That's the advice James Pennebaker and John Evans offer in Expressive Writing: Words That Heal. This book will help you overcome the traumas and emotional upheavals that are keeping you awake. You'll resolve issues, improve your health, and build resilience. Based on nearly 30 years of scientific research, the book shows you how and when expressive writing can improve your health. Its clear explanations of the writing process will enable you to express your most serious issues and deal with them through writing. Book jacket.

Expressive writing is life-based writing that focuses on authentic expression of lived experience, with resultant insight, growth, and skill-building. Therapists, coaches, healthcare professionals, and educators have known for decades that expressive writing is a powerful tool for better living, learning, and healing. But until now, few have had access to practical applications that have proven successful. In this groundbreaking collection, you’ll discover: how expressive writing can call us into healing community exciting new discoveries about how writing can support neuroplasticity and actually help change our brains—and thus our thinking and behavior new research on the role of expressive writing for prevention of compassion fatigue in RNs how transformative writing can create art from the ashes of trauma the role of journal writing for emotional balance sensible ideas about the synergy of expressive writing and play therapy for children, teens, and adults interventions and strategies for the use of expressive writing in acute psychiatric care how interactive expressive writing helps deaf teens communicate inarticulate feelings and thoughts how cancer survivors can use expressive writing to reclaim identity and strength post-treatment the role of expressive writing in developing the roots of resilience for practitioners

Writing a journal is not just about keeping a record of daily events - journal writing provides a unique therapeutic opportunity for facilitating healing and growth. The author of this book guides the reader through developing journal writing to use as a therapeutic tool. Keeping a journal can help the writer to develop a better understanding of themselves, their relationships and the world around them, as well as improve skills of problem-solving, decision-making and planning. As such, journal writing can be a powerful complement to verbal therapy, offering an effective and affordable way of extending support to troubled clients. The book includes advice on working with individuals, facilitating a therapeutic writing group, proposed clinical applications, practical techniques, useful journal prompts, exercises and case vignettes. This clear guide to the basics of journaling and its development as a therapeutic medium will be a valuable handbook for therapists, health and social care practitioners, teachers, life coaches, writing facilitators and any professional seeking personal development in themselves or their clients.

This book brings engagement and conversation to a cross‐pollination of creative and expressive writing and multi‐modal art forms. Through the lens of expressive arts therapy, the authors demonstrate how writing can reveal the unexpected that emerges from art making. The lineage of expressive arts therapy includes artful writing, poetry, associative, creative, and memoir, for example, to engage in self‐discovery, growth, and restorative care. Each chapter is grounded in intermodal expressive arts with a central focus on creative and expressive writing, which is informed by movement, visual art, storytelling, music, sound, photography, and physical performance, including response art, and has writing prompts and invitations as well as playful and improvisational integrative arts writing explorations. Creative arts therapists and expressive therapists actively searching for creative playful self‐reflective writing practice will find this book a rewarding resource. Krystal Leah Demaine, PhD, MT‐BC, REAT, CTRS‐C, RYT, music therapist, expressive arts therapist, and professor of expressive therapies at Endicott College, practices HEARTful healing note by note through song, story, poetry, and creative curiosity. Tamar Reva Einstein, PhD, REAT, expressive arts therapist, poet/artist, and teacher, crosses cultural borders in Jerusalem with the arts as her mother tongue, threading writing and arts like her threaded beads and amulets.

Writing Works is a guide for writers or therapists working with groups or individuals and is full of practical advice on everything from the equipment needed to run a session to ideas for themes, all backed up by the theory that underpins the methods explained. Practitioners contribute detailed accounts of organizing writing workshops for clients.

"According to common wisdom, we all have a book inside of us. But how do you select and then write your most significant story--the one that helps you to evolve and invites pure creativity into your life, the one that people line up to read? In [this book], creative writing professor, sociologist, and popular fiction author Jessica Lourey guides you through the redemptive process of writing a healing novel that recycles and transforms your most precious resources--your own emotions and experiences"--Amazon.com.

This book takes readers through a series of guided writing exercises that help them explore their feelings about difficult experiences. Each chapter begins with an introduction that explains how to proceed with journal exercises and what they are structured to help accomplish. The exercises leave readers with a strong sense of their value in the world.