Over the last 30 years, an abundance of research has demonstrated how helpful expressive writing is in improving both physical and mental health. Very few people, (even very few therapists), make use of this knowledge by including expressive writing in their lives. Interestingly, most researchers in this area have relied on groups of college students who were most likely reimbursed for their participation. Without that reimbursement, perhaps the college students would not have done any writing either!

If you would like to learn more about joining a therapeutic writing group, contact us. For more information about our next Writing for Health and Healing group for women that meets in Lane Cove North, please click here.

People who are seeing a therapist and are willing to do writing as a form of "homework" will make progress faster and therefore will attend fewer therapy sessions as a result. But what about people who don't feel the need to see a therapist but are nevertheless affected by bad memories of painful or traumatic events?

If you are someone who had a flair for writing in high school or who had hoped that maybe one day you would write a book or memoir, then you perhaps you are one of the few who have the self-discipline and motivation to make use of one of the self-help books on expressive writing. I have included links to some of these books below. But there are many people who read those books and still cannot make themselves write. There are many more readers than writers!

So the difficulty is essentially one of motivation. Why do we find it hard to motivate ourselves to write even when we know it is good for us?

The first reason is that many of us are already so busy that we are unlikely to add another task to our list when we are accountable to no one but ourselves for achieving it.

The second reason is that to protect ourselves, we have a tendency to avoid that which is emotionally painful. This makes sense. Most of us will find excuses not to write about painful events even if we know it will help us. Writing is not immediately reinforcing because it doesn’t usually help us feel better right away. If we get upset when we write about something sad or painful, it might take a couple of hours or a good night’s sleep to feel normal again. Research shows that the benefits of writing are not immediate but occur over the medium to long term.

The third reason is that writing is a solitary activity. Even many professional writers say that writing is a lonely experience. If you are already feeling a bit down or lonely, it might be hard to do something that makes you even feel lonelier.

To increase our motivation for writing, we have to find a way to be accountable, to be supported in facing the pain, and to connect to like-minded others so that we don’t feel lonely. A writing group can help us increase our motivation. Meeting once a week or so to report on what they have written, participants feel accountable, they write more and, when they hear other people’s stories, they feel inspired to write.

If your overall goal is to produce fiction or a good memoir for publication, then you need to find a writers' group to get instruction in the craft of writing and to get feedback on the quality of your writing. You will write more, become a better writer and probably also make friends.

But if your goal is not to publish a book, but to experience personal growth, better health, and the resolution of painful emotions, then what you need is a therapeutic writing group, a small group that will help you maintain the motivation to write and that will the support you to write about emotionally painful experiences. When an experienced therapist manages the group process, participants feel contained and safe. When you read your writing aloud (and you choose what and when to read) participants respond with acknowledgement and support. They do not give you any feedback on your style or instruction on the craft of writing. You choose what you will share within the group and what pieces you keep private.

If you would like to learn more about joining a therapeutic writing group, contact us. For more information about our next Writing for Health and Healing group for women that meets in Lane Cove North, please click here.

Books

Why is it that we seem to long for someone to listen to us and why is it that the experience of having someone listen, really listen, and allow us to talk, has such a profound effect on us?

When you talk out loud to someone else, you hear your words spoken out loud, and you get the chance to listen to what you are saying. On your own, you may have been aware of a jumble of thoughts or self-talk. Talking an issue or idea out loud with someone is often the first experience we have of organizing our thoughts well enough to express them to someone else, and as we do this, we construct a more coherent story of what we are thinking and feeling. As we listen to ourselves saying this more coherent story and we are more able to think and reflect upon our experience.

When you are distressed, thoughts and feelings churn around in your mind. When you say what you are thinking and feeling out loud in the therapy room, or to your best friend, you get to hear your own words out loud, and sometimes you hear them again when the listener reflects them back to you. What had been jumbled up feelings, memories and impulses in your emotional limbic brain, you express as spoken words which you hear through your own ears and are registered into your frontal cortex, the thinking brain, which is very good at making sense of things. When you experience your listener as accepting and nonjudgmental, you can more easily adopt that attitude and feel less critical of yourself.

Does it require an another person, a listener, for you to experience this process of listening to yourself speak? Maybe not. It would be very difficult to talk out loud to yourself, by yourself, for a whole hour, even if you were able to make yourself do it. But if you could make yourself, it would probably help you. If you’ve ever had the experience of sending audio files as voice letters, you may have some sense of this.

Another way of experiencing listening to yourself is through the process of expressive writing. Some people keep a journal as a way of reflecting on their thoughts and feelings about their lives. Keeping a journal can be very helpful, but it isn’t always positive. Some people use journals to reinforce angry thoughts and bad memories. However, there is a great deal of research, spanning over 30 years, that shows that if we write about our deepest thoughts and feelings about traumatic events that we have experienced, (even if we write about it only once), we will experience ongoing benefits regarding both physical and mental health.

