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INTRODUCTION

WRITING YOURSELF THROUGH THE DARK AND INTO A NEW PERSPECTIVE

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

—RICHARD BACH

“Look at it again,” my Psychology 101 professor urged us. I stared hard at the image on the screen, squinted, turned my head from side to side, even closed one eye and then the other, but still all I could see was an ugly, old woman.

“Watch,” he said with a gleam in his eye, as he began to trace the outline of the image. This is a chin, not a nose, this is an ear, not an eye, her necklace, not her mouth. And then I saw her, the beautiful young lady that just a moment ago had been an ugly old woman. The topic of the class was on how our perception determines our reality. In this case, the famous picture on the screen contained two images—called a perceptual illusion—and depending on how you looked at it, the brain would interpret the picture as either an old woman or a young lady.

I was both fascinated and disturbed by how easy it was for me to miss something right before my eyes simply because my brain didn’t know it was there, didn’t know it was an option. I much preferred the image of the young lady, but until my brain had been instructed to see it, my reality was the old woman.

Your Perspective Determines Your Reality

The lesson that perception determines reality is a critical one, particularly for moving effectively through the inevitable pain and suffering in life. The way we look at things matters. It changes not only what we see, but also what we think, how we feel, what options and possibilities are available to us, how we relate to others and to ourselves, and whether we feel hope or despair. As a clinical psychologist, one of the greatest gifts I can give my clients is a change in perspective. Gaining a new perspective changes everything! One of the best compliments I have ever received was from a client at the end of treatment. When we first met, Tom had been bound up in rage, guilt, and despair over a violent hate crime that had been committed against him. He had been beaten by a stranger in broad daylight as he and his partner were walking along the street. He sustained a serious traumatic brain injury that left him deaf in one ear, and he was experiencing severe brain fog, memory and concentration problems, and a deep depression. When he came to see me, he was on medical leave from his job as a surgeon where for years he had provided skilled care for high-risk patients.

I explained to him the blooming in the dark metaphor on which this book is based. I still remember the look on his face of both astonishment and then hope when I shared this new perspective on trauma and loss. Over the next few months, we used the blooming perspective to help him work through his pain and find new meaning, a new narrative, and a new direction for his life. His depression resolved and so did his rage. He was able to forgive his attacker and even confront him with love and grace in the courtroom. Not only was he able to work, but he also decided to move to the part of the country he’d always wanted to live. He found a wonderful new home and job there, and he moved with his partner shortly after we finished to begin his new life. He radiated hope and joy. After thanking me for the work we had done together, he looked at me and said, “You know what, you’re the ‘real’ Spin Doctor.” Then he told me I needed to write this book, so that others could experience the same kind of transformation he did.

You most likely have a well-developed perspective on the difficult situation you are experiencing. You know your pain like the back of your hand. It might feel like it’s going to be your reality for the rest of your life. I’m here to tell you that as awful as you feel right now and as permanent as this pain might feel, there is another option, another view of your pain and suffering through a different lens. With this new perspective comes a different way of being in your situation, of moving through your suffering, and even of enjoying your life again. Just like with the old lady/young lady perceptual illusion, once you see the other option available to you, you can never go back to not seeing it. That said, you may still prefer the first image you saw because sometimes it feels easier to stay in our current viewpoint—it’s familiar and it’s a path you have tread numerous times.

This book is intended to show you how to see another picture, another possible perspective on your current situation. It’s also intended to give you effective, practical tools to move through your pain using this new perspective. Those two things—illuminating the new perspective and providing the practical tools—that’s my job and my expertise. What you choose to do with this change in perspective and the tools is up to you.

Your Darkness Is Also Your Opportunity

When the darkness in life descends upon us, regardless of its source or type, it feels like the end of the world. The pain can become so intense that you long for the end of the world, or at least the end of your world of pain. I don’t know specifically what you’ve been through or what you’re going through now, but if the description of this book resonated with you, then it’s likely that you will benefit from the blooming principles and exercises offered here. You are most likely at a place where your life will never be the same again and you will never be the same again. No amount of wishing or foot-stomping or crying or even praying will make things go back to how they were before your found yourself in this darkness. Your way of being has come to an end, and accepting this is one of our hardest tasks. We have to begin to trust that something greater is at work, and that something greater lies ahead.

