Writing to Heal: The Characteristics of a Healing Narrative

If you are interested in receiving private, holistic, trauma-sensitive narrative healing support, I would love to support you. Click here for more information.

One of the reasons I am so passionate about writing is because of its power to help us process and heal from our big life experiences. While writing can help us mend, it is not just any kind of writing that seems to support such efforts. 

In my book Birth Your Story, I share proven characteristics of a healing narrative based on extensive research in the therapeutic writing field. That is: how we can write about past traumas and challenges in a way that supports our healing.

Whether you are writing a personal story you don’t plan to share or if you are writing a memoir for publication, these characteristics serve as a useful guide for your own writing. Here are 12 characteristics of a healing narrative.

Link events to feelings

The first characteristic of a healing narrative is that it connects events—what happened—to how you felt/feel about it then and now. I call these the skin and muscle layers of our stories. The skin is what happened, the external landscape. The muscle layer of our stories is the internal landscape: what thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and relational dynamics were present during the experience.

It can help to consider and explore how you felt then and how you felt now. This is one of the places we have agency in storytelling. We may not be able to change the facts (the skin/what happened), or even how we felt about it then, but we can notice and influence how we feel about it now.

It is also vital that we bring a compassionate witness in to see just how reasonable and understandable it was that we felt as we did during this challenging or traumatic time. I have a whole section in my book about using Non-Violent Communication with ourselves to bring more empathy to our own inner experience. 

Key Questions: What happened? What did you feel at the time? Why? How do you feel about it now? Why?

Find a balance between thinking and feeling

Overly analytical and intellectual processing, and, conversely, purely emotional venting about the negative aspects of an experience have been found less effective than a more balanced approach in therapeutic writing. The key is integrating heart and mind wisdom and enabling them to work as a team to serve you well.

Weaving together thinking and feeling is incredibly integrative, even down to the neurobiology, as this process is literally activating and asking both the left and right hemispheres of the brain to process our experience collaboratively. This creates synthesis and helps us actually integrate our experiences in mind and body. 

Write in short successive sessions

The prospect of writing about trauma can be daunting. We may fear we’ll fall down a dark well into the abyss and never find the rope to pull us skyward again. It can be intimidating to write about trauma because we know our old feelings will come up.

This is totally understandable.

While it is certainly uncomfortable to explore old wounds, the energy it takes to resist our experiences is often greater than the energy it takes to actually look at and begin to process and mend from what happened. Of course, you want to take things very slow and in small bits.

Research has shown that the most benefit in therapeutic writing is often by writing in fifteen-to-twenty-minute increments over a period of four or more successive days. This has been found to make writing more manageable and conducive to positive outcomes. 

Create order and organization

Sometimes traumatic experiences can leave us with a fragmented narrative that is missing some parts and over emphasizing others. One of the reasons writing is so supportive of healing is that it gives us a place to piece the narrative together. When we stay vague or can’t create a cohesive narrative we may miss some of the greater benefits of writing to heal. 

The more accurate, concrete, and organized your writing (about events, thoughts, and emotions), the greater the potential for healing. This can take time to piece things together and sort out all that you experienced. This process of creating order and organization doesn’t have to be a one-time effort, it may be an ongoing step-by-step journey. 

Write in detail

Similarly, the more vivid, compelling, and specific our writing (as compared to reflection that is vague or general), the more therapeutic potential is possible.

When we can anchor into the specifics and paint a picture of the scene, it can support our ability to heal. Again, this is not a process to be rushed.

When it comes to writing books or other works for an audience, I often tell my clients that the more specific you can be, the more instantly universal and relatable your story becomes to others, even if they’ve never had an experience like that. When we get more specific we can illuminate, we can show, specific (and universal) truths. 

Slow down

This one is so important. Trauma can sometimes be characterized by things happening “too much too fast.” So when we are setting about the healing journey we must go slow. Like slower than we think is slow. Like as slow as the slowest most tender parts of ourselves need to go.

When writing about charged or traumatic events, don’t put any pressure on yourself to hurry through, and be patient with yourself. When you get to a part of your story that holds pain or some other charge, slow the telling down, so that you can safely and fully move through the process at a manageable pace.

Know when to slow, when to stop, and when to keep with your process. Use your feelings and your felt sense in the body as a trustworthy compass to guide you. We have to make sure all parts of you are feeling safe as you move through this writing to heal process. 

