Читать книгу Rewrite Your Life - Jessica Lourey - Страница 18

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

—Virginia Woolf

We move what we're learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being.

—Brené Brown

In Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, expressive therapy pioneer Dr. James W. Pennebaker devotes several chapters to the history and power of personal honesty. According to his extensive studies, all humans have inappropriate thoughts, fears, and uncomfortable memories. The best way to move past them is to travel through them.

In other words, the truth will set you free.

Perhaps like me, you find this vastly comforting.

Building off social psychologist Dr. Dan Wegner's findings that the harder we try to bury a thought, the more power it gains (the “try not to think of a white bear” hypothesis), Pennebaker designed studies that found that when you stop suppressing and instead reveal your negative thoughts and memories, even if only on paper, you create a narrative congruence that allows your brain to release them.

Although Pennebaker's studies cannot pinpoint whether the relief comes from the act of releasing a secret or the cessation of the work of inhibiting it, the science is clear: disclosing your closet skeletons is good for your immune system, your mental health, your blood pressure, your heart rate, and a bunch of your other parts. In an elegant and interesting twist to his work, Pennebaker discovered in one particular study that the “sickest” subjects (as measured by the frequency of doctor visits) were also the people who wrote on the most superficial topics when asked to write nonstop on any subject for ten minutes, “whereas the healthy students' writing samples were broader in scope, more emotional, and more self-reflective” (61). The least healthy students wrote about the weather and their clothes, while the fittest explored relationships and the meaning of life. They were willing to make themselves vulnerable on the page.

Going deep makes us healthy, and healthy people go deep.