I’ve come to believe that the darkness affords us a unique opportunity to radically change our lives and our identities and to find or change our life’s purpose. It doesn’t happen automatically. The darkness is an opportunity for transformation, not a guarantee. My goal is to help you take full advantage of this unique time in your life. My hope is that you use your difficult experience to find a new perspective and fulfilling life path.

I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be all roses (pun intended)—there is real work to do in the dark. If your process is anything like mine and that of the clients I’ve worked with, it’s going to be painful and messy and you’re going to want out of the suffering. Badly. But if you’re anything like those of us who have tread through this, you’re going to gradually see how your painful situation will open up otherwise unavailable opportunities for self-awareness, greater meaning, and personal and spiritual growth.

I’ve Been There

I’ve had a number of those “life-turned-upside-down-and-smashed-into-tiny-pieces-and-I’m-not-sure-I’m-going-to-make-it” moments. Besides my parents’ divorce, years struggling with a medically confusing chronic illness that leaves me profoundly fatigued, and a long-standing estrangement with my mother that saddens me to this day, I grieved hard over the loss of my marriage. When my husband left, all I could see was the death of my dreams, and I felt like I was dying. There were days when I wasn’t sure I wanted to go on. I could not see beyond what I had lost. It was much easier to keep looking back with regret and sink into hopelessness and despair. I did everything I could think of to resurrect my past and restore my marriage. Nothing worked. The shame piled on as I helped other couples in my clinical practice through their marital difficulties and yet I couldn’t fix my own.

It wasn’t until I changed my perspective that I was able to see this time in my life in a much more positive light. Instead of seeing the mandatory year of separation before the divorce as a year to win my husband back, I began to see that I was being given time to build a whole new kind of outlook and life for myself. After the angst and mourning over my previous life, it was time to attend to me. During this time I would do more than heal; I would become more than I had ever been and my life would be set on an incredible new course.

My healing came when I realized that what I really needed was for my life, not my marriage, to be rejuvenated. I needed to become a woman who engaged courageously in life, who broke out of her routines and her self-limiting beliefs. I needed to become a woman who loved much and loved well. I had to stop letting fear control my life and my relationships. I needed to create and enjoy a richer and more joy-filled life. What I didn’t realize and didn’t want to do was give up my old way of being, my old perspective on life to get there. Yet, something must always die before resurrection. I needed to accept that my old way of living and my marriage were part of the past and that it was only because they were in the past that I could experience a new life and a broader perspective.

I am writing as one who has been where you are right now. I know how devastating it is to have your life, your marriage, your health, your family, and your dreams ripped from you and your heart torn into pieces. When I talk about this new perspective, I am in no way downplaying your pain. It’s real and it’s miserable. But that’s not all it has to be. Let me tell you about the day when my perspective on my pain and loss changed.

Night Bloomers

I was in the clinic seeing clients one Wednesday afternoon not too long after my husband left. In those early days, it was hard to concentrate on what my clients were saying. My grief and fear were overshadowing everything in my life, including my work, which I loved. Over the lunch hour that day, I checked my phone and found a text message from a friend. She had sent me a picture of a vibrant pink flower with a message that read, “Night blooming cactus. I’ve cared for this cactus for years and it finally bloomed last night.”

Those two sentences and that pink flower changed everything.

I had no idea that some flowers bloom in the dark, that some flowers actually require the dark to bloom. As I paused to consider this new information, it hit me: some people need the dark to bloom. Some people need the trials and suffering and loss and life upheavals to experience growth and transformation, to come into the fullness of their beings and life purpose. I am one of those people. Like it or not, my greatest personal growth has always come from spending a season in the darkness of pain, loss, and suffering. I think there are a lot of us out there who need the dark. I call us “Night Bloomers.” If you’re reading this book, there’s a good chance that you or someone you love is a Night Bloomer. I wanted to write this book to provide my fellow Night Bloomers with hope. Hope that your heart-wrenching, faith-shaking loss may provide the fertile covering of darkness that can produce beauty not possible in the light.

