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Part I of a series.
Keeping traumatic experiences under wraps can trigger mental and physical health problems. In the 1980s, social psychologist James Pennebaker began looking at questions of trauma and health while at the University of Texas at Austin. He’d done a series of studies examining how people express their symptoms—and their perceptions of their symptoms—to healthcare professionals. He sent out a survey to 800 college students, and among the 80 questions he posed, one asked if the students had experienced any sexual trauma prior to the age of 17.
“The responses to that question changed my career,” he says.
About 15 percent of the students answered yes. Those students also reported far higher rates of physical and emotional symptoms and doctor’s visits than those who answered no. In follow-up interviews and studies, Pennebaker learned that the issue was not so much around the traumatic experience itself, but rather that these people felt that they had to hide what happened to them. They kept the experience from others, and, to a large extent, buried it within themselves. They were reluctant to discuss it, hesitating to open the box and peer inside at what they were feeling. What is it about secrets and trauma that is so toxic? James wondered.
He developed a working theory: Keeping a secret is a form of active inhibition.
“Concealing or holding back strong emotions, thoughts, and behaviors...was itself stressful,” he explained in a journal article in 2017. “Further, long-term, low-level stress could influence immune function and physical health.”
If keeping a secret about trauma contributes to poorer health, Pennebaker thought that having an outlet for safely revealing these stories might help. Talking about our trauma to someone else is complicated, however, because of fear, stigma, or social pressures that inhibit the freedom to reveal our full story.
He designed a study in which he asked groups of undergraduates to write about a traumatic experience over the course of several days, while others in a control group wrote about superficial topics. He instructed those in the expressive writing groups to write about their thoughts and feelings surrounding the most traumatic experience of their life. He encouraged them to really dive in and explore their deepest emotions. He assured them that all of their writing was completely confidential, that spelling, sentence structure, and grammar didn’t matter. Pennebaker saw that those using expressive writing around trauma had far fewer visits to the campus health center than those who wrote trivial stories.
Numerous studies using this same writing paradigm confirm that when you intentionally tap into personal and emotional stories through writing, it helps reduce both mental and physical ailments. In one study on the effects of expressive writing on the brain, researchers saw that the act of writing about a past traumatic event changed neural activity by activating the mid-cingulate cortex, an area that is critical in processing negative emotion. The act of putting words to our emotions and feelings can help us contextualize and better understand difficult events in our lives at a neurobiological level.
Pennebaker has now spent more than 30 years studying how committing our thoughts and feelings to paper can improve mental and physical health. His work has shown how writing can help those who feel alone give a name to their feelings, connect to their needs, and process traumatic events. Dozens of studies by Pennebaker have also found that expressive writing can reduce blood pressure, lower stress-hormone levels, lessen pain, improve immune function, and alleviate depression while also heightening self-awareness, improving relationships, and increasing our ability to cope with challenges.
Creative nonfiction—an umbrella term for genres like memoir and personal essay—is another form of expressive writing. Through the act of writing, the author sets out to learn about themselves. Often, the best essays and memoirs start off by asking a question, and the author writes their way to an answer. The very word “essay” comes from the French verb "essayer," meaning “to try.” Through the act of writing, we can learn to map our minds and come out on the other end more informed about how we feel and think. As the writer Mary Karr wrote in her book The Art of Memoir, “A memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.”
But for some of us, it’s impossible to put secrets or traumatic experiences into words at all because of the ways they have altered our brains. The words, quite literally, cannot be found.
From the book Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. Copyright © 2023 NeuroArts LLC. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