Invite in the Wise Witness

This is one of the great things about the act of writing, compared to thinking or talking about our stories. When we write something down, we literally set it outside ourselves. This creates a witness relationship, where we tangibly create distance between ourselves and our narrative so that we can see it from a different perspective. This witness element can be really supportive so that we can create safe distance and make room for healing.

The wise witness is here to help you remember that what you are writing about is not actually happening to you in present time. The wise witness is here to offer you protective space and an opportunity to see in a new way.

Allow there to be a part of you that moves through this writing process as a witness. There can be that part that really feels and merges with all that comes up to the surface, but see if you can also connect to a part of yourself that can simply witness what is arising rather than getting caught up in it. Allow this wise witness to be a compassionate observer and companion as you explore your inner truth.

Write a balanced emotional narrative

Sometimes during traumatic times or situations, our memory and perspective tends to get polarized. We see things as only all horrible or terrifying. The most healing narratives are those that not only explore the pain and challenges, but also acknowledge the joys and pleasures present in the experience. Including the positive doesn’t negate the trauma, but it does bring balance and a more complete representation of the experience. If you can’t bring yourself fully into the “joys” of the experience, you may be able to express what sustained you during this time or what has sustained you since the event.

Stay open

The most healing comes in writing when we are willing to hold our stories with an open hand: we aren’t clenching so tight that no light can get in, but rather we are willing to approach our storytelling with curiosity, a willingness to explore multiple angles or perspectives, an openness to new discoveries, and a desire to look for the meanings in our tales.

The meaning layer is what I call the third and deepest layer of storytelling akin to the bones of the body. While I write more about this elsewhere, we want to be open and curious to what meaning we are and can create about our stories.

For example, I was talking to a friend recently and he shared this story: He’d been telling himself that his parent’s divorce during his childhood and his later divorce as an adult meant that he was abandoned and unlovable. When he did some story excavation work, he opened up space for new meaning to emerge. He decided to choose that these experiences didn’t mean he was unlovable but that perhaps these things had happened for him. That perhaps somehow these separations served him by allowing himself experiences he needed that may not otherwise have had. And that these separations did not make him unlovable. 

Being open to new meanings does NOT mean that we excuse past behaviors or choices or make what happened to us “okay” or “good”. Not at all. It doesn’t strip away the truth of what happened. It just gives us the power to be in control of how we relate to our experiences now. A lot of healing is possible in re-visioning the meaning of our stories. 

Stay compassionate and kind

As best you can, allow this process to be nurturing and give yourself the compassion and kindness you would give a friend bravely going through this process of exploring trauma. As best you can, withhold self-criticism and judgment, about yourself, your experience and your writing.

I spoke above about the Non-Violent Communication based process I feel is very supportive in this realm. You can find this in my book Birth Your Story. 

I often invite my narrative writing clients to play the “How Human of Me” game. This is where you look at your experiences and how you felt about them and say to yourself “Wow, how human of me to have felt x, when I really needed y.” Or “how human of me to have responded to x by doing y, given that the situation was z.” 

This game is a handy one to pull out anytime you need to offer yourself more kindness and compassion. 

Don’t force the process

Always monitor yourself as you tread into the waters of trauma. The most important element of this process is to ensure your own safety and wellbeing. Let me say that again because it bears repeating: the goal of writing to heal is NOT to retraumatize yourself. The goal is to heal. Keeping yourself safe and well cared for matters more than anything else. Carefully monitor the effects of your creative process on your wellbeing, and get help if/when you feel out of that safe zone.

Seek support

When processing trauma through writing, I highly recommend working concurrently with a trained supportive therapist or another healing professional. Writing can open up our stories in ways that other healing modalities simply cannot, but it is also wise and incredibly supportive to have a human ally or allies, expert professionals, on your support team as you move through significant traumas. We are often wounded in relational contexts and we heal in relational contexts as well.

I greatly encourage you to reach out to trauma-informed healing professionals to support your healing journey. 

If you found this information useful, I invite you to please share it with someone in your world you feel will benefit. 

If you are interested in receiving private, holistic, trauma-sensitive narrative healing support, I would love to support you. Click here for more information. I also offer private narrative healing coaching and a group program called Heal a Story that Hurts.