22 % of women and 11 % of men reported having had a traumatic sexual experience prior to 17, and the people who endorsed it were more likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, high blood pressure, ulcers, that started me wondering why.
Sexual traumas were somewhat unique in that they were the kind of trauma that people were most likely to keep secret.
James Penn Baker is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
The author of over 300 scientific articles and 8 books, he has opened up groundbreaking research on expressive writing and its profound impact on everything from anxiety and depression to chronic pain, disease, inflammation, grief, and well being.
But having a trauma and then keeping it secret from others, and it didn't matter what the trauma was, exacerbated the health risks to the person.
And this made me wonder, if keeping a secret so bad for you, what if we brought people into the laboratory and had them write about it or talk about it?
Would that improve their physical health?
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Just really excited to dive into the work that you've been doing.
I'd love to jump in on the expressive writing side and eventually work our way around in the conversation to some of the more current really just like examining of language in the tool.
So let's start at the beginning.
if we take a step back in time, I'm so curious how you first become interested in the connection between writing and well -being?
I was never particularly interested in writing and well -being early in my career.
In fact, I had bounced around in in many areas and I went to graduate school because I was interested in essentially in the mind -body problem and how psychological factors can influence physical health.
And I was actually writing a book on some of my early work on physical symptoms, how we come to know how we feel.
And I thought, you know, it'd be interesting to come up with a questionnaire that could get a sense of what kind of people report physical symptoms. So I sat around with a group of undergraduates and I said, okay, we're going to come up with a questionnaire and let's feel free to ask people anything we want about their lives and I'm curious to see if any of them are related to health to physical symptom reporting.
And we, this group just sat around somebody was talking about what they eat or how they got along with their parents or have they, do they have pets and one person said, how about prior to the age of 17 did you ever have a traumatic sexual experience?
Now this study was done and we were doing this about 1980 81 so this was this was long before this was became a common question and we passed out the questionnaire to about 800 students and we found that about 15 percent reported that they had had a traumatic sexual experience and that one question was related to every health problem every physical symptom that I had.
and then a little bit later I was contacted by the magazine psychology today they were going to be doing an article on my work on physical symptoms and they said we're thinking about having a questionnaire in the magazine would you be interested in working it with us and I said yeah and I put that sexual trauma question on along with many others.
Back then this by the way it's not a true scientific study but they got 24 ,000 responses and these not college students.
These were a very general audience mean age was about 38 years old.
And we found that 22 % of women and 11 % of men reported having had a traumatic sexual experience prior to 17.
And the people who endorsed it were more likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, high blood pressure, ulcers, colds, flus, anything that you can imagine.
And that, I realized I discovered that sexual traumas were somewhat unique in that they were the kind of trauma that people were most likely to keep secret.
And then I did some other studies finding that having any kind of trauma was bad for you, and we'd known that for a long time.
But having a trauma and then keeping it secret from others, and it didn't matter what the trauma was, exacerbated the health risks to the person.
And this made me wonder if keeping a secret so bad for you, what if we brought people in the laboratory and had them write about it or talk about it, would that improve their physical health?
That was really the beginning of it.
You know, at that time, I'd never really thought about this whole kind of confession effect.
And it was ironic because in my personal life, occasionally I had gone through difficult times and I found that writing about it was really beneficial, but somehow I never connected that with the other research I was doing.
Yeah, I mean that's so fascinating that as you described, we've known for a long time that trauma can cause all sorts of untoward things in the mind and body, but the realization that it's the keeping secret of an experience that seems to really compound that experience.
Talk to me a bit more about that, I think that's fascinating.
initially, you know, I went through many iterations of trying to figure out why secrets were so toxic.
But one of the things I discovered when I started interviewing people who had had sexual traumas was how the sexual traumas completely messed up their lives.
One of the first people I talked to was a woman who, when she was 14 her, actually, I guess, her mother had divorced when she was very young and the mother remarried maybe when she was 12 and at at first, you know her mother was happy, she was happy and within a year or two, the stepfather was started to come into her room in the middle of the night and started molesting her and she didn't know what to do.
I mean this was she knew if she told her mother that it would break her mother's heart and she'd never seen her mother so happy and then she couldn't talk to her girlfriends at school because she knew they wouldn't understand it.
So here, this event, not only was she having the event, but she was now having to have these really stilted interactions with the people she was closest to, and she would talk to me about what it was like in the morning, sitting at breakfast, and the stepfather would come down the stairs and putting on this big, happy behavior and it's this feeling of rage and fear going on with her.
And, no, her mother knew something was the matter when pro, but she wouldn't say anything.
So she started doing things to try to make herself more unattractive.
So she started eating huge amounts to put on white, but it turns out he was drunk and it didn't make a bit of difference.
And she ended up running away from home at about the age of 15 or so, but hers was just horrifying story.
And I've heard stories like this for other types of types of trauma as well.
Keeping a big secret really disrupts your life.
And not only is it disrupt your social life, you change in your eating habits, you your sleep patterns change, your exercise patterns change, all of these things happen you're much more likely to start drinking or using drugs or things like that.
So it's it's kind of this cascading group of problems that come from this, keeping this big secret.
