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As I discussed in this earlier post, writing has helped heal the depression that dominated decades of my life. That post reviewed James Pennebaker’s research, as summarized in Opening Up, but said little about how I go about writing to confront the most powerful feelings and maintain the progress I’ve made in recovery. For writing is an important activity for sustaining my health as well as for healing. So how do I get the writing done – and how did I manage to do it when life was still dominated by depression?

First, I had to get past not just the fears writing brought up but all the self-defeating habits of earlier attempt to write. Louise DeSalvo’s essential book, Writing as a Way of Healing, has a great list of the ways people can undermine writing as a healing process and even worsen their feelings. My own list included these beliefs.

• If my writing is no good, I’m no good.

• If the first draft isn’t great, there’s no point in finishing.

• No one can see this until it’s perfect.

• If X thinks this piece of writing isn’t perfect, I’ll never write one of those again.

• I must write novels to be really successful.

• Writing journals isn’t really writing.

• I can’t write until I have more time.

• I can’t write until I’m in the right mood.

I could extend the list, but this gives you the idea. My assumptions guaranteed that I would spend a lot more time avoiding writing than doing it. What I did finish was never good enough for me, and often I would give up for years at a time, telling myself I just couldn’t do it.

I started thinking differently about writing one day when I described a painful experience in a letter. Someone I hardly knew had heard that I had cancer and wrote to tell me of his own experience with the same type of cancer I had. I was moved by that and wrote back. I put down exactly what I had gone through and what I had felt at each stage. I wasn’t at all self-conscious about what I was doing, and when my wife read the letter, she immediately said: “This sounds just like you – it’s so real.”

I felt good about what I had written, but more importantly I felt better emotionally. There was something about writing to a specific person and trying to convey just what I was going through that opened a door to feelings I usually held back. I started then on a piece of fiction in the form of a series of letters. Again, I could bring out the feelings of each event I was describing – it might have been fiction, but I was writing about my own struggles.

The next step was realizing that until I could write through what I had actually lived and reached my own feelings about it all, there was no other writing I could do. I saw how important it could be – no matter how hard – to use writing as part of the recovery process. Medication, therapy, all the exercise in the world weren’t getting me very far. But expressing the most powerful experiences in written words was changing me on a deep level.

I began writing journals, sometimes about the traumatic experiences of the past, sometimes about that day’s events and emotions, or about connecting on a feeling level with simple things – the sight of a neighbor playing with his ten year old son, running into an old friend.

Gradually, I worked out a new set of attitudes and practices about writing.

• Writing is an important way of learning about my life, not a measure of my value as a person.

• If a piece of writing isn’t capturing an experience very well, I can improve it by revising.

• Sharing and talking about my writing with others adds to what I’m learning and stimulates further exploration.

• Writing short pieces or breaking up longer ones into small sections is the best way for me to work.

• Writing every day – even brief notes, ideas, impressions – feels good and reinforces my skills.

• Writing is a part of my life, like close relationships, not a separate activity that I can only do under special circumstances.

• I can always write something, no matter what my mood is. If I’m in a bad mood, I can write about that.

Such a complete turnabout from the beliefs I used to hold didn’t come easily or quickly. To begin moving from one state of mind to the other, I had to focus on a single form of writing, that of the letter. In each one I spoke to a specific person and described as closely as I could exactly what I was feeling and learning. I avoided thinking of this as Writing – which felt like the dead-end road to judgment. Instead, it was personal talk that came naturally.

That helped me focus on an essential dimension of writing: discovery. As I described what I felt, I was also learning what each experience meant to me and how much emotion I had always tried to bury. even about immediate, smaller moments of each day.

Writing became more transparent, helping me see myself and what I experienced every day, rather than deflecting my mind toward outcomes and judgments of self-worth. It took a long time for the changes to get inside me as a part of everyday life. It also took a while for me to recognize that this process had become an essential part of recovery from depression. By that time, I had started on this blog, and its healing effect was clear to me every day.

How about your experience? Have you had the problem of confusing the writing with your self-worth and turning it into another weapon of depression? What practical steps do you take to sustain the healing power of writing?