The problem with talking to ourselves, whether that is out loud to a tape recorder, or writing it down in our journals, is that we tend to avoid facing the most painful bits, and so we only go so far in writing about the memory or issue. When we reach that bit that really hurts, we stop or focus on something else. The essence of that painful memory still lingers like a sliver under the skin that continues to fester. Sometimes when we think we are writing about our feelings, we are actually masking over another terrible bit that we can’t bear to face. In contrast, if you were talking with someone who had the skill to ask you the right question, at the right time, so that you go to that place that you would rather avoid, and you faced it, you are likely to experience a kind of healing.

To transfer this into the realm of writing, this means that your likely to do the the most therapeutic writing when you are working with a skillful therapist who guides you in how to write about those things that you would otherwise automatically and unconsciously avoid.

People who experience this kind of writing are often surprised at the clarity and strength of the voice that emerges, their own voice, and a voice much stronger and wiser than they had ever known. In contrast to the woman who came to me saying that she felt she had “lost herself,” people say that writing has allowed them to “find themselves” or “find a voice.” In this process, the painful memories that had sometimes festered for decades, are drained of their colour and visceral response and take their proper place as factual memory in the long narrative of our lives.

William Ury from the Harvard program on negotiation presented aTed talk on the power of listeningwhile negotiating issues in business and and in international conflicts.He dreams of a world in which listening is taught in schools, parents are taught to listen, and in which leaders are chosen on their ability to listen.

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Is the ability to listen well a skill or something associated with a certain personality type? Those people who know that they don’t listen well may brush off their lack of skill off with, “I’m an extrovert,” “I’m just more of a talker,” or“I’d rather look for a solution than be endlessly moaning about it.”

We learned many of our patterns of speaking and listening in our families that we grew up in and these patterns were shaped by our gender and social class. It takes conscious knowledge, experience, and intention to override these patterns and do something different. I was not a natural born therapist. Listening did not come "naturally" to me because of my personality or the family from which I came. As the middle child in a family of five children, I had experienced very little of anyone in my family listening to me in a significant way, and I doubt that any of my siblings would say I was a good listener when I lived with them. My first experience of learning to listen was when I was about 20 years old, and I took a Rogerian counselling skills course. It felt very artificial and difficult to do and so profoundly different than how I was "naturally." Why it was so difficult was not just because the skills themselves were difficult but that to do it well required me to have a very different attitude.

The attitude associated with good listening can be trained, however, in the same way that we train our thinking when practising meditation. When you sit quietly and meditate, concentrating on each breath that you breathe, you might notice how your brain is chattering on, making judgements, trying to convince you that what you’re doing is a waste of time and that you should get up and do something productive. The goal of meditation is not to make those thoughts stop, but not to identify with them and fuel them with energy. Rather, we learn to let our thoughts pass by like clouds floating by in the sky.

As I begin a session with a client, and I focus on what he or she is saying, it sometimes takes a while for my brain to get in sync. My brain will often be doing antics similar to what happens in meditation, distracting me with thoughts about things outside of the room or about my reaction or thoughts about the client. I must continually bring myself back to attending to the client in front of me and allowing my thoughts to pass like clouds. I resist the urge identify with the thoughts and or the urge to say what is unnecessary to say.

As the session goes on and the client’s story deepens, my attention is naturally riveted, and my thoughts seem to disappear. I listen deeply, not only to the words and making sense of their meaning, but listen by watching what the person is saying through body language, their way of sitting, through their the tone of voice. I am attentive to the slight breaking of the voice during the most emotional bits as their eyes tear. I wait for more, asking the right question, encouraging the answer by pulling together everything that has been said. My mind is completely occupied with the present moment because the experience requires focus, attention, concentration and restraint.

To be able to listen well, a therapist must believe it important for clients to express and explore their thoughts and feelings. The therapist knows this will take time and that this is a creative process and is no shortcut to be taken by providing the “answer” too soon, even if the therapist, in the end, does know a useful direction. After the session, the clients say that their minds have opened up in some way. New thoughts trickle in and connect up with other thoughts, and they begin to see the world a bit differently,

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If you have someone in your life who really listens to you, without judging, without interrupting, without telling you the “solution” to your problem too quickly, and you can tell this person what is laying heavy on your heart, then you have a precious gift. If this person is your partner, a best friend, a sister or someone else close, you are one of the lucky few.

Being a good listener is much harder than it might seem. You will notice that even if you long for your partner to listen to you, it is still very hard for you to stay listening to your partner. We find our minds racing ahead thinking about what they could do to solve the problem, what they should do, what we would do instead, or else our mind wanders to the many other things we have to worry about and how we would like this conversation to end so that we can get on with it.

Women often complain that their male partners don’t listen and instead interrupt and tell them what to do, how to fix it. So instead of being able to explore her own thoughts and feelings, she becomes frustrated and angry with him. If you ask him, he will say he is desperately trying to be helpful in trying to help his upset partner, and he doesn’t understand her constant criticism of him.

