This published work is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon as medical, psychological, coaching, or other professional advice of any kind or nature. Enjoy my full disclaimer for more information!
I’ve been performing and competing at poetry slams since January of 2000. Do you remember the frenzy as 1999 turned over and everyone was panicked because all the dates in computer databases would go from “99” to “00” and what if they exploded?
Yeah, one month after that is when I started slamming. Don’t remember that? No worries. I just got beat at a slam this summer by some kids who weren’t born then — and they were great.
Lots of slam poetry is personal narrative, like my poem about my medicalized birth trauma that I did EFT tapping with to resolve hip pain. And normal therapy itself is expected to be personal narrative. When I started slamming, I was so impressed by the heroic journeys of poets to conquer their traumas that I wrote my dissertation on it: The Resolution of Internal Conflict Through Performing Poetry.
Several years later, I went back to my dissertation and made a journal article out of it. I submitted the article, and the journal said, Hey, this is great research, but your literature review is ten years out of date. When I went to update my literature review, I found out that while I’d been changing diapers and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, people had been researching the effects of writing about positive things. In particular, a writing exercise they called the “Best Possible Self.”
Before the exploration of writing about positive things, most researchers only looked at what happened when you wrote about emotional or traumatic events, usually three sessions of writing for 20 minutes. They’d compare that to a “control” writing assignment. The control scripts vary. Some ask you to write about what you did yesterday. One asks you to describe your shoes (for 20 minutes! dang, that sounds mean). There would usually be a small but significant post-writing improvement in health for emotional writing (EMO) versus control (CTL).
So, the new thing was to write about your best possible self (BPS). Basically, you imagine the most perfect future you could possibly have, and describe it, including descriptions of how you overcame obstacles getting there. The effect sizes were the same as that for EMO writing. So, that’s cool, right?
But the thing that made me get excited was a study by Austenfeld and Stanton in 2008. They took a measure of people’s emotional processing, and then gave them either EMO, CTL, or BPS writing to do. They found that “high emotional processors” (who have feelings about their feelings) did better in EMO, but actually showed increased hostility if you made them do BPS. Meanwhile, “low emotional processors” (not too involved with analyzing their feelings) did better in BPS, but showed increased hostility if you made them do EMO.
I had a revelation. Maybe not all people are the same!
It also made me think that you shouldn’t give the wrong intervention to people because you might make them worse, not better.
I was worried about occasions when someone “makes” someone write contrary to their type. Therapists, workshop leaders working with survivors of rape and violence, and of course the voices of influence in slam poetry and all literature at large—all of them have a power, and none of them knows that they may be having a harmful effect by requiring attendees to write against their type.
So I used a big chunk of my post-doctoral internship hours to do a study that divided people by their emotional processing level, gave them the correct intervention, and had way bigger positive effect sizes than usual because the results weren’t brought down by making half the participants a little bit sick with the intervention:
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Targeting Writing Interventions to Emotional Processing Level: A Factorial Experimental Design
Abstract
Emotional processing (EP) from the emotional approach coping measure has been shown to moderate the effect of writing interventions. This study targeted writing interventions to EP level, with low EP participants receiving a best possible self (BPS) script and high EP participants receiving an emotional expression (EMO) script, versus a control (CTL) writing script. A factorial experimental design was used to balance the potential factors gender, spacing of interventions, and whether participants were instructed to keep or give their writing samples to the administrator. Post-test measures were taken 1 month after completion of writing. Sixty-four undergraduates (66% female) participated. Those with high EP (EP ≥ 3) were assigned EMO or CTL; those with low EP (EP ≤ 3) were assigned BPS or CTL. These targeted interventions had significantly better results than CTL for change in last month’s need based healthcare visits (p = .0058) and health symptoms (p = .0107). Analysis of health symptoms showed that only cold/flu (p = .0369), headaches (p = .0393), sinus (p = .0411), and diarrhea (p = .0089) showed a significant change. Data modeling suggests that gender, EP, intervention, and spacing were active factors contributing to change in health, and that interactions between them should also be taken into account. Analysis of the CTL intervention showed a marked worsening of health for low EP participants but a mild or negligible effect on health for high EP.
Publication Information
Maddalena, Cheryl J.; Saxey-Reese, Ruth; and Barnes, Elizabeth Lester. (2014). "Targeting Writing Interventions to Emotional Processing Level: A Factorial Experimental Design". Quality & Quantity, 48(6), 2939-2962. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-013-9933-2
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So… let’s talk about the limits of story to heal in the context of energy medicine.
Story is the sense that we make of events. Every time we mentally rehearse a story, our neurons fire on the pathways of that story and make those pathways stronger. Stories can become entrenched in our biology, and then they become part of our worldview.
From an energy perspective stories might as well be spells, as when we say them, they are reinforced in our biology and become more and more true… But clearly, mass mutterings of positive affirmations is rarely a sufficient counterspell to bring us all the way back from limiting beliefs and into contact with the Divine!
I submit that our stories are useful placeholders for understanding ourselves and others. However, to quote a truism often said by EFT tappers:
The story is often necessary, but rarely sufficient for healing.
From the perspective of EFT, tapping the points on the meridians is what will bring in the element that helps healing occur.
But sometimes even with that powerful tool, energy stays stuck or is just incomprehensible. After I had several cases that did not completely resolve with EFT, I knew I needed some secret decoder rings to help me understand why things weren’t able to move forward! And I found them, but as usual, I didn’t get going in that new direction until I experienced a personal emergency.