I’ve been thinking about writing a lot lately.
Over the past five years I’ve run a number of writing groups, and there hasn’t been one where people haven’t struggled to write. Sometimes it is obvious. Someone says they don’t know what to write, or they sit looking at the page. Sometimes it is more subtle. There is suddenly something else to do, a distraction, a feeling that what they have written isn’t good enough, or a tendency to stay on the surface.
I think this resistance to writing, and to speaking for that matter, is universal. We all know something of it.
And perhaps we are wise to anticipate the struggle.
Because when we write something down, we are doing more than putting words on a page. We are potentially unsettling the status quo. Even if that status quo is fairly miserable, it is known. We know how to live there. We know how to function. We know how to keep certain things contained, how to avoid certain feelings, how to keep ourselves busy, how to stay in control.
Writing can disturb that arrangement.
From an IFS perspective, it makes sense that the parts that resist are there. They have usually invested considerable energy in preventing us from going somewhere. They have jobs to do, and those jobs often make perfect sense when we understand what they are protecting us from.
Something I have become interested in is how much they are willing to let us do.
I was reminded of this recently listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcast, Where Is Your Bad Writing? He brought together several well-known writers about the process of writing, and something similar came through in each conversation: don’t wait for the writing to be good enough. Show up. Let the pen move. The quality of what comes out matters less than developing the willingness to keep writing.
Perhaps the part of us that wants the writing to be good is the very part that stops us from writing at all.
How much our critics let us write may be a pretty good reflection of how well we have come to know them.
If we sit down and immediately find ourselves writing freely about something that has always been difficult to approach, perhaps there is already some trust there. Another time we may find ourselves completely blocked. We can’t get anywhere near it. The stuckness tells us something too.
When we formalise the practice, this becomes even more interesting. We decide we’re going to write every day. We join a writing group. We commit to some writing for a number of weeks. From our perspective, we may simply be creating a regular practice.
But from the perspective of our protectors, the message may be quite different.
We’re saying that we want to go somewhere.
We’re saying that we’re willing to look at things that some parts of us may have spent years preventing us from looking at.
It makes sense that they might become more alert.
We can’t really stand in logic and say, “Well, it should be fine. There’s nothing to worry about here. I’m just writing.”
Because that isn’t necessarily the reality those parts are living in.
For some of them, the danger still feels real. The threat can feel imminent. And for some, they are lodged in the past as if the past were present.
Something happened, and a part of us learned that it was dangerous. It took on a role. It developed ways of keeping us away from that danger. Years later, we sit down with a piece of paper and decide that we’d like to have a closer look.
Of course something in us might object.
This is one of the things I find so interesting about expressive writing. It is a practice that looks incredibly simple from the outside. Sit down and write for fifteen or twenty minutes. Yet there can be a lot happening underneath that simple instruction.
And there is some fascinating research behind it.
In the 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker began studying what happens when people write about difficult experiences. One of his early experiments asked students to write for fifteen minutes on four consecutive days about a traumatic or upsetting experience, including their deepest thoughts and feelings. A control group wrote about relatively trivial topics.
The study was small, and there were limitations. But the result was surprising enough to get people’s attention. Over the following six months, the students who had written about their difficult experiences made roughly half as many visits to the student health centre as those in the control group.
It was a simple experiment, but it opened up a much bigger question. What was it about putting an experience into words that might make a difference?
Pennebaker later worked with Jan Kiecolt-Glaser and Ron Glaser, looking at immune functioning alongside expressive writing. Other researchers began asking different questions about what might happen when people put difficult experiences into words.
One study I find particularly fascinating was conducted by Keith Petrie and colleagues in 1995. They worked with just 40 medical students who were going through a hepatitis B vaccination programme. Some students wrote about traumatic experiences and others wrote about more neutral subjects. The researchers then measured their antibody responses following vaccination.
The students who had written about their traumatic experiences showed higher antibody levels four and six months later.