A Famous Night Bloomer: From Prison to the Palace

To help you get an idea of what I’m talking about, let me tell you a story about someone who chose to bloom in the dark. Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) has been described as a protester, a prisoner, a president, and a peacemaker. I would add to that list a Night Bloomer. Mandela, who grew up in a small village called Transkei in South Africa, knew what it was like to suffer. He knew what it was like to lose things that were important to him. He lost his eldest son, his two grandchildren, his freedom, and his ability to control his life. He lost twenty-seven years with his wife and family while he sat in a dark prison cell.

Mandela had a strong sense of justice. He fought against racial oppression. To many he was a saint and a hero, but Mandela wasn’t always this way. In the 1950s, he was number one on South Africa’s terrorist list, as the founder of a military wing of the African National Congress. Although he fought for human rights, originally there were groups of people he did not want to include in this fight, such as Indians.

Listen to how Richard Stengel, who collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, describes how prison changed Mandela:

“The man who went into prison in 1962 was hotheaded and easily stung. The man who walked out into the sunshine of the mall in Cape Town twenty-seven years later was measured, even serene … I asked him many times during our weeks and months of conversations what was different about the man who came out of prison compared to the man who went in, he finally sighed and then said simply, ‘I came out mature.’”

Prison was where Nelson Mandela bloomed in the dark. We remember Mandela not as the man before prison, or the man in prison, but as the man he was after he emerged from prison. He prevented a devastating racial civil war and created a democratic South Africa. His life had an astounding impact on human tolerance and freedom, not only in South Africa, but all around the world. The first president of a democratic South Africa, champion of the anti-apartheid fight, bestower of dignity to the poor, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate had bloomed in the dark. The hard work of these achievements was done while he sat in that dark, lonely prison cell for twenty-seven years, refusing to allow the suffering and injustice to destroy him.

Mandela could not have negotiated peace as an angry man. The personal transformation he went through in prison allowed him to complete the mission ahead of him. He needed the softening that comes from choosing over and over again to extend grace and forgiveness to your oppressors. In his fight for human justice, he had to be strong, but not revengeful; courageous, but not cocky. He had to forgive, but not compromise. These are the lessons he learned in prison. These are the blossoms that required the dark to grow and mature. The world will forever be a better place because Mandela chose to bloom.

An Everyday Night Bloomer

Ok, so we’re not all going to be Nelson Mandelas. Let me share with you another real-life example, lest you think this paradigm shift is only for a highly select few. This story is about my friend and colleague, Jenny Owens, who did something remarkable after she and her husband nearly lost their newborn son. I’ll let Jenny tell the story in her own words:

“In April of 2016, my husband and I were thrilled to welcome our son Maximus Owens to the world. Within hours of his birth, Max was diagnosed with a rare condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia. His diaphragm was not fully formed at birth, allowing his bowels to move into his chest cavity, displacing his heart and crushing and impacting the development of his left lung. The doctors gave Max a 50 percent chance of survival and it was a very rough start the first few months as Max and physicians fought for his life. He spent several weeks in the NICU and more time in the children’s hospital as he underwent several surgeries.

“When we were staying at the hospital for one of Max’s surgeries, I ran into a grandmother of an infant patient in the family lounge. We chatted for a while, and during our conversation she shared that she was visiting for two weeks and staying at a hotel. Her son and daughter were living in a tiny hospital room at the Children’s Hospital until either the Children’s House or Ronald McDonald House had an open room. They were from Tennessee and had traveled all the way to Baltimore for specialists that could care for their baby’s rare condition. They would be there for months while their tiny baby had multiple surgeries.

“Right then I realized how incredibly lucky we were to be in Baltimore and so close to such amazing hospitals. Had we lived in a more rural area, Max may not have had access to the critical treatment he needed for survival, especially since we weren’t aware of his life-threatening condition before birth. When we were in the NICU we could get home in ten minutes, but many families traveled hours to be there each day and stayed months longer than we did. I thought about it all night and most of our stay. And I wondered—what if people living nearby hospitals could volunteer rooms in their homes to people traveling with loved ones for care?”

In 2016, Jenny started a nonprofit organization in Baltimore, Maryland, called Hosts for Humanity. The organization matches volunteer hosts with patient families seeking a place to stay while their loved ones receive care. Family and friends of patients now have a low-cost and supportive place to stay while their loved one is in the hospital.

