Yes, I know, it’s a melodramatic and clickbaity title. But it is definitely true that writing about my experiences enabled me to process what I’d been through and allowed me to finally recover after years of struggling with depression, anxiety and insomnia.
How Writing Saved My Life
This is based on ‘a blog post I wrote in 2022’. In that post, I talk about how I worked with my therapist to use my passion for writing to not only make the notes I was making for my therapy sessions more interesting, but to turn them into a therapeutic tool themselves. You can, of course, read the original post at the link above, but I wanted to reiterate some of the key points here.
Writing for Therapy
I’d tried traditional journalling before, but it didn’t really work for me. So, I tried a few different kinds of writing to help me work through my thoughts and feelings. Again, these might not work for you, but maybe they will give you an idea of something new to try, and, who knows, it might make a difference.
On Becoming a Father
I’ve written about this in in a previous post, but I wrote a blog series called ‘I Am Your Father’, chronicling my experience of becoming a dad for the first time during lockdown (though I obviously didn’t know that it was going to become a lockdown parenting blog when I started it!).
It started as a light-hearted way to share the experience, primarily with our family and friends. I thought it would be fun to write about the ups and downs of becoming a parent, and to share some of the funny and chaotic moments. After COVID hit, I ended up writing about how we dealt with isolation, sleep deprivation, and becoming a parent with no outside support. I also ended up discussing mental health. A lot!
As you can imagine, it was a difficult time, and it is still something that is difficult to reflect on. However, I firmly believe that writing about it helped me to process what I was going through, to look for the silver linings in all those dark clouds, and to focus on how we did the best we could in incredibly difficult circumstances. So, I’m glad I stuck with it, even when things got really difficult.
Now, I realise that is, hopefully, a unique situation that you will not have to experience. But I hope it shows how writing and reflecting - however difficult it might be - can be a useful tool for processing difficult experiences.
“Out of My Head and Onto the Page”
This idea of using writing as a tool to process things can also be applied to less niche situations. The pandemic isn’t the first time I’ve dealt with severe mental health issues. During a previous difficult period in my life, I tried a range of different techniques and forms of therapy to try and help me begin to recover. As I said, traditional journalling hadn’t worked for me. But I worked with the therapist to work out a different approach.
Part of the problem I had was that I would ruminate on things. The same thoughts and worries would keep going round and round in my head. This would distract me from work and sleep, and prevented me from enjoying things. It also kept dragging my mood down and making the whole situation worse.
Here are a few key quotes from the original post:
“I would write every few days about whatever topic had been dominating my thoughts, interspersed with bits of advice from my sessions with Jo (my therapist). I would write structured essays on whatever had been on my mind, as if I were writing a blog post (even though I never planned to actually share them).”
“By focusing on one thing at a time, I was able to break down my problems and begin to work through them. Plus, by writing it all down, I was able to get the thoughts out of my head and onto the page, which stopped me from obsessing over them quite so much.”
I found that if I wrote every-so-often about whatever topic had been dominating my thoughts, it helped me to break the cycle and stop me from obsessing over them quite so much. Writing about them in a structured way, as if I was writing a blog post - with an introduction, background, discussion and conclusions - helped me to resolve these issues, which couldn’t happen when they were all jumbled up inside my head.
Telling Stories
I didn’t just just write non-fiction to help process things either. In 2019, I wrote a short story called ‘The Journey’ for a short-story competition by Mind. It was a fantastical tale, inspired by Greek and Norse mythology, about a man battling literal demons, based on my experiences and on the things I’d worked through with my therapist. In fact, the character of the Oracle in the story was based on her!
Again, it was not just retelling my story. I had to come up with things for the Oracle to say that would help the hero on his journey, and ways for him to overcome the demons who were taunting him. And a lot of this was based on advice from my therapist, and on the things that we’d worked through together.
The story was shortlisted by Mind and you can read it on my website.
Final Thoughts
So, that’s how I was able to use writing as a therapeutic tool, to help me process and come to terms with everything that happened to me. It may not work for you, but it’s something to consider if you’ve got something going round and round in your mind and just want to be free of it.
Thanks for reading.
Take care of yourselves.