It is a small study, and it certainly doesn’t mean that writing improves the immune system in some straightforward way. The wider research is much more complicated than that. But I find the question fascinating. What is happening when something we do with our experience seems to have consequences that can be measured in the body?
The research continued in different directions. Pennebaker and colleagues studied people who had recently lost their jobs and found that those who wrote about their thoughts and feelings surrounding the experience were subsequently re-employed more quickly than participants in comparison groups.
Researchers have since studied expressive writing across a wide range of populations and circumstances, including physical illness, psychological distress, stressful life events and major transitions. There has even been research into whether expressive writing might influence wound healing.
And researchers began looking more closely at the writing itself.
This is perhaps the part that interests me most.
It wasn’t simply that people who expressed the most emotion seemed to benefit. Researchers became interested in changes in language, particularly words associated with insight and making connections. There has also been research suggesting that writing can help people take a little more psychological distance from a difficult experience, allowing them to look at what happened rather than being completely inside it.
You might begin with:
I was angry.
Then:
I was angry because I felt ignored.
And perhaps eventually:
I think being ignored brought up something much older in me.
Something has shifted.
The experience has become connected to something else. There is a little more context around it. We are no longer simply inside the experience. We are beginning to see it.
I recognise this in my own writing. I’ll sometimes start writing about something that I think is the issue and, somewhere along the way, realise that it isn’t. Something else has been underneath it. I didn’t necessarily know that when I started.
Maybe that is part of what the page offers us.
Space.
We can slow something down enough to notice it.
And perhaps this is where the resistance becomes interesting again.
If writing can take us towards places that we have spent a lot of energy avoiding, then it makes sense that some parts of us might not be enthusiastic about the idea.
We don’t need to get rid of those parts.
We don’t necessarily need to push through them either.
We can get to know them.
We can ask what they are worried about.
We can notice when they are willing to let us go a little further and when they aren’t.
This is one reason I have become less interested in telling people to “just write” and more interested in helping people develop a relationship with the parts of themselves that make writing difficult. I have a sense that the motivation to write, or to express what is inside us, is already there. The work is to meet the resistance in a more skilful way.
Sometimes the writing itself becomes the conversation.
I don’t want to write about this.
Why?
Because something bad might happen.
What do you think might happen?
And suddenly we have something to write about.
We don’t have to force our way through the protector. In fact, doing that may strengthen its protective impulse.
Maybe we start with what it is willing to let us see.
That might be a small thing. A memory. A feeling. A conversation from yesterday. A moment when we felt ashamed or small. Something we are angry about. Something we keep thinking about.
Or simply:
I don’t know what to write.
And then we stay with that for a while.
I’ve come to think that writing is partly about developing this capacity to stay curious about our own experience.
We don’t always know where the writing will take us.
E. L. Doctorow described writing as driving through the night with the headlights on. You don’t need to see the destination, just enough in front of you to know where you are going.
I actually think the mixed findings in the research make the whole thing more interesting. I’m less interested in proving that writing “works” than I am in understanding what happens when it does. The effects are generally modest, and there is no simple formula. It seems to matter who is writing, what they are writing about, what is happening in their lives and perhaps how ready they are to go there.
Maybe writing helps us organise something that has been difficult to organise. Maybe it helps us make meaning. Maybe it gives us enough distance to see something we couldn’t see when we were completely inside it.
Maybe sometimes it doesn’t.
Perhaps the invitation is simply to create a little space in which our experience can speak, and to become curious about what is willing to be said and what isn’t.
And perhaps that is one of the simplest reasons to write.
To give our experience somewhere to land.
And perhaps how much our parts let us write about our experience may itself be a reflection of how well we have come to know them.
Curious about your inner critics?
What stops you writing isn’t always a lack of time or ideas. Sometimes it’s the voices inside telling you not to start, not to go there, or that what you write won’t be good enough.
If you’re curious about which critic voices tend to be loudest for you, take my Inner Critic Report. It takes about 5–10 minutes and gives you a snapshot of the critics that may be shaping your experience.