I spoke with Jenny again recently about the idea of blooming in the dark and here’s what she said:

“Reflecting over the last couple of years, I’ve experienced periods of both extreme highs and crushing lows. I felt lowest when Max’s first surgery failed a few weeks after his birth. When the surgery team rolled him into the room and triumphantly declared a successful repair, I didn’t feel their elation. I felt despair. I didn’t see a newborn that had been “successfully repaired,” but instead one that was hopped up on fentanyl, puffy, and nonresponsive. I wanted to lie on the floor, for no other reason than my body seemed to want to reflect my emotional state. Fast forward almost two years, and Max is now a thriving and resilient toddler. We feel tremendous gratitude for his health, and for an amazing support network that took care of us when we were down. And although pain in all its forms is a state I don’t want to be in for long, I’ve come to appreciate it for facilitating a journey of tremendous personal growth.

“Some pain is unavoidable, systemic, or just bad luck—perhaps a car accident, an illness. Some pain you play a part in, by neglecting your health, finances, relationships, etc. I try to see pain as a sophisticated alert system identifying a credible threat. Pain told me to “pay attention!” loudly and forcefully. So I did. After I witnessed the need for housing I could no longer do nothing. This suffering showed me the hidden pain of others, and radically altered the path of my life.”

Jenny could have spent the year after her son was born simply cherishing her time with him and her husband (and I know she did a lot of that). She could have gotten stuck in her trauma and fear and anger. But through hard work, determination, and the love and support of others, Jenny took her pain and fear and turned it into something incredible, an organization that helps others who are experiencing similar pain and fear. Jenny said she never would have thought of doing something like this until she experienced this kind of suffering. She wouldn’t have seen the need, wouldn’t have felt the same pull on her heart. The world is a better place because Jenny experienced this pain and allowed herself to use it to help others. She’s an inspiration. She’s a Night Bloomer.

A Change in Perspective Changes Everything

My hope is that this metaphor—flowers and people who require the dark to bloom—has begun to shift your perspective from one of loss and despair to one of growth and hope. Because once you change your perspective, you can begin to use your own inner resources and creativity to begin moving in this new life-affirming direction.

Let me just pause to clear something up before we build on the new perspective and guiding metaphor of the book: Blooming in the dark is not about whether what got you into the dark—perhaps the death of a loved one, divorce, illness, abuse, loss of physical functioning, a fractured relationship, a child addicted to drugs, job loss, or bankruptcy—was good or right. None of these things are good. And debatably none of them are “right.” Nor does this metaphor mean that we should purposely pursue or create painful situations in our lives so that we can grow. Rather, the message of blooming in the dark is that the dark presents us with a unique opportunity that if harnessed skillfully can propel a life forward in ways that couldn’t occur if the darkness had never happened.

I’ve designed this book as a guide to help you view your particular situation in a new way and to equip you with effective and powerful tools, so that you can navigate the darkness in your life skillfully. I will share with you principles about blooming that I have learned from practicing psychotherapy for nearly two decades. I will tell you about some of the empirical findings I have learned as a researcher who studies coping with stressors and who develops interventions to improve mental health. I will share transformative knowledge that as a university faculty member I teach my students about integrative health and wellness, such as mind-body approaches for healing, including journal writing. I’ll provide many of the powerful writing prompts I’ve used as a Writing for Wellness workshop facilitator with people who want to process and grow from cancer and chronic illness. And I’ll share some of the strategies I use as a health and wellness coach when I assist individuals in achieving goals they thought were beyond their reach.

I will also share with you the exciting findings of many other researchers that support the blooming principles in this book, so that you can feel confident that the tools we’ll be using are effective. But beyond all this professional experience and research, I will also meet you in these pages as a fellow Night Bloomer. You’ll witness part of my personal journey, as well as those of some of my clients and workshop participants, and even those of some famous individuals who bloomed in the dark. I see myself as a humble guide with hard-won experience, a guide who has traversed this path many times before with people from all walks of life and who has learned some of the secrets of finding treasures and experiencing transformation in the dark.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, asserted that “suffering ceases to be suffering … at the moment it finds a meaning.” Indeed, despite the old adage that “time heals all wounds,” recent research shows that the real healer is “finding meaning”¹. The goal of Night Bloomers is to help you make meaning out of your suffering, so that the darkness in which you find yourself can become a fruitful time of healing and personal growth. Now, let’s turn our attention to why writing is such a powerful tool for blooming in the dark.