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Simple things can overwhelm, turn me upside down, submerge who I am in a great wave. I was turned over once as a kid, swimming at a beach near LA, the ocean churning and huge. I tried to jump into a breaker and ride it in, but the surge tossed me up in its gritty gnash of turgid green, where I whirled about, then smashed head first into the sand. Lying there on the beach, I turned to see if I was safe and saw what was left of the wave easing away in a mass of bubbles, like so much harmless fizz in a glass. I had been completely lost inside that thing, powerless to move, jetsam to be thrown aside. And now it was nothing.

It’s one thing to be taken over by a force outside you, another to be overwhelmed from within – tossed into emptiness only by your mind. Little things – nothing at all really – can tear you loose from the ground you stand on.

I was driving home one evening on autopilot – it was late, I was tired, preoccupied. My mind was obsessing, vice-tightened on every mistake I had made in my work that night. I had done everything wrong, was sure my colleagues now thought me a fool, a liability. How could I have done this, said that? Every detail cut into my skull, and I thought my head would just crack with the tension.

How could I go back to the office the next day, continue working as if nothing had happened. How could I live with myself? I could never do anything right – I was a fraud, and everyone would know. I was the star in this masterpiece of depressive thinking.

Then I came to a stop sign, a routine stop sign. There wasn’t any light, not even moonlight, but what I could see was suddenly all wrong.

I knew I must be near my home, but I couldn’t recognize a thing. I had come through here hundreds of times, yet now everything was strange. Those tall dark masses must be a row of trees – but there is no row of trees on that corner. How could the road angle off to the left? I knew it went straight ahead, it had to go straight ahead!

I was completely lost. I panicked – I couldn’t make any sense of this space. It was like driving off the freeway into an emptiness without direction or even the pull of gravity. Whatever internal compass it is that keeps me oriented on the face of the earth was broken – a suspended needle spinning round its wobbly circle over and over again, and my mind was spinning with it.

I tried to search my memory for the corners and streets I knew to get my bearings – but there were too many – I could hardly think straight. I was flailing inside, and I couldn’t choose among those rapid flashes. This is crazy, I told myself, just calm down for a minute – it’s no big deal. Why is this happening?

But I had to do something in that dark, empty place without a sign I could see. I was all panic, but I knew one thing. I was in my car, the wheel in my left hand, the shift knob in my right, the accelerator next to the foot pushing way too hard on the brake.

I forced myself to stop thinking and drove straight through what felt like a wall of flashing red lights warning me not to move. But that was all I could do, and somehow I just did it. If I kept on, I would have to find something familiar, something that would place me back where the world was instead of in this nothingness. Movement felt good. Panicked confusion was so many bits of broken glass cutting my hands, but here was a smooth and useful fragment.

It took another couple of miles heading straight down the silent street until I found it. A light, a sign with a name I knew, a corner with a small store and post office, just where they were supposed to be. I knew where I was. A few miles too far, but I knew exactly how to get back. I knew where my house was and would soon be there.

Everything looked right, I could sink into the comfort of the familiar, an order around me that contained my feelings, my awareness. The world was still there, and I was back in place. I wasn’t lost, and the panic ebbed away. No crisis, just a dark night. I knew where I was.

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Thanks again to isabella at moritherapy and her post about Mental Health Camp, I’ve been reading Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing. She discusses at length not only the healing power of the writing process but also the need for a writer to care for the creative self.

Her own breakthrough in becoming a professional writer started when she discovered a demanding form of Japanese painting that grows out of the Zen tradition. It requires that the painter prepare by achieving an inner balance and “emptiness” that allows total concentration on the creative act. The painting itself is achieved with a series of strokes in one sitting that permits no changes. This is an art requiring an inner harmony cultivated through spiritual practice and a balance in all aspects of life.

There’s a similar tradition in the Chinese art of calligraphy, as explained in a beautiful book – The Way of Chinese Painting by Mai Mai Sze. The tradition is also described in Wen Fong’s Images of the Mind, which includes dozens of excellent reproductions of calligraphy, poetry and paintings. According to the Chinese “way,” the artist not only achieves spiritual, mental, emotional and physical wholeness but also captures the essential spirit and energy of external reality. There is a connecting energy that relates the individual to the larger world. The artist expresses that unity not only in the finished work but also in the act of creating it. During those creative moments, the calligrapher/painter stands apart from the tumble of thoughts and emotions and works in a state similar to meditation.