And as you described, I mean, the, the horrific example you just gave was in in sexual trauma, but this is it's the context is any form of meaningful trauma, where then you feel for whatever reason, and it may be a sense of survival.
It may be keeping social harmony, whatever it may be or some blend of that, or just shame, which would be profoundly misplaced, I would imagine.
That it creates this effect that amplifies the already harm done by the initial trauma.
I'm so curious also if you can recall back, when you're having these conversations, this is as you described, back in the 80s, 90s, You're earlier in your career, you're deepening into the research. I'm so curious, what's it like for you not only as a researcher but as a human being who cares about other human beings to sit down and start to have people share these experiences like this?
You know, it was such a profound effect.
I was trained as a social psychologist. And I think many people are drawn to social psychology because they don't feel as though they have great social skills much of the time.
And for me, first of all, just realising people often wanted to talk about traumas.
So for example, I had done this after discovering these adverse effects of secrets.
We did our first writing study where we had people write for 15 minutes a day for four days about the most traumatic experience.
ideally one that they kept secret.
And we got permission from the Student Health Center to track their, how often they went to the doctor for illness.
So we were able to compare people who wrote about traumas versus another group that we asked to write about superficial topics.
And we tracked their physical health in the months before they were in the experiment and the months afterwards.
And we found that people who wrote about these traumatic experiences went to the doctor about half the rate as people in our in our control conditions.
That first paper when it was published got a lot of press and all of a sudden I discovered myself at parties.
People would come up to me and they said.
Oh, I saw your I saw your your work was talked about in the paper.
You know when I was seventeen and then they start telling me these traumas And I started hearing these more and more and more.
And I must admit, from the very beginning, I became just fascinated by it.
And also, I was really curious about them how they dealt with it, how they thought about it, how they thought it affected them.
And so, in a weird kind of way, I didn't know if I was doing them a great deal of service, But they all said that I was, that it was really helpful for them to talk.
For me as a scientist and a researcher, to me this was like entering a world I had never even thought about.
Ironically, I'd gone to graduate school in psychology, but I was never interested in clinical psychology.
So, all of a sudden I became kind of an amateur clinical psychologist. Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating.
People are sort of coming up to you because they trust you, you've done this work, all of a sudden there's a scientific validation for what they've been experiencing.
It's almost like they want to come to you and both thank you for what you've done, but also unburden.
I would imagine a lot of those people are people who you really didn't know very well, even.
That is true. This has gone on.
I still get emails or letters sometimes from people writing about, just telling me about traumas they had had, which is now is it, you know, that first study was published 40 years ago, and it's kind of ironic that it still has this impact on people.
Help me bridge the gap between people speaking about the experiences that they've been through and have been keeping secrets.
I would imagine some people even for decades versus writing about them is, you know, I think probably lot of people think about, okay, so there's been a, you know, something you're struggling with, or trauma that you've been through and you haven't told anybody else about it, and you feel the weight of it.
You might go to maybe a trusted friend or a therapist or somebody who's, you know, like a qualified healthcare provider or mental healthcare provider and talk about it and share.
Maybe that's the safe place where there's an agreement of confidentiality and you feel like you can finally share the secret.
How is this different than writing about That same thing, you know, it's not as straightforward as you might think We've done studies where we've asked people to talk Sometimes just talking to a tape recorder or talk to the wind outside and we get similar effects so putting it into You know expressing it to yourself whether it's spoken or written doesn't seem to make much of a difference and I think if you are able to talk about a traumatic experience to someone who is really listening and isn't judging you and is supportive, then I think talking to another person can be as good, oftentimes better
than writing. But there is the big danger.
And I think all of us have had this experience where you start to tell a trusted friend about something that's really disturbing.
and as you begin to tell it, you can see this look of horror on their face.
Then you go off in this direction, in a direction that has nothing to do with what you wanted to say, but you realize that this is not going to be helpful to our relationship.
This could be hurtful to the other person.
It could offend them.
You can see that maybe it makes you look worse.
So therein is the big danger of talking is so much depends on what the other person says.
And in fact, going back to the sexual traumas in those early studies, occasionally people would write about being sexually traumatized by a father or a stepfather.
And then they would've told their mothers, and their mothers blamed them for the sexual trauma.
And so in a odd kind of way, this act of disclosure is punished so severely that it probably has a really adverse effect on the child for ages afterwards.
Yeah, I would imagine.
I wonder also if you saw almost the opposite effect sometimes happen where somebody would go to, let's say a dear friend and just start to unburden, and start to share what they've been holding secret.
And I feel like so often there's this natural impulse for someone you care about.
So if you're in the role of the friend.
There's for a lot of folks, there's probably this impulse to do probably one of, or maybe both of two things.
One would be to share your own version, if you are actually holding something also and say like, simply as a way to say like, you're not alone, I get it, I feel your pain.
And also the second thing being, well, how can I fix this?
Like here's my friends sharing something deeply painful.
That's like, is there something I can do to fix?
And I wonder if those two impulses also complicate it when it's a spoken thing.
A couple of really great questions.
I think if you are telling me something truly horrible, there is some kind of natural inclination for me to share something horrible as well.