To me alone, there came a thought of grief:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief

And I again am strong.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1807

Writing Is Good for You

Early on in my graduate studies, I came across a series of research papers describing how writing can help people feel better emotionally and physically. I did a deep dive into the literature and was fascinated with what I found. Dr. James Pennebaker is considered the pioneer in expressive writing, or as it’s called in the research, written disclosure. Little did I know then that ten years later he would train me how to lead Writing for Wellness workshops. In Pennebaker’s original writing experiment in 1986, now repeated hundreds of times by researchers around the world, he and his team asked undergraduate students to write about either a trauma or a neutral topic (such as describing the room they were sitting in) for fifteen to twenty minutes a day over a period of four days². The students who wrote about a trauma, describing both the traumatic event and their feelings about it, experienced better physical health, fewer doctor visits, improved sleep, less pain, and more positive mood over the following months. That was our first glimpse that there was something about getting one’s pain into the written word that helps the body and mind feel better.

Since then, researchers have found a host of other benefits for the writer³, including better immune system functioning by stimulating T-helper cell growth and antibody response to viruses and vaccinations⁴, improved wound healing⁵, lower pain levels⁶, better sleep⁷, and lower cortisol levels⁸, blood pressure, and heart rate⁹. Writing has also been shown to improve our emotional and psychological well-being¹⁰, including increasing positive affect¹¹ and reducing depression¹², anxiety¹³, post-traumatic stress¹⁴, and intrusive thoughts and avoidance, which are associated with the experience of trauma¹⁵. The physiological changes facilitated by writing cause our bodies and minds to relax, creating a fertile context for healing.

The benefits have gone beyond health. Research has also found that those who have written about emotional topics experienced better grades, found jobs more quickly, and were absent from work less often compared to those who did not write about emotional topics¹⁶.

The Type of Writing Matters

Some of you might be thinking that writing about your worst trauma or whatever has landed you in the dark will increase your distress, just like thinking or talking about it can make you feel worse. And you’d be right, but only partially so. Researchers have found that some people who write about a distressing topic tend to feel worse after they finish writing compared to people who write about neutral topics¹⁷. The good news is that this outcome changes over time: The initial distress after writing about stressors and trauma is short-lived and for many turns into long-term positive changes in emotional well-being. Not so for those who write about neutral topics. They don’t experience positive changes in their emotional well-being.

Other fascinating research has shown that the type of writing matters. People who experience intrusive rumination—distressing thoughts that just pop into your head and run on an endless negative or catastrophic loop—are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, a debilitating condition that can occur after experiencing a trauma¹⁸. However, people who engage in deliberate rumination—intentionally thinking about a distressing event in a particular way—are more likely to experience post-traumatic growth, or positive effects as a result of experiencing a trauma or stressor.

Both intrusive and deliberate rumination involve repetitive thinking. The difference is that deliberate thinking is an intentional process to examine and reflect on a situation. This type of repetitive thinking is good for us. It helps us create meaning, reduce fear, and change unhelpful thinking styles¹⁹. We can use carefully crafted writing prompts to facilitate this type of deliberate, repetitive thinking. These types of writing prompts provide us with a time-focused, intentional rumination experience about our adversity. This leads to meaning-making and new healing narratives, which ultimately sets us up for post-traumatic growth.

After discovering this compelling research on expressive journal writing, I started using writing in my work with clients as an activity they could do between sessions. Many of them benefited from this writing. After receiving training with Dr. Pennebaker at Duke University, I then began offering Writing for Wellness workshops for students, community members, and people who were going through or had gone through the experience of cancer and chronic illness. The feedback on the helpfulness of writing was so encouraging that it motivated me to keep coming up with new prompts for expressing our deepest thoughts and feelings and for facilitating transformation. What my clients and workshop participants were experiencing mirrored what the research has found over the last thirty-plus years: writing helps people who are suffering.

