Tuesday 30 May 2017

Writing for divorcees

People going through a divorce were used as subjects in a research to analise the effects of writing on general health indicators such as blood pressure and heart rate.

A recent study by Bourassa and Allen (2017) looked at three groups of divorcees who were asked to write for 20 minutes on three occasions over a period of almost 8 months.

Alexis Blue of medicalexpress.com explains that there was a creative writing group, asked to write about their pain, a second group who were asked to write about their feelings within the framework of a narrative with a definite beginning, middle and end—essentially telling the story of the end of their marriage, and a control group, asked to write about their day-to-day activities without considering their feelings.
The results showed that there was no difference between the control group and the divorcees in the creative writing group, whereas the narrative writing group showed the best levels of blood pressure and the most variable heart rate, which are both a sign of good health.

The leading researcher Bourassa explains what makes narrative expressive writing good for the heart.
"To be able to create a story in a structured way—not just re-experience your emotions but make meaning out of them—allows you to process those feelings in a more physiologically adaptive way. The explicit instructions to create a narrative may provide a scaffolding for people who are going through this tough time," Bourassa said. "This structure can help people gain an understanding of their experience that allows them to move forward, rather than simply spinning and re-experiencing the same negative emotions over and over."

In a previous study, five years earlier, asking divorcees to write about their feelings just hindered healing for them. They also looked at three groups, in the same research centre, the University of Arizona, and found that the health indicators from the groups that carried out either form of creative writing were worse off than those who wrote about mundane tasks. They explained it in terms of the repetitive effect of going over the reasons for the divorce and the painful feelings with creative writing, in people who were already keen to understand what was happening to them. For that group of almost 100 subjects, it turned out that writing about their daily activities took their mind off rumination over the causes of their marital separation. Read more at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-post-divorce-journaling-hinder.html

It is interesting how the results changed over a period of five years. This could be reflecting a more empathetic and open-minded world in which people do not need to ruminate on the causes of their divorce.


Would love to read your comments. Do you have experience with creative writing?