Writing Your Way Through Emotional Triggers
We’ve all been there. We hear a song, smell a scent, listen to a conversation, and are suddenly thrown into an unmoored negative feeling — maybe just a tinge of unease, maybe full-on dread, overcome by an emotion that doesn’t fit the situation, but that we cannot shake. This sudden sinking into unexplained, uncomfortable feelings is common for most of us, and because it eventually recedes, we often discount it as being “just the way we are.” But what if we could make these experiences less intense, less startling, less uncomfortable? What if a simple exercise could help us understand these reactions and feel calmer and more confident?
Often, we remember incidents from childhood, but do not fully remember the emotional impact they had on us at the time. We may recount these easily, describing to our friends or spouses the events in our lives that were significant to us, but in the retelling, they are just a list of facts or anecdotes. Often the “funny stories” we tell from our childhoods, when looked at more closely, bring to light situations that were actually distressing to us at the time. When describing these through writing, we can discover the unknown impact of this emotionally laden material. We may find we have dismissed things we didn’t realize had hurt us and that may still be affecting us by thinking, “that’s just how things were.”
Unless these experiences are seen fully, unless we can think about how they may have shifted us and our perspective on ourselves, on others or on the world at large, they can affect us in unseen ways even now, in effect haunting and altering our current daily lives. Most of us can identify areas where we either overreact or underreact. Perhaps we feel excessive irritation toward our children if they are noisy, experience sudden tension when hearing a certain tone of voice, feel uncomfortable letting friends know if we feel hurt by them, or feel reluctant to reveal if we are sick.
James Pennebaker, PhD, found that simply writing about upsetting life events can relieve many of the lingering effects of that event. He refers to this as “expressive writing.” Numerous studies reveal that people who engage in expressive writing benefit in important ways, including significantly improved physical health and sense of emotional well-being.
In the article, “The Health Benefits of Narrative,” James Pennebaker and Janel Seagal describe their discovery that students who participate in expressive writing sessions find that
“writing about their thoughts and feelings drastically reduced their doctor-visit rates after the study compared to our control participants who had written about trivial topics…Confronting traumatic experiences had a salutary effect on physical health.”
Pennebaker and Seagal’s findings have been confirmed by studies throughout the world across social classes and racial/ethnic groups.
In his book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation, Dr. Daniel J. Siegel explains, “Writing in a journal activates the narrator function of our minds. Studies have suggested that simply writing down our account of a challenging experience can lower physiological reactivity and increase our sense of well-being, even if we never show what we have written to anyone else.”
As part of our e-course entitled Making Sense of Your Life, Dr. Siegel and I talk about the tremendous benefits associated with developing a coherent narrative about your life, including enhanced relationships, positive feelings toward self and an overall improvement in physical and emotional health. We suggest an exercise in which participants quickly list ten things from their childhood that felt distressing — anything from actual abuse to the more mundane but still hurtful circumstances in life. Examples might include having to move every couple of years due to a parent’s job, an injury sustained that was frightening, or worrying about a beloved sibling. The next step is to think about how they felt during the event and how it may have shaped their life.
To explore how early experiences in your life may still be influencing you today, you could try this exercise yourself.
- Set a timer for 5 minutes and list whatever memories come to mind.
- Then take time to think about each item. Write about where you were, how old you were, what you were feeling during the experience. Did you feel frightened? Embarrassed? Angry? Helpless?
- Next, consider and write about how those feelings may have altered how you view yourself, other people or the world at large. Did you come away from that experience feeling ashamed? Wary of others? Hyperaware of potential dangers?
Suppressing the “feeling memory” of experiences that affected us negatively but were not addressed adequately, i.e., unresolved trauma, takes a lot of emotional energy and bodily resources. Freeing up the memories and recognizing what it was like for you at that time, thinking through the experience and how it affected the way you felt toward yourself, other people and the world at large, can release this tension.
Imagine a world where mysterious emotional triggers do not lurk around every corner, a world where your emotional responses to yourself, your loved ones and even the driver in front of you all make sense and feel manageable. Writing about distressing events helps you feel more securely anchored to your present-day experiences, easier within yourself and healthier overall.
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