That one's kind of unknown because it is acknowledging what you've been through.
And sometimes, hearing that I've been through something, especially if it's somewhat similar, can be beneficial.
If it's something completely irrelevant, maybe not.
Because sometimes it might just be, oh, you think you had it bad.
Right, it's like you're co -opting the conversation.
That's right. The other one, there's been some really interesting research in terms of how, so you had this terrible experience.
well here's what you can do.
All the research certainly hints that getting free advice from somebody usually is not very helpful, and in fact it's often harmful in the sense that if I start giving you advice, I am making some assumptions that are probably not true about you.
It's not as though you haven't thought about a lot of the stupid things I'm saying, but you know, you feel a little bit annoyed by the other person.
So I think giving advice is a pretty terrible idea unless the person wants some advice, and sometimes you might want advice.
And so, sure, I'll give you advice, but I think what I learned in the years afterwards was the most beneficial thing is simply being there and convey that you're here to listen.
If there's anything else you'd like to say, I'm all ears.
And actually, listening to the person.
So I think that be very beneficial.
And one other thing that I learned early in my research career, I was asked to give a talk to a group of people who had experienced the death of a child and there are groups in many communities.
Sometimes the groups have different names and I went and I listened and I heard these horrible stories and I was so deeply disturbed by the stories that I had young children at the time.
And I got up to talk about my research. And I started off by saying, I know exactly how you all feel.
Oof. That was a mistake.
Never, ever say that.
That was a mistake you make once.
And, you know, the people there, they were wonderful.
A guy, a few minutes later, got up and he said, I want you to know that saying that, we hear that a lot.
You have no idea how we feel.
You cannot begin to imagine.
Don't tell us that you know how we feel because you just don't.
And of course, I would say you're right.
I have no idea. So another helpful social tip.
Yeah. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.
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Use the word confession or confessional a little bit earlier in a conversation and it's, you know, I think a lot of people will picture that and in potentially a religious context where you go to confession or there's a weekly confession and there's some sort of veil where it's there's a veil of anonymity there and also it's really just about listening and acknowledging.
That is sort of like the solitary purpose but the word confession itself, in this context, is troublesome to me because there's an implication in there that there's something wrong that you've done in that context rather than, this is something that I have experienced.
It's such an interesting question.
I've been fascinated how often people who have been victims of really horrible things, sexual abuse or physical abuse, or whatever, they feel guilty.
They feel that in some ways they were at fault, even though objectively most of the time, they weren't.
So, in an odd kind of way confession for them may be an apt term, but you're right.
Confession does imply some degree of blame.
Yeah. What you're describing also is that person's subjective experience, maybe the feeling of blame and shame, even if like from the outside looking in, it's so clearly not so you kind of take people as they come.
It's so interesting.
You shared just very briefly that you developed this protocol, expressive writing protocol, and that it was four days, about 15 -20 minutes.
I'd love to walk through that in a bit more detail if that's okay with you.
So I want to make it clear up front.
I'll give you the first methods that we use.
But over the last 40 years, there have now been thousands of studies done with expressive writing.
There's not one true way.
Here at the beginning, I want you just to appreciate that this method can be adapted to your or anyone's specifications.
There's not a right or wrong way.
The very first study that I did, I did this with Sandra Beale, who was a graduate student of mine.
And I didn't know it.
I was just pulling this up off the top of my head.
And I thought it like it'd be good to have them to write several times and it needed to be writing as opposed to talking because I didn't know who would they talk to what kind of feedback would you get I restricted in terms of at the time students who were taking introductory psychology got could get five hours of experimental credit over the course of this of the semester so I could do a study where I can give people five hours of credit.
So, I could have them write once a day for four days.
And then, they could fill out questionnaires for another hour.
That was the deep reason I did it.
And the other issue was, I wanted to do this quickly because one of the dangers is you do a study where you bring one person in for four times and then the next person comes in next week.
That study would take forever.
So I had developed an assembly line approach to research where what I needed was a large number of rooms where I could run lots of people at close to the same time.
So we were able to find some space where they were classmates, essentially classes in labs, where we would get almost 50 people, and they were signed up one every 10 minutes.
They'd come in, they would talk to me or to Sandy, who would tell them what would happen, how they would be, what they would be writing about.
And then somebody else would take them to a room where they would be by themselves to write for 15 minutes.
And there would be something on the door.
So we knew how long when they went in.
And then 15 minutes later, somebody would come by, knock on the door.
They fill out a questionnaire, and then leave. And then they'd come the next day.
So that was the method.
The reason we had them write 15 minutes was because these were classrooms and we could only get the classrooms from 5 .30 until 9 .30.
You do all the arithmetic.
So that was the logic.
There was no deep feeling.
There was no theory.
There was nothing. And that study worked.
And the next study we did the same kind of thing where we had them write 20 minutes.
And then we started to do other variations.
The next study I think we had them write three times.
and we got the same effects.
And then there were some other studies where they wrote five times and we tried all these things and it all seemed to work.
And over the last years, there have been studies where people have them write only for three minutes or writing for three minutes or five or 10 minutes once.
And then we have them leave and come back 10 minutes later and write again for 10 minutes and leave and come back and write again for 10 minutes.
