology [movement]. It’s feeding this idea we are entitled to feel happy, that that is the default setting for humans. So out of the full spectrum of emotions that make us who we are – and all emotions, even the dark ones, have something to teach us – it’s saying that if we’re not feeling happy all the time there’s something wrong with us.”

YES! It’s natural to want to maximise your happiness levels, but unless you’re Miley Cyrus, life is not a constant party, and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you are trying to make it so. In fact I’m not sure that’s working out too well for Miley either. As much as we might relish the euphoria of graduating from university or the elation (or perhaps despair, depending on your circumstances!) of finally seeing those two stripes appear on a pregnancy test, happy events aren’t shaping you as a person. It’s the agony of rebuilding your life and healing your fractured heart after the demise of a relationship that teaches you how resilient you are, and that you’re capable of looking after yourself. Darker emotional states instil practical lessons too. It’s the despair of blowing your car’s head gasket in peak traffic that teaches you that if you’re driving a car older than Cyndi Lauper’s back catalogue, you need to top up its oil and water frequently. (This example may or may not be inspired by real-life events.)

Fixating on happiness like it’s some magical destination – the finish line of an emotional marathon littered with disappointing boyfriends, menacing bosses and unflattering haircuts – can also have the effect of lowering your self-esteem. Basically, you’ll wind up feeling like you’re doing life wrong when you’re unable to live in a state of infinite happiness. Ugh. We’ve got enough reasons to feel like we’re failing, thank you very much; experiencing normal human emotions shouldn’t be one of them. 

Instead, I think it’s more helpful to focus on contentment. Because gratitude is a core value for me, I spend time focusing on all the good things in my life. That means that when I get hit by an unexpected curveball and my life starts to feel like a giant pile of poo, I don’t pretend that it’s wonderful. I acknowledge the crapery (that is a word now, I just declared it so) and focus on what comes next, because I know it always gets better in the end, and my life is still, overall, incredible. When you’re broke, lonely and desperately overworked, it’s much easier to return to a baseline state of contentment – because unless your life is completely broken, there is always more right with it than there is wrong. Happiness is a beautiful place to visit, and you should go there often, but you can’t build your home there. 

Paul’s approach is to focus not on the meaning of life but the meaning of moments. As an example, he talked about teaching his child to read: “That has purpose, but doesn’t always have pleasure.”

The take-away message: knowing what’s important to you and what you value can be hugely helpful in achieving life satisfaction – even when things are not going so well. If you can focus on the moments that give you purpose, and celebrate moments of pleasure, you might not need to read a trillion books, or even one book, on happiness. And you’ll be better able to recognise and appreciate it when you stumble upon it. 

I didn't smile for a long time. I regret that

For a long period of time, maybe 15 years, I hated my wonky, misaligned teeth so much I used to put my hand in front of my face whenever I smiled. This became so automatic that when I finally got my teeth straightened at the age of 30, it took months of training to stop hiding my smile; the habit was that ingrained.

Friends, a smile is not a thing to be suppressed. It is the thing you do that makes you shine. It is the thing you do that makes a big impact on other people. It is the thing you do that improves your mood (it’s true – research shows it alters your brain activity in a way that’s consistent with a lift in mood). 

I’m annoyed at myself for hiding such a major part of what makes me sparkle for so long. And for such a painfully petty reason. I remember I even developed a ‘camera smile’ (this was in the days before digital photography, when it was much easier to avoid the camera) that didn’t involve opening my mouth! As you can probably imagine, it did not look even remotely warm nor sincere.

Remember late last year when Kim Kardashian said she avoids smiling because it causes wrinkles? There was an English woman interviewed on TV the other night who stopped smiling as a youngster for the same reason. She’s 50 now, which means she has not smiled for 40 years! I almost feel sorry for her that she’s had such a muted life. Of course, just because she’s not smiling doesn’t mean she’s unhappy – but really, what sort of happiness is that which cannot be fully and naturally expressed, and must be guarded as if it were a dangerous animal that might escape and wreak havoc?

I’m only guessing here, but I imagine that no one has ever got to the end of their life and regretted smiling and laughing so much. And as far as the wrinkle situation goes, I think Audrey Hepburn said it best when she declared that happy girls are the prettiest. 

Blame it on the weather

In this part of the world, we talk about the weather A LOT. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, you’ll regularly hear comments like: “Oh no – it’s going to rain this weekend”, “I hope it’s nice tomorrow” and “What a miserable day”. For so many people, it seems like they need a day of blazing sunshine before they can feel content.

I understand the interest in Mother Nature’s moods – after all, I never make a wardrobe choice without checking the forecast, so I can choose pants over floaty dresses in gale conditions and avoid a Marilyn moment – but I don’t understand the amount of power we give to external conditions. I find it odd that something which we have zero control over not only features heavily in social interactions but is the determinant of whether it is a “good day” or a “bad day”.

Here are the factors that typically amount to a good day for me:

·         Waking up alive

·         Feeling loved

·         Feeling a sense of purpose

·         Laughing at least a couple of times (ideally more)

Neither the absence of rain nor a high temperature are prerequisites for my day-to-day happiness.

Why do we care so much about the weather? As far as what Mother Nature throws at us, we have sunhats and sunglasses and umbrellas and coats. As far as what life throws at us, we have the power to determine our own forecast.

The sunshine is within us – it’s our job to bring the warmth and the light to each day.