Feeling overwhelmed? Having trouble emotionally processing something that happened to you? Expressive writing might help. Here's how.
, I talk about different metaphors of learning to add nuance to understanding the process of learning. One of the metaphors is of the self as a “developing author,” meaning you develop your ability to construct meaning from your experiences.This is the essence of expressive writing as a technique. You construct a new way of thinking about an event that can help you productively move forward.
For example, a group of professionals who had lost their jobs was voluntarily recruited to a “Writing in Transition” project by an outplacement firm. Participants were asked to write for 20 minutes a day for five consecutive days. The prompt was to write “about their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding the layoff and how their lives, both personal and professional, had been affected.”The participants were then tracked over eight months.
Interestingly, the individuals who engaged in expressive writing did not take more job search actions than the control group. So what accounts for their increase in receiving job offers? Seemingly they were more effective in job interviews, perhaps because they had made sense of their job loss and were less troubled by it and were, therefore, more effective in an interview.
You might be skeptical, however, that simply writing about a negative event will lead to a newfound perspective. I’d largely agree, despite the evidence of the research paradigm. In writing about an event, I’d also include identifying cognitive distortions in what you wrote. Cognitive distortions such as being overly critical of yourself , overgeneralizing , and should statements have been outlined by many practitioners and writers in the field of
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