And that seemed to work as well.
So there's not one true way and some people some might sometimes ask well What about typing versus writing doesn't seem to make much difference?
What about if I write with my?
Dominant hand versus my non -dominant hand my right hand versus left hand, you know That seems to work as well So it's been this is the thing that's been so interesting is Almost any method that forces people to stop and have time to reflect on something that really is bothering them, and putting it into words, seems to have these beneficial effects.
People tend to sleep better.
We and other labs have measured all sorts of biological markers and changes in resting heart rate, or muscle tension, or immune function, or God knows what.
But if people are interested in looking at expressive writing for almost any kind of issue, go to Google Scholar and enter expressive writing.
And what are you interested in?
So you say, chronic pain.
There are probably 20 studies on that.
Headache. I don't even know anymore.
I have lost track of the research. much, but panic attacks or fear or learning or almost anything.
And you'll see that there have been some interesting studies done on it.
And I want to dip into those a bit more.
But I'd love to get a little more granular on protocol too here and with the understanding that there's a lot of flexibility here and that there's, you know, your mileage may vary and you can probably try a whole bunch of variations of this.
But let me maybe ask you some very specific questions.
curious. Have you found that the setting makes a difference when somebody sits down to do this?
Not strong setting effects.
However, most of the settings that my lab and other labs have done have been where we're trying to make it at least somewhat comfortable.
And ideally you don't want to be distracted.
You don't want to have loud noise going on.
And what I would recommend for people doing this on their own is just set aside three or four days, ten or fifteen minutes each day, and a place that you won't be distracted.
You know, ideally, a place that you feel very comfortable and not threatened at all, and use that as a place to write.
And the general instructions I give to people is, you know, what you write about depends on you.
And what I would ask you is what is bothering you right now.
Are there certain things that are weighing on you?
You find that you're you are thinking about too much. You wake up in the middle night thinking about it.
Those are the kind of topics that I think writing can be very beneficial, ideally something that you found it hard to talk to other people about and for those kind of situations.
start off just writing and the only rule I have is to write continuously.
don't worry about sentence, structure, spelling, this writing is for you and you alone.
Another thing I often tell people is, sometimes you'll start writing because you think you've got a particular issue that's bothering you.
And after two or three minutes, you start to get really bored, and you start writing about something else.
Great, your, your brain is probably telling you, write about something else.
You can write about the same thing all three or four days, or you can write about something different each day, that's entirely up to you, and there's no one way to write.
Some people will do poetry, other people will make lists, other people will just generally write.
And I urge people to ask themselves, you know, if you're writing about a recent conflict between you and your boss or you and your spouse, or you and a child.
In your writing, really try to tie this to other experiences that might be like this?
Have you had other experiences, say, in your childhood, your relationship with your parents, your relationship with this particular person?
How is this related to who you've been in the past or maybe who you'd like to be in the future or who you are now?
Or have there been other kinds of traumas in your life or upheavals in your life that you have felt in similar ways?
What do you think the connections might be?
In other words, give yourself permission to go in any direction that you would like.
And you are the judge of whether or not this is working.
I urge people to write three or four times initially, and if after three times your writing doesn't seem to be doing anything for you, then it's not doing something for you.
Go do something else.
You know, go jogging, go talk to friends, consider talking to a therapist I find myself so I don't write very often myself.
I don't consider this journaling.
I find journaling for me pretty horrifying to me.
I don't want to write every day and you know, I'm usually writing about stuff is that is not going well in my life and usually life goes is goes well.
But you know, three or four times a year, sometimes more, sometimes less.
I wake up in the middle of the night or be tossing and turning and I know something's bugging me and I get up in the middle of the night and I'll just sit down and write.
And I might write for 10 minutes or I might write for an hour.
And usually I go right back to bed and fall asleep.
In other words, I almost view this method as a method to clean your mind.
So are there one or two or a few sort of opening prompts that you think are, you've seen be effective with people too?
Because I've imagined people, you know, they probably like, like, I'm feeling this, I'm remembering this, there's something I haven't, it's been on my mind, I haven't told anybody else.
But like, what's my opening move here?
Like, how do I actually start the process of pen to paper or like fingers on a keyboard?
You know, I can tell you the way that I do it, which is I'll sit down and I'll say, I've been, you know, it's three o 'clock in the morning, I've been thinking about this person I'm dealing with at work.
He's been driving me nuts and I don't know why this bugs me so much. What is this about me?
Yes, it's him, but it's also why am I reacting the way I am.
This reminds me a lot of dealing with so and so in the past. For me, and again, everybody is different.
And I've seen thousands of these expressive writing essays.
People approach them in all these different ways.
And I should also say, as somebody who's seen these essays, often I'll look at these essays that I think, God, this doesn't seem that upsetting.
I wonder what's going on with this person.
And then a few months later, I'll get a, you'll be a follow up and people will ask them about their writing.
And that person who I thought they're writing didn't seem to be very helpful with saying that was, you know, writing that was so important, you know, it made me realize that I've been doing this.
And in this, in this person's writing, you didn't see its significance.
But as this person is explaining it several months later, you see, oh, okay, I could see how this could have a very deep personal effect.