Writing Was My Lifeline

And then the research got real. When my husband left, and like I have done in every other crisis, I pulled out my journal and started writing. Every evening before bed, I would look forward to the twenty or thirty or even sixty minutes I had to pour out my heart on the page, relieved that I wasn’t exhausting anyone by saying the same things over again or expressing the same pain that I thought I should have been over by now. Some days, I’d even take a ten-minute break at work to just write about what I was thinking and feeling—a lifeline for those first few months of foggy sadness.

On the sage advice of my writing coach, I turned my journaling into a memoir, chronicling the year of separation up to the day in court when a judge granted the divorce. I would write a chapter and then edit it, write another and edit it, and so on until the book was complete. Then I edited the whole book several times. With every revision, I found myself getting stronger and happier. It wasn’t until I finished the book that I realized I had just done the equivalent of trauma therapy, which is telling your trauma story again and again until it loses its emotional power; has a beginning, middle, and most importantly an end; and gets integrated into your entire life story.

I knew I was through the darkness when my divorce story was just a chapter in my life story and not my entire life story, which is how it felt when I was in the middle of it. Interestingly, as I did more research for this book, I came across a study that showed that among recently separated adults, creating a narrative about their divorce experience seemed to be the most helpful type of writing for emotional recovery²⁰.

Writing Can Help You Too

We’re going to use writing as our primary tool for blooming. Writing will allow you to move through your suffering by first acknowledging its existence and then processing it. We’ll use writing to release your painful emotions and dark thoughts rather than ruminating on them continuously²¹. But to heal, you’ll need to do more than simply recall your story; you’ll need to reconstruct your story²². To reconstruct your experience through writing, you’ll use the writing prompts in the following chapters to search for and find meaning in your suffering—what are the lessons to be learned, the benefits to be experienced, the resolution necessary to move forward? We’ll also use writing to explore other perspectives, identities, and pathways to wholeness that will facilitate greater ease as you move through the dark.

You’ll find that as you write your story, it will become more objective and you will gain emotional distance from it. Eventually, you will integrate the trauma and suffering into your overall life narrative, so that it no longer runs the show. Like editing, you will “rework and reword,” and finally you will write a new ending to your story. I will guide you through each of these steps using the prompts in the pages to come.

How to Use This Book

Here are a few things you should know and do before we get started:

∗ Twelve Principles of Blooming in the Dark. This book is organized around twelve principles of blooming in the dark. These are principles I learned through my own seasons in the dark and those of my clients. Each principle and accompanying writing prompt is grounded in empirical research from various domains of psychology. One chapter is devoted to each principle. Following the description of each blooming principle, there are six to eight thought-provoking journaling prompts for you to complete at a pace that feels right to you. These prompts are designed to help you experience each of the twelve principles of blooming in the dark.

∗ Choose a beautiful blooming journal. If you haven’t already done so, find a lined journal in which to respond to the writing prompts in this book. It should be a journal that inspires you to write. Maybe the cover is your favorite color or has a background you find inspiring. I’d recommend you begin with a new journal rather than one you’ve already written in, so that it can be devoted exclusively to your blooming process. If you’d find it easier to have the writing prompts already typed into your journal, I’ve created a downloadable PDF that lists each of the writing prompts for the twelve blooming principles with lots of blank space after each prompt. You can find My Night Blooming Journal at www.drmichellepearce.com/nightbloomersjournal

∗ You do not need to be a writer to benefit from this book and the journal exercises. The writing exercises in Night Bloomers are designed for personal transformation, not to sharpen grammar, spelling, or composition skills. In fact, paying attention to those aspects of writing can impede the effectiveness of using writing as a tool for healing.

∗ It doesn’t matter what type of pain and suffering you’re going through, this book is for you. The twelve blooming principles and the writing prompts I’ve designed are applicable to many different “dark times” in life, such as loss, grief, death, illness, divorce, breakups, job loss, aging parents, estrangement, miscarriage, rape, assault, bankruptcy, affairs, disability, life transitions and upheavals, and so on.

∗ You can work through the twelve blooming principles and accompanying prompts at your own pace. Some of you may complete the journal exercises in a few weeks, others in a few months, while others may take even longer than that. The important thing is to go at a pace that keeps you growing.

∗ Be sure to keep watering your seed through your writing even when you don’t see signs of growth. If it feels like too much to work through all the chapters and prompts in order, you can dip in and out of the chapters. There are also enough writing prompts in each chapter that you can choose the ones that most resonate. You can also go back and complete prompts you didn’t complete earlier or respond to prompts again, once you are further along in the process and your responses might have evolved.

