What is Expressive Writing?

Writing can give us a place to put the things we don’t yet have words for or the things we have been carrying quietly for a long time.

The use of personal writing as a tool for reflection and healing has a long history. In the 1960s, psychologist Dr. Ira Progoff developed his Intensive Journal Method, a structured approach to using writing for self-exploration and personal growth. Later, psychologist Dr. James Pennebaker began studying what happens when people write openly about emotionally significant and difficult experiences. His research helped establish expressive writing as a subject of psychological study and has contributed to decades of research exploring the relationship between writing, emotional processing, and wellbeing.

Expressive writing is a little different from keeping a diary or recording the events of your day. The purpose isn't to write beautifully, produce something worth sharing, or even necessarily tell a coherent story. Instead, we use writing intentionally as a way of slowing down, becoming curious about our inner experience, and giving thoughts and feelings somewhere to go.

In therapy, I may invite you to write in response to a carefully chosen prompt, question, memory, feeling, image, or experience. What you write belongs to you. We can then explore whatever emerged: something surprising, a pattern you hadn't noticed before, a feeling that became clearer once it was on the page, or perhaps something that deserves more time and attention.

How Can Expressive Writing Help?

Sometimes writing allows us to get close to an experience in a different way than talking does. It can help us notice the stories we tell about ourselves, recognize patterns in our thoughts and relationships, clarify our values and needs, and make room for emotions that may be difficult to express aloud.

Expressive writing can be incorporated into therapeutic work around experiences such as:

• grief, loss, and bereavement

• anxiety and overwhelming emotions

• difficult or traumatic experiences

• relationships, intimacy, and communication

• identity, self-esteem, and self-understanding

• significant life transitions

• illness, caregiving, and changes in the body

• creativity and creative blocks

• changing careers or finding a new sense of direction

• values, meaning, spirituality, and purpose

You do not need to consider yourself a writer to benefit from expressive writing. There is no right way to do it, and spelling, grammar, and style don't matter. The writing is simply another way into the therapeutic conversation—one that can sometimes help us discover what we knew, felt, or needed before we quite knew how to say it.

What Clients Need to Know

• Uninterrupted privacy is essential for the expressive writing process. It's important that you create space and time for your thoughts and feelings to emerge without interruptions pulling at your attention. I ask that all devices and notifications be turned off, and that clients refrain from attending online workshops, private sessions, or couples sessions in public spaces where they may feel too self-conscious to share their discoveries.

• Pen to paper is ideal, unless you have a physical limitation that prevents this. The intimacy of pen to paper writing offers deeper connection, and a slower approach to writing that allows emotion and truth to emerge.

• Choose a journal that makes you want to write in it, and have writing tools in several colours available. Have fun with selecting your writing supplies.

• Expressive Writing is intended to support other forms of treatment for mental health issues, and journaling for mental health is not intended as a stand-alone substitute to comprehensive healthcare. Please inquiry about my counselling services for additional support.

• With Expressive Writing, the focus is on accessing truth rather than producing clever or poetic writing. Our goal is to silence the inner writing critic and connect deeply to self.

• Sharing within a workshop or private session is meant to discuss the thoughts, feelings and connections that emerge. You'll only read what you've written if you want to.