I wonder if part of that is also, I'm sure you've thought about this, that those first couple of days of writing, maybe not the complete cycle of processing, but maybe that's the opening of some bigger, tiny Pandora's box, and maybe just let it all out and you get to close the box and it's empty after that.
But maybe you write for three or four days and then the box stays kind of open, but now you have access to something that was still stolen away for you know like who knows how long and your brain just continues to chew on it and maybe over a period of weeks or months or years even like that there's an evolving unfolding that happens and so this was more of an inciting incident does that land with you oh it does and as you're speaking i can think of instances where that's been true, true of me, where I'm kind of writing in this direction, and I bring up this one issue that really isn't that pertinent.
And then maybe the next morning, I walk in along and it's kind of like, Oh, my gosh, that issue is really been something that's bothering me as well.
Or maybe that was driving what was going on.
What's so interesting for me is What writing does is it almost forces you to be your own therapist. I've always been interested in the idea of therapy, and I've dipped my toe into it briefly.
I'd still like to actually go into therapy at some point.
But in a funny way, I feel writing is doing so much of that for me in that it, you know, I am dealing with these personal issues in the way I deal with the way that that I naturally deal with things which is standing back and looking at them from all these different perspectives and asking why in the world have I been doing this?
It doesn't make sense that it's, it's kind of a problem solving approach but it's also very, you know, exploring very deep issues in my life.
Yeah, it also brings up a fascinating question for me which is the distinction between any benefit on the other side of whether it's expressive writing or therapy or any other sort of like intervention, how much of the benefit comes from the release valve factor versus the resolution?
You know how much of the resolution is simply not carrying the weight of it anymore?
You're raising a question that I think is so central to to psychotherapy itself.
Early on when I was first doing these studies a lot of people would say yeah this is great because you get to blow off steam and I had a couple of people in these early studies, I would ask them, what effect did the writing have?
And there'd be two or three people I remember saying, you know, it helped me to just blow off steam and get this out.
And the metaphor is essentially like the, you know, you have all of this steam inside the pot and then you let it go, and then everything's relaxed afterwards.
words. I never found that somebody who used that metaphor actually benefited from writing.
And there's been a lot of studies over the last 50 years looking at this idea of catharsis.
By the way, it's really not catharsis, it's really venting.
All of the work says that venting is not very therapeutically beneficial, and often is actually the opposite.
that over the years I've come to believe that one of the most powerful things about expressive writing is providing insight, getting an understanding of what's going on, so that often the issues that we are obsessed with, or worried about, or keep ruminating about, are issues that we haven't come to understand.
There's a debate about this within psychology.
Many people view the problem of its emotion regulation.
You need to regulate your emotions.
If you're getting angry at your spouse, you're not regulating your emotions.
That's not the way I think about it.
I think it's regulating or understanding why you are feeling and behaving the way you are, why is it that you view your spouse as a threat or that they're doing something wrong.
It's not that I need to regulate my emotions.
I need to regulate my understanding of what's going on.
And once I understand it, there's no need for regulation.
No, that lands. Emotional regulation has been become an increasingly hot topic, which is kind of fascinating.
And I'm always curious what what is underneath what's driving the need to feel like an emotion needs to be regulated.
Not Not that we throw that out entirely, but I think there are other ways to sort of like step into that.
That's right. So, it's regulating thoughts as opposed to the emotion.
So, to me the emotions are the, you know, they're the exhaust of the car and rather than worrying about the exhaust, the issue is why are you pushing the accelerator down too so heavily?
What's going on here?
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Are there things not to write about?
I know, you know, part of what you've shared is, you know, people are just, you know, if you're sort of asking yourself, what's bothering me today?
Like, what am I spitting about what's on my mind?
Someone might hear that and think, well, it's just this dopey thing.
This isn't Trauma, capital T, or little t trauma.
How do we decide what's worth focusing on, what's worth choosing as a topic for the writing for this moment?
If you sit down and you start writing about something that you feel that you're not getting any traction on, stop writing about it.
Write about something else.
or one of the things I do occasionally I do workshops and at the beginning I start off with what I call the flip out rule and that is in this room I see everybody seems to be pretty normal nobody here is flipping out now if you start writing and you feel like you're going to be flipping out stop writing it's really easy or change topics if you're starting to flip out about a particular topic, you're not ready to write about that topic.
Certainly not, not in this workshop.
But the issue is you are responsible for yourself.
You need to figure out what is working and what's not.
You need to be a scientist. You need to figure out what is working for you right now and what isn't.
And so that's been another interesting approach. I think many therapists really take on the role of I'm going to help you get through this, and if you start having problems, I'm here to help you, and my approach is, this is not my problem.
Here's a tool that I want you to use it, but use it responsibly and figure out what's going on.
why are you ruminating about this?
Why are you being haunted by this topic?
You mentioned now a couple of times that, you know, people will sometimes do this in a group setting that, over the years, you've read thousands of people's writings around this.
So, of course, I'm assuming that permission was given before so they knew that what they were writing would be seen by you or by somebody, you know, on your team.
What's your take on On sharing, you know somebody sitting down.