∗ Writing might make you feel a little worse before it makes you feel better. In the research, some participants reported feeling more distress for an hour or two after writing about a traumatic event. However, over time the people who wrote about a trauma—and not the people who wrote about a neutral event—experienced better emotional and physical health²³.

∗ This is different from your childhood diary. The prompts are designed to help you reflect, find meaning, discover new perspectives, glean insight, reconstruct your experience, and facilitate positive action in your life. If you’re looking for more than “Dear Diary” writing, you’re going to like this book.

∗ You need to write about both the facts and your feelings about the facts. In studies on therapeutic writing, those who wrote about superficial topics or just the facts of the crisis, without addressing their feelings, did not experience health benefits.

∗ Timing might matter. A few studies have found that people who were required to write about a traumatic event immediately after it occurred actually felt worse after expressive writing, possibly because they are not yet ready to face it²⁴. My advice is to try it. See if it helps. If you find you’re not ready, put this book down and wait a week or two. Then try it again.

∗ Monitor yourself and do what makes sense for you. Dr. Pennebaker has something called the flip out rule (which, when I did my training with him, I swear I heard him call the “freak out rule,” so that’s what I’ve been using with my clients ever since!). Basically, the advice was that only we know if we’re about to flip out from our writing, and if we’re getting close to that point, we should stop and do something else to calm ourselves down.

∗ Therapy is helpful (and yes, I’m biased, but it’s true!). This book will provide you with therapeutic principles, wisdom, and tools that are similar to those you would receive in psychotherapy. That being said, the writing you do will bring up material that may be quite helpful to discuss in therapy. I highly encourage you to work with a mental health professional if you want to dive deeper into the material that comes up.

WRITING PROMPTS

Try your hand at responding to the writing prompts below. You can respond to some or all of the prompts, and you can do so on a single day or spread out your writing over several days this week.

My Journal

Take five or ten minutes and write about how you want to use this book and its writing exercises. When will be the best time for you to do your writing? In the morning, in the afternoon, before bed? How can you reduce other distractions in your environment so that you can have fifteen to twenty minutes at a time for uninterrupted writing? Which do you prefer, writing longhand or typing? How will you know if writing is helping? At what point would you seek the help of a mental health professional?

A Perspective Change

Write about a time in your life when your perspective about something changed. Choose a time when your eyes were opened to a new way of looking at and understanding something about yourself, your relationships, your health, your future, and/or your life in general.

What was this change in perspective? What impact has this change in perspective had on you and your life?

Are You a Night Bloomer?

•Are you in the dark? What happened to put you in this situation?

•How did you feel about life before your current situation?

•Do you feel you need a perspective change? Are you asking “why?” or “why me?” Or are you asking “what now?” What might happen if you started asking “what now?”

•In what ways do you relate to the stories about Night Bloomers in this chapter?

•Would you like to be a Night Bloomer? Why or why not?

Searching for Pearls

The burden of suffering seems to be a tombstone hung

around our necks. Yet in reality, it is simply the weight necessary

to hold the diver down while he is searching for pearls.

—JULIUS RICHTER

•What do you think about this perspective on pain and suffering?

•What does this perspective bring up for you?

•Is this your current perspective on suffering? If not, would you like it to become your perspective? What would it take to make this your perspective on your suffering?

WRITING TIPS FOR NIGHT BLOOMERS

Here are some writing tips to keep in mind as you create your Night Blooming Journal:

•Date your entries. It’s nice to look back and see how far you’ve come.

•Grammar and spelling do not matter. These exercises are not designed to improve your technical writing skills; they’re designed for healing and transformation.

•There is no right or wrong way to write. So, try not to judge, censor, or correct your journaling.

•Be as honest as possible. You only cheat yourself if you hold back the full truth.

•Write quickly and keep your hand moving. Write through the negative thoughts and emotions that come up.

•Write deeply. What you get out of writing will depend on how much you put into it.

•Keep your journal private and write for your eyes only. This will help you be as honest as possible.

•When you feel stuck, remember to tell your story just one word at a time.

•We’re going to do more than just write about your pain. A lot more. Allow yourself to play and have fun.