What DeSalvo drew from studying this tradition was that writing was not separate from life but an integral part of it. She felt a healing power through the detachment she achieved during the creative process that allowed her to observe difficult and destructive thoughts and feelings without being overwhelmed by them. Instead she could write about those feelings and explore in detail the most wrenching experiences of her life. The detachment she achieved helped her come to terms with the issues that had long troubled her and interfered with her writing. She found that this healing effect, repeated on a daily basis, strengthened the resilience needed to survive emotional shock.

To help others get past their fears, she developed many practical suggestions – which she calls her yoga of writing – about how to structure time, set realistic goals, remove fear about completing a long project by consistently doing small parts of it each day. The basic idea she conveys is that writing is an achievable practice, an integral part of living, rather than a separate reality requiring inspiration or special talent that one must be born with.

She mentions Janet Frame, the New Zealand fiction writer, who provides, I think, the most amazing example of someone who used the healing power of writing to end her mental and emotional turmoil. After years of breakdown, therapy and voluntary hospitalizations, she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. She was also scheduled for a lobotomy, which would certainly have destroyed her creative powers, but avoided that procedure because of the great critical acclaim that greeted her first book of stories. She went on to write a series of novels, stories and autobiographies that helped her resolve the emotional legacy of her most difficult life experiences.

DeSalvo’s description of what happens during the writing process brought to mind two books by Anthony Storr, which I mentioned in an earlier post – The Dynamics of Creation and Solitude: A Return to the Self.

Storr compares the creative state to one of Carl Jung’s key therapeutic methods – active imagination. Jung urged his patients with mood and personality problems to spend time writing, painting, modeling clay or other form of creative expression. He observed that this brought them to a mental and emotional state where they stood apart from thoughts and feelings and could avoid being overwhelmed by them. This “active imagination” also induced a kind of free association that permitted new insight. Conscious and unconscious thoughts and symbols came closer together, and links could be made between areas of experience never previously related to each other.

For some of his patients, this led to dramatic breakthroughs in which they could achieve complete relief from disorders, such as depression, and help the mind and body return to what Jung thought of as a self-regulating condition. The organism as a whole, he believed, normally achieved a balance between extremes through a self-regulatory process, just as the biochemistry of the body returned to the optimum point – such as the system for maintaining a fixed body temperature or the appropriate level of oxygen in the blood. The breakthroughs achieved seemed not to have external causes but to come about through a deep inner change of attitude.

Observations like these led Abraham Maslow to believe that the creative state and the condition of being a healthy self-actualizing or fulfilled human being were likely identical. In that state, one is “lost in the present,” achieves a detachment from time and space and a form of transcendence of the normal limitations of self-awareness. He describes a fusion between the creative person and external reality that resembles DeSalvo’s sense of what the artist experiences in the Japanese tradition.

Jung and Maslow were concerned with the creative state itself as a mental activity that contributed to human fulfillment. They were not looking beyond that to the completion of a particular work of art. For Louise DeSalvo, however, experiencing the full healing power of creative expression involves not just the act of writing itself but also the ordering and support of daily living that leads to the finished work. That achievement brings creative expression into the larger context of life as a whole. She emphasizes that the healing practice of writing can be shared by many, not just the most accomplished artists. It is a way of life that can be learned.

That leads me to ask this question: To what extent have you been able to integrate writing or other imaginative work into a “yoga” of daily practice? What I have found so difficult over the years is integrating the practice of writing with all the other needs of work and family. What’s your experience of finding that balance?

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Thanks to isabella, and her recent posts on writing and healing (like this one), I’ve been thinking more about the way writing, creativity and healing fit together. From the beginning of this blog, I had no doubt that creative expression of all kinds, and writing for me, could bring about healing, even if only temporarily. I’m quite sure now that writing has been central to my recovery from depression, but I’m not at all clear how or why it has that effect. I doubt there could be a definitive answer about something buried so deep in the mind, but I’m constantly trying to find new ideas about the process. I’ve recently been reading two books by Anthony Storr, a British psychiatrist, that bring together many insights from the work of leading thinkers and creative writers.