Let's say there's something really that's on my mind.
I haven't been telling anyone I feel the weight of Holding it myself and I pour it out onto paper for four days and and and I do feel a lot better But what's on paper scares me a little bit also and I don't necessarily Want even though I feel I've unburdened it's no longer weighing me down I don't necessarily want anyone else to see that what's your guidance on sharing?
My guidance is this writing is for you and you alone.
And I often will tell people, I want you to approach this, that you'll do this writing and that you'll destroy what you've written afterwards.
Whether you destroy it or not, it is up to you.
And you need to be very aware that what you've written could be very damaging, if somebody close to you found it.
It could hurt their feelings, it could hurt your reputation.
And you have to be aware of that.
And so I think there's another issue about this as well, and that is, is it beneficial for you to go back and reread what you've written first started doing this, I had a graduate student and her approach was she had written for a long time and she would write and then the next day she'd go back and get what she had and then she would start to revise it.
As she felt this was really powerful for her.
as I told her, I couldn't imagine doing that.
That sounded horrible, I would never do that in a million years, but I know it was beneficial for her.
I think this is a good example of how we're all wired a little bit differently.
Over the course of my life, I've gone back and read some of my expressive writings over the years, and I'll start reading some of these early essays, and I get depressed so quickly.
The reality is I'm a pretty upbeat person and I write when I'm struggling with something.
And for me, I want to get over that.
Struggling is great, but it's a lot better to not have to struggle.
And going back and seeing these earlier periods, yes, intellectually it's kind of interesting that I was dealing with this issue back when I was in my 40s and this in my the 50s.
But hey, I feel like I resolve those.
And I don't want to necessarily go back in and revisit them.
Yeah. So we're not going to be expecting a deep intense memoir from you anytime soon.
Reviewing all the journals from Expressive, right?
You guys are already here.
And now, let me tell you how I was so screwed up about this.
I want to revisit also, you mentioned earlier in our conversation, just a series of different benefits.
And certainly you know like you kicked off a lot of this early research but as you shared there have been so many labs, so many studies, so many investigators now that have done their versions of research looking at different outcomes.
One of the ones I'm deeply fascinated by is the research between expressive writing and its impact on physical pain.
Talk to me about this a bit.
So, I've not actually done any of that research myself.
Chronic pain is of the biggest problems facing the American health and world health, you know, everything from back pain, or injury, or other kinds of chronic pain.
One of the interesting things about chronic pain is because we know so little about it, very often physicians can't really identify what the underlying cause is.
When that happens, the person with the pain, not only are they suffering with the pain, but there's dealing with a humiliation, that their friends and neighbors and family members are all essentially saying, Well, just all in this guy's head.
Some of the work on chronic pain is showing that expressive writing is particularly well suited.
And it's important for everyone to understand, I'm not saying that pain or anything else is just in your head, it there is something absolutely there.
But expressive writing is a method that has been shown to be really effective in reducing it.
And I think, you know, there are all sorts of reasons why this is true.
One is that think what happens when a person is experiencing chronic pain, that information from the site of the pain is being processed in the body and in the brain.
And when you're experiencing this pain, it's harder you to concentrate on other issues.
And generally when a person's under stress and they have chronic pain, their pain gets worse.
And one of the things expressive writing does is it helps to reduce the noise and input from the stressor itself.
And I don't begin to understand the pathways, or the mechanisms that drives this.
But there's a wonderful group of physicians who have been doing these studies on chronic pain.
One guy is a guy by the name of David Hanscom, H -A -N -S -C -O -M -B, who has published on this and he's a pain physician, and he's been somebody who's been doing some just remarkable work showing the benefits of expressive writing as a method to get through a lot of pain experiences.
Yeah. I mean, it's so powerful.
Some of the other research that I know, and as you shared, for anyone who's actually I'm curious about this specific research. Literally if you go to Google Scholar, type in expressive writing, whatever symptom or thing that you're struggling with, there's probably papers on this.
Things ranging from mental health, anxiety, depression, illness, disease, grief.
When you think about this, one of the things that I love about this modality also is it's accessibility.
There's so many things that are connected to pain that we've endured and that we are bearing all alone.
And that when we can unburden, it's stunning how many systems in our body it affects and how many symptoms it affects.
But oftentimes we feel like if we're feeling this thing, we've got to go to somebody, we've got to pay something.
And for some people, that's fine.
They're completely good with that.
They have the resources and the support and the network.
For plenty of other people, they're not.
So I love the accessibility of this practice because it just opens up and says nobody's excluded from the benefit here.
This has been one of the things that I've really loved about it is here's a technique where I am not saying there's one true way, you know, and people will come to say I'd like to get certified in expressive writing and I'll say okay you're certified and that's what's so interesting is the person who you, the writer is the one who is certifying yourself that these methods work.
They're very simple and you just need to figure out what works best for you.
But you're right. The cost of this is a pen and paper or one of the methods that I developed many years ago is finger writing.
My wife and I were in Europe and we're staying in a small hotel somewhere, and at night, I started tossing and turning about something, and I thought, I need to get up and write about this, but I didn't want to turn on the light because it would wake my wife up.