Sometimes the man has learned that it is not a good idea to try to fix it and so does try very hard to listen. He tries hard not to interrupt, but still leaves her feeling unsatisfied because he fidgets, looks at his phone, looks away, makes huffing and puffing noises. She knows he’s waiting for his turn and that he will challenge her. The saddest part of all this is in her attempt to seek connection, be heard and be validated, she gets hurt and feels invalidated. She then goes on the counterattack, criticizing him which results in them engaging in in a spiral of attack and counterattack. When it is all finished, she leaves with another problem to worry about, the sad state of their communication. When she comes to see me for therapy, she says “I have lost myself. I don’t know who I am anymore”.

Although I seem to be suggesting that men are more likely to be Mr. Fix-it and have more difficulties with listening, sometimes this pattern is reversed. I have worked with men who became despondent after being fired or retrenched from their jobs. They were left wrestling with deep feelings of resentment and humiliation. Some men in this situation refuse to talk about it. Others, however, cannot stop talking about it and their female partners, although initially supportive, eventually become sick of hearing about it and begin to criticize him for not getting his act together. The conflict that ensues results in him shutting down and getting even more depressed.

Why is it that talking to a therapist can be such a different experience than talking to partners, friends or family?

Given the choice, most people feel better when they have a chance to be the one in a conversation who does the most talking. So the intention or motivation to be a good listener does not stem from the intrinsic good feeling of the experience of listening. Someone who listens does it not because it feels good but because they believed that it is an important thing to do that will benefit the other person. Many people have never experienced how beneficial this can be and so have no commitment to listening.

Other people might think that it is good for someone to get it off their chest but lack the skills to be a good listener. The basics of listening skills can be learned, at least from a good teacher. Pareto's Principle or the 80-20 Rule probably applies here. We can learn 80% of the behaviour needed to be a good listener in 20% of the time. What we can learn in a short time is the skill in just letting the other person talk, without interrupting, and in using minimal encouragers to keep the person talking, saying things like: “yes tell me more”; “Mmm, hmm”; “how did that make you feel? ”; “is there more?”. To add a little more complexity, throw in the skill of summarizing from time to time what the person has said.

The difficulty that most of us have, even if we learn this very basic skill, is that the speed of which we speak and listen is one-quarter or one-third of the rate of which we are capable of thinking. So while the person is talking, we can’t stop ourselves from thinking, and sometimes this takes the form of a counterargument which at some point we can’t stop ourselves from speaking. Even if we manage not to speak our thoughts, the speaker is likely to be aware of the fleeting evidence of our preoccupation in our subtle facial expressions and body movements.

The second difficulty is that if the listener is in a close relationship with the speaker, it is very hard not to have some vested interest in the content of what the speaker is saying. Therefore, it is hard to stay and appear neutral. If you are considering whether you should stay or leave your partner, your partner will hardly be neutral as you explore this issue. If you are considering moving overseas, your mother can hardly be neutral. Even if she says she wants you to be independent, and she tries as hard as she might to remain neutral, you will read the tiny little facial muscles that show her disappointment. Or she will cry. Our difficulties in remaining neutral are magnified if we are trying to listen to someone who is hurt or angry with us or our behaviour. And even when the issue has nothing to do with the listener, those who love us will feel distressed by our distress. Often their distress will overwhelm their ability to listen. Or sensing their distress, we will protect them by not saying everything that is on our mind and in our hearts.

The third difficulty is that when people speak, they often only say part of what they are feeling. Sometimes this is because they have never articulated it to themselves and either don’t know they are feeling it or don’t understand their confusion. It is hard for the untrained person to guess accurately what the person is feeling and to ask questions in a gentle way to elicit this expression of the feeling. And if they guess wrong, and the listener is even a bit pushy, the speaker will feel misunderstood and withdraw.

For some people, the experience of talking to a therapist who listens is the very first time in their lives that they have had anyone really listen to them for more than a few minutes. While a 50 or 60 minutes session may not seem like a long time, it is a long time to have a person really listen to you, keep the topic solely on you and your life, explore the nuances of your thinking and feeling and not redirect the conversation back to him or herself. As a neutral person, the therapist can suspend judgement and go fearlessly alongside you in exploring what is difficult for you to articulate. Add to that that an experienced therapist has had thousands of hours of listening to people’s stories of their relationships and inner lives and so has well-developed intuition which is she or he takes as a tentative hypothesis in helping you explore what you might be feeling.

If you are seeking personal therapy for yourself, that is what you should expect of a good therapist.

It is important to know that one sign of a bad therapist is that the person doesn’t listen well enough. A bad therapist talks too much about him or herself, doesn’t ask you good questions, gives you premature suggestions before you feel you have been heard or seems to want to talk about a topic that interests him or her more than it does you. You walk away feeling frustrated and feel like the therapist didn’t really “get you.” If that happens to you, you need to tell your therapist that in your very next session or you need to find a different therapist. All therapists should have much more than listening skills. But if a therapist lacks the essential ability to really listen, impressive university degrees or therapist qualifications will not a great therapist make.

Next: Listening like a therapist