Key points

Reflective writing allows us to own our own story, instilling a feeling of personal agency.

Expressing one's feelings on the page can uncouple the event from the negative feelings engendered by it.

Writing about adversity, we can identify some personal inner strength, pulling the positive from the negative.

When my youngest foster daughter was in treatment for her severe eating disorder , one of her therapies involved writing a trauma narrative. In 11 single-spaced pages, both sides, she documented all the obstacles she had overcome in her young life: the death of her father, her mother’s alcoholism . Then, in what her counselor called a destruction ceremony, she shredded her words, stuffed them into balloons, and set them sailing on her way outside of the residential tr

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