So I just sat in the dark, and I just started writing with my finger, and as I was doing this, I was thinking, whoa, this works really well.
And I've done some informal studies with groups, and doing this writing just with your finger in air can be beneficial.
So it's even cheaper, you don't have to spend money on that hand.
Right. That's fantastic.
I do want to dip into something else as well, which is sort of like building on this earlier research and that's you know, beyond expressive writing, you've developed this linguistic inquiry and word count or LAWC, kind of like a tool that analyzes language to uncover insights and emotions and behaviors and personalities.
Take me into this a bit, this is fascinating to me.
Early in my career I came up with this expressive writing work and one of the things that reviewers kept asking, and I kept asking, and other researchers kept asking is, why does writing work?
And everybody and their dog had a theory, I had a great theory, and none of those theories have panned out particularly well.
But one of the things that I started to think about was, well, maybe if I just looked at how people were writing, I could get some kind of insight into its benefits.
And I didn't know how to go about analyzing the writing, so I started off by dealing with a group of students who were training to be clinical psychologists, and had them read these essays and to evaluate each essay on a number of different dimensions.
One was to what degree is this person getting some kind of insight?
So what degree is this person exhibiting, searching for causes and reasons for their behavior?
To what did this degree is this person expressing their emotions, etc, etc. I had maybe dozen students doing this.
And it turned out to be a total disaster because the judges, the students, couldn't agree on the dimensions.
And they got depressed reading these really traumatic stories.
And so here is a method that was really slow.
It was not reliable and it made the reviewers, the readers, depressed.
That is not a... It's not exactly checking the boxes if you want to check.
Exactly. So I thought, surely there'd be a computer program.
Now, this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And in college I had taken a course on computer programming.
I wasn't particularly good at it, but I had a good sense of how a computer program could be developed to analyze text.
And as it happened, one of my graduate students, Martha Francis had her undergraduate degree had been in computer science.
And so I sat down with her, I said, you know, I think we could write a computer program that could analyze text.
And the idea of it was a method is just called word counting.
It sounds really stupid.
But for example, let's say if I wanted to get a sense of if a person is angry, well, thing you could do is just calculate the percentage of words in a text that were angry related, anger related words, would be...
I would think it would be a rough estimate of the degree in which that person is angry.
All you had to do is to come up with a list of words that suggested anger.
What we did was to start to create all these dictionaries.
So we had an anger dictionary and the guilt dictionary and a happiness and love, and then we had another one for causal words and words like because, cause and effect and others for insight, words like understand, realize.
And then, and this, by the way this took forever.
The computer program was pretty easy, but coming up with a word list was difficult.
And once we got into these word lists, we started to also throw away just common things like let's do first person singular pronouns, I, me and my, and first person plural pronouns, we, us and our.
One of the ironies here is I have never been interested in linguistics.
I've never been interested in language.
I still have post -traumatic stress disorder from diagramming sentences in high school.
So it's kind of funny that I was getting into parts of speech and things like that.
In any case, we developed this computer program that would go through and we would enter a text and it would have to be digital and it would go through analyze it and come up and it will say well this percentage of words were anger words this percentage of words were happy words this percentage etc etc. And it turned out to be a really interesting program and we found that that expressive writing there were certain kind of fingerprints of beneficial writing So, for example, the more that people use positive emotion words when they're writing about a trauma, the more likely they were to benefit
from the writing. And part of it is even if they said they were not happy, their use of the happy word suggested that they were still thinking along this dimension of happiness.
The effects were modest. And negative emotion words, a moderate number of negative emotion words were associated with benefits.
Writing too much, know, really getting too deeply into negative emotions was not helpful and not using negative emotions was not helpful.
But what we found in those early studies was it was these cognitive dimensions that were much more powerful.
These were like insight words.
Understand, realize, know, meaning, causal words, because, cause, effect.
And what was interesting was the pattern of these cognitive words that, if people increase in their use of these cognitive words over the of writing, they were more likely to benefit.
Almost over time they're going from not really having a coherent story, to trying to come up with a story and those were the people who benefited.
These early studies I was really fascinated by, but then I was also interested in, you know, you could use this meth, this computer program and the computer program is L -I -W -C, which we pronounce Luke and I know it doesn't seem like it should be pronounced that way but it's my program.
So it's Luke. The Luke program, we first came out with it in 1992 and it's on its maybe fifth or sixth edition now so it still exists but much more sophisticated.
At the time the internet was just starting to become popular and for those above a certain age they'll remember that day that in the mail they got a disc in the mail from America online, AOL, and you could put this into your computer and then get a phone modem that would call in to who knows where.
And all of a sudden you were connected to the world, and there were these chat groups that were starting to exist, so you could be in a chat group about England.
And so all of a you go into that and you'll be talking to people in England.
And I mean, this, this was incredible.
Well for me, I wish because I was interested in words.
It allowed me to start downloading texts.
And every night after the kids were in bed, I'd go up and I'd start to go to a different type of group.
You know, sometimes it would be sports.
Sometimes it would be dating.
Other times it would be, you know, other topics.
Some groups were mostly women.
Some were mostly men, etcetera.
And I just download to me every night.
And then the next morning, I go and analyze the text.