Solitude: A Return to the Self and The Dynamics of Creation explore the role of creativity in healing and the overall process of human adaptation to experience. Here’s a brief paraphrase of a few of Storr’s major points that I’ve found especially helpful.

1. The mind understands the bombardment of sense impressions it is constantly receiving by organizing them into recognizable patterns – that’s a tree, that’s a person, that’s a car. In the same way, the mind needs to find patterns in the welter of feelings, thoughts, associations, images, dreams, etc. that crowd into its psychic space. A wave of emotion is separated into feelings – this is grief, this is happiness. Images appearing in the mind are picked out as memories, not scenes in the outer world. A word is linked to this memory and that feeling. According to Storr, creative work plays an important role in this ordering process.

2. In his view, when creating something ourselves or seeing the works that others have created, we’re attempting to integrate and reorganize inner experience in a way that deepens meaning and produces a feeling of balance. That process moderates internal tensions and brings a sense of peace and fulfillment. The unruly flow of emotions and thoughts grows calm.

3. Depression leads to a feeling of helplessness and paralysis. Doing creative work, to whatever degree possible, is a way of coping with this problem. Each activity contributes to a sense of control and mastery by linking ideas and feelings from different types of experience – or areas of the brain, in terms of neuroscience. Instead of feeling completely overwhelmed, a person can regain some level of confidence in the ability to function by imaginatively organizing physical things, words or fantasies.

4. As I’ve written here, a depressed person can also feel detached from the outer world and need to retreat into complete isolation. Storr points out that creative work is one of the tools for rebuilding the sense of connection between inner and outer worlds. I experience this like a reopening of my eyes to everyday things, colors, sounds and allowing in all the associations they have for me. It’s a reminder that I’m part of the world after all.

5. Many psychologists see the process of human fulfillment itself as the uniting of different aspects of personality and need. Each person makes an ongoing adaptation to new experience and relationships that draws often on unexplored parts of the mind. By integrating these elements, one can build an expanding sense of self and capability. Creative or imaginative work involves ordering symbols and patterns that have deep associations transcending logic and even conscious awareness to draw together different levels of mental activity. This helps an individual achieve the inner wellness on which continuing growth over time remains possible.

6. In an interest analogy to Buddhist traditions, Storr describes the mental state induced by creative activity as one of detachment. The mind becomes absorbed in the task at hand. It can then observe every thought and idea more dispassionately and come up with news ways to work with them. It is somewhat like the state of being completely present in the moment that can be achieved through meditation.

7. While attention is focused on writing or drawing, a sense of peacefulness develops. I usually feel this as a rich sense of satisfaction – even without reference to the specific content of what I’m writing. The act of being in that mental and emotional place restores me at a deep level. The way I put this in one post was that depression and all concerns simply disappear when I get to that unselfconscious level of concentration.

8. Storr finds it important to the process of adaptation and healing that creative work continues throughout life. No one who needs to express themselves this way ever feels they have it right. There is always a drive to do it better next time. And as life and reactions to experience keep evolving, new ways have to be found to reorder the inner world and adapt to everyday life. I think that’s why anyone engaged in any sort of creative activity feels so frustrated when it’s not “right.” The inner balance being sought hasn’t yet been found.

I emphasize these ideas among many in Storr’s insightful books because they resonate so deeply with my own sense of what happens as I write. They also help me understand why the process of doing this blog has changed me, as I’ve tried to adapt to what I’ve gone through. I’ve been working for almost two years with all the inner realities of depression and its impact on relationships, work and just about everything else. It feels right to describe all this as a reordering and reworking of inner experience to create a more balanced whole. That brings me closer to a sense of fulfillment – and peacefulness.

As I’ve mentioned before, after writing about my experience for some time and doing other healing work, I suddenly realized that a basic shift in attitude and belief had taken place. Whatever that inner reordering accomplished, whether conscious or unconscious, I look at myself and everyone around me differently. Healing doesn’t mean getting rid of every problem, but it does mean I can be fully present for my own life and all that it brings. That is a kind of balance I’ve never felt before, and the process of writing feels like the most important activity leading to this change.

It would be helpful to know if these ideas make sense to you. Is this a useful way of thinking about the inner impact of creative activity – any kind at all that you may do?