Why Write?

"What if writing were a simple, significant, yet necessary way to achieve spiritual, emotional, and psychic wholeness? To synthesize thought and feeling, to understand how feeling relates to events in our lives and vice versa? What if writing were as important and as basic a human function and as significant to maintaining and promoting our psychic and physical wellness as, say, exercise, healthful food, pure water, clean air, rest and repose, and some soul-satisfying practice?" (6)
"This book is an invitation for you to use the simple act of writing as a way of reimagingin who you are or remembering who you were." (9)
"the act of writing about something painful can help right a wrong that has been done to you. It can be a form of restitution." (10)
"Writing to heal requires no innate talent, though we become more skilled as we write, especially when we pay careful attention to the process of our writing." (15)

How Writing Can Help Us Heal

Writing means representing and re-presenting (18)
"to significantly improve your spirits long-term, you must endure difficult feelings initially" (22)
"To imporve health, we must write detailed accounts, linking feelings with events. The more writing succeeds as narrative—by being detailed, organized, compelling, vivid, lucid—the more health and emotional benefits are derived from writing." (22)
- "We must write in a way that links detailed descriptions of what happened with feelings—then and now—about what happened" (25) - linking thinking & feeling is critical

"If we commit ourselves to engaging in the process of writing, our work will evolve and mature. Becoming competent takes time, and we all have within ourselves the capacity to do it." (32)
"art for the sake of life" (33)
therapy & writing: "my work deepends because of my therapy; but my therapy progresses because of my work." (41)
"writing about difficulties enables us to discover the wholeness of things, the connectedness of human experience. We understand that our greatest shocks do not separate us from humankind. Instead, through expressing ourselves, we estabslih our connection with others and with the world." (43)
"Through writing, we change our relationship to trauma, for we gain confidence in ourselves and in our ability to handle life's difficulties." (45)

"For anxiety and fear (even downright terror)...are the feuls that drive the creative process. Anxiety and fear are feelings we'll learn to tolerate, even welcome. They're signals...that we're committed to the process; that we're doing sifnificant work; and that we're growing and changing through our work. No growth, no change, occurs without them." (50)
"writing is about cultivating and practicing autonomy. It is the way healing begins, especially if, in the past, our autonomy has been seriously compromised or even stolen from us. What we often explore in our writing is an assault on our integrity as people. Writing, then, enacts a freedom we often felt we didn't have." (51)
"First, we must become present to our own pain—we must not deny its existence, we must let ourselves feel it. Second, we must record it honestly—without hypocrisy, dishonesty, sentimentality, or idealization. And finally, we must recount it directly." (55)