And all of a sudden I started to see, wow, people differ in the way they use language and in ways that are very different than I think most of us would ever guess.
So, for example, men and women use language completely differently, but it's not in terms of what they're saying.
It's how they are saying it.
Initially I just thought that I there was clearly a big problem in my computer program.
So for example, the first thing I looked at was the most common word in conversation.
And the most common wording conversation in English is the word I.
And who uses I more, men or women?
Well yeah it was obvious that men did, except it turns out that never was true.
It was women always use I words more, and that made no sense to me, but it held up and it didn't matter what the context was.
And so I started then, what about we words?
We, us and now. Everybody knows women use we words more, except they didn't.
It turns out that men and women use we words at about the same rate.
Or how about cognitive words?
Because, cause, effect, etc. And I just assumed of course men use those words more.
No! Women consistently use those words more.
OK, emotion words...
Everybody knows women have to use emotion words more.
No, there was no difference.
How about social words?
References to other people?
Friend, pal, he, she, they, etc. Well obviously women.
And that's the only one I got right.
women do in fact talk about other people more.
And as I dug into this, I, first of all, realized that all these words I was looking at were essentially parts of speech pronouns, prepositions, articles, etc. And that the brain processes these words differently and then they do content words.
And these words were really powerful markers of not just sex differences, but personality, intentions to behave, depression, proneness, almost everything.
And they worked in ways that make sense now that I understand them, but back then they didn't.
So I -words are used more by people who are self -focused.
When you use the word I you're very briefly paying attention to your internal state.
So, for example, people who are physically sick or in pain use I words more than when they're not in pain.
Or people who are standing in front of an audience where they are self -conscious, they use I words more.
Or there are all of these different ways you can get people to be more self -focused, Just have them write an essay about what they did yesterday but have them write this in front of a mirror versus not in front of a mirror.
They use more I -words if they're in front of the mirror.
Women are more self -reflective than men.
That's something that all of us, I think, would agree with.
Self -reflection is a marker of I -words.
We think of I -words as being associated with narcissism, self -importance, but in fact that's not the case.
So all of these dimensions have really important meaning.
And all of a sudden it allowed us to do these studies to show that we can tell if people were lying or telling the truth, not with great accuracy, but better than humans can do.
Or that we could identify people who were prone to depression, or PTSD, or people who are in a depressive episode.
Or we can also start to find out differences between how people think or the degree to which they naturally are analytic in the way that they think.
And so they can tell us all about people and how they connect with others but also how they work through problems. It's so fascinating this work.
I would imagine now, I don't know if you're involved in it at all, but with AI sort of like exploding onto the scene over the last number of years.
And I've seen some of what it can do in terms of analyzing not only language but, like actually vocal intonation, you know, and energy, and it can pick up all these different things simply by in the blink of an eye, and respond to you.
I mean, how fascinating would it be?
As this work extends, you know, if you literally could have something, an app on your phone or just something on your computer that could become a leading indicator.
We're there. This AI world is so exciting.
The big differences between AI and these large language models and the Luke program with AI, AI is unbelievable in its ability to predict.
So, it does an amazing job at predicting what a person will do or say.
All of these features.
The killer problem is we don't know why.
So it predicts, but we don't understand why.
And something like a dumb word count program, it doesn't predict nearly as well as AI, but we know, we at least know what the dimensions are that are driving the effects.
So at least at this interim period, the two methods together really make a very nice package.
And the AI work is moving so quickly.
It's very likely that in somewhere between five years and five minutes, it'll be completely, completely irrelevant.
It's kind of mind -boggling.
But it is amazing to see like work that you've started and built on for years and how it's being picked up, but very differently.
And like you said, you know, there's a difference between an analytical model where you actually understand why it's telling you what it's telling you, and a black box where like, you're like, wow, this is incredibly accurate and valuable.
but I don't get where it's coming from.
And those worlds absolutely are going to merge like, as you said, five minutes to five years, who knows exactly when, but I mean, it's kind of a fascinating time to be.
And it's very interesting for people in psychology, because we've all grown up with models.
We build all these models to explain perceptions and thoughts and so forth.
And now all of a sudden AI is saying, who cares about the models?
I'll show you exactly.
I'll predict with almost perfect certainty.
And it really does question what role psychologists will be having in the future.
The psychologists and a lot of others, but it's gonna be amazing to be a part of that whole adventure.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well.
So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase, to live a good life, what comes up?
To me, to live a good life is one of discovery and curiosity and closeness with other people.
and especially those family and those that are close to us.
And also, a nice day outside with a stable climate.
Well, being in Colorado right now we don't have that, but I think you're probably talking more broadly about the world.
Thank you so much. You bet.
But if you love this episode, you'll also love the conversation we had with Nicole Sax about her approach to journaling for chronic pain.
You can find a link to that episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Light Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields.
Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young.
Christopher Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del Bliss for her research on this episode.
And of course, if you haven't already done so please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app, or on YouTube, too.
If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here.
Do me a personal favor, a seven second favor, share it with just one person.
I mean, if you want to share with more, that's awesome, too, but just one person even.
Then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter because that's how we all come alive together.
Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
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