F-R-E-E-Writing
As well as writing novels and nonfiction, I am intensely interested in the power of writing when we use it to communicate with ourselves.
Like Keats, “I am convinced more and more, day by day that fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing in the world”. But I am also convinced by my experiences in working with individuals and groups that the value of writing extends way beyond the exchange between professional writer and satisfied reader.
Too often in daily life writing is relegated to a utilitarian role but its capacity is so much wider and deeper than that. I see writing is an invaluable - and often underestimated - tool for life.
Its invention ranks with the discovery of fire as a human breakthrough. Writing enables us to store and pass on information, knowledge and wisdom. It has fundamentally changed how humans live together. It literally underwrites the complex cultures we live within and has facilitated the greatest human achievements — without writing there would be no mathematics, no science, no philosophy, no history, no cinema and, of course, no literature.
Through writing, we experience the miracle of “speaking” to each other across dead generations and vast continents. Equally miraculous, I believe, is the power writing gives us to “speak” to, and understand, ourselves.
It is no coincidence that both Jo Devereux and Izzy Mulcahy, the protagonists of Lovers’ Hollow and A Dance in Time both write their way to a resolution. Their experience is one I have seen replicated again and again and is a tribute to my belief in the power of writing to heal, empower and liberate.
Writing regularly to yourself both keeps you safe and sets you free. I can personally echo the words that Izzy says in A Dance in Time: that for me, “writing is both the roof on my house and the gap in my fence”. This sense of safety and freedom is the bedrock from which significant creative work can emerge.
My interest in this aspect of writing has led me to the technique I call F-R-E-E-Writing.
F-R-E-E=FAST, RAW & EXACT-BUT-EASY
F-R-E-E stands for Fast, Raw and Exact-But-Easy. Using this method the aim is to write fast enough to get beyond our censoring, conscious minds to access subconscious levels.
It has made such a difference in my own life that it is now my daily practice. I have seen it make such a difference in other lives that I now pass it on whenever I can.
I have introduced on this method to writers, of course, but also to postgraduate students and returners-to-work, to immigrant groups and women recovering from drug addiction. I have witnessed its benefits among people from different countries and at every level of social and personal development, even those with weak literacy skills.
I have taught the same simple technique, over and over, without ever tiring of it because my respect for F-R-E-E-Writing and my understanding of its complex potential, continues to expand and deepen.
Over the years, I have come to see F-R-E-E-Writing not as a luxury for those with the time to do it but a simple, significant shortcut to social and emotional wellbeing. A daily brushing of the psyche, that takes a little bit longer – though not much – than a good brushing and flossing of the teeth.
I have come to believe that everybody who can should be F-R-E E Writing.
Especially those who writer or wish to write.
FREE-WRITING FOR HEALING & STRENGTH
Dozens of studies have found that most people, from schoolchildren to nursing-home residents feel happier and healthier after writing about deeply traumatic memories. In his book Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, James Pennebaker, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, summarises ten years of scientific research into the connection between writing and increased physical and mental wellbeing. He concludes that writing is a tremendously powerful tool, “far more powerful” than they had predicted when setting up their study.
The effect isn’t just emotional. One study found that those who wrote in this way had more active T-lymphocyte cells, an indication of improved immune system.
Other studies have found that they tend to take fewer trips to the doctor, function better in day-to-day tasks, and score higher on tests of psychological well-being once they do regular writing exercises.
The benefits occur regardless of literacy or educational level: all that is needed is a sufficient level of literacy to communicate with oneself. And the more often people write, the more beneficial the effects.
As a result of such findings, Writing Therapy is now used to help people with all kinds of physical and emotional problems, including life-threatening illnesses such as cancer; chronic conditions such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis; drug and alcohol addictions; eating disorders; and trauma. It has also been shown to be beneficial for combating low self-esteem, depression, and stress-related ailments and, more surprisingly perhaps, to have a positive impact on heart health: heart rate and blood pressure.
In addition, writing therapy is ideal in helping people cope with grief and loss. For example, poetry therapists were asked to work with the students of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, after the shooting tragedy there in 1999.
Virginia Woolf writes eloquently of this in her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past”. By writing of her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brother, she felt she did for herself what the then new practice of psychoanalysis was doing for its patients: “I expressed some very long and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it, I explained it and then laid it to rest”.
But FREE-Writing isn’t just for those who are consciously in need of healing. It is of benefit to all.
- F-R-E-E-Writing rights. At a daily level, it improves your psychic state, elevates your mood, makes you feel centred, sets you up for your day. Everybody always feels better after a F-R-E-E-Writing session than before.
- FREE-Writing connects. We connect with ourselves — the inner self, at all levels: mind, emotion and spirit. We connect with the outer world, by increasing our awareness of all our relationships, with people, places and things
- FREE-Writing liberates. The method operates on the premise that it is not the events that happen to us – as individuals or as writers - that count, so much as our inner relationship to those events. Sometimes, yes, we are overwrought in our F-R-E-E-Writing. Or whiny or irritable or sad or angry or miserable. Or joyful or elated or carefree or blissed out. Over time, all our emotions will find their way in. That is one of the values of FREE-Writing — to show us how transient those emotions are and in doing so, lessen their hold on us.
- FREE-Writing uncovers. Because we write as fast as possible, thoughts and emotions are allowed to rise without the internal censor kicking in. This brings us to new understandings — concealed meanings and significances are brought to the surface. Woolf calls them “shocks”, those moments of profound insight that come from examining our past, because of how they force an awareness we wouldn’t otherwise have had.
- F-R-E-E-Writing unblocks. Regular and committed use of FREE-Writing generates a progressive strengthening of the psyche, leading to new recognitions, ideas and emotions that overcome habitual anxieties or self-sabotage. This is a very different dynamic from attempting to control what we perceive to be our flaws or bad habits. Consciously disciplining ourselves into change is generally doomed. We manage it for a time but our old, ingrained ways resurface, stronger than ever. (We see this dynamic clearly in binge drinkers or compulsive eaters but it is there to an extent in us all.) With regular FREE-Writing, the shells of our bad habits are sloughed away as new experiences and preferences emerge - without conscious manipulation.
- FREE-Writing contextualises. Over time, we realise that our lives have been going somewhere, however blind we may have been to the direction. We find the connections beneath the surface fractures, the meaning that has been trying to establish itself in us. Re-entering the experiences of our lives allows them to serve as starting points for new, often unpredictable, inner movements that yield profound transformations.
FREE-WRITING FOR WRITERS
If you are a writer or aspiring writer, here are a few more reasons why FREE-Writing is a necessary daily practice.
- FREE-Writing creates the objectivity we need towards our own life in order to understand. By lessening the hold of the ego and emotions, we acquire the distance that is a prerequisite of art.
- FREE-Writing inspires. Ideas and emotions that are useful to our “real” writing (and our lives and relationships) emerge, seemingly from nowhere.
- FREE-Writing stabilises. The best writing uses emotion as material but rises from a space beyond emotion. Given free vent, moods and emotions are siphoned off in our notesbooks and far less likely to interfere with our “real” writing. We become a channel for the deep stuff rather than a mouthpiece for ego thought or emotion.
- FREE-Writing empowers. It teaches us to trust our own experience of the world, our own intuition – essential to a writer - and gives us confidence that we will be able to express that in words. Truly allowing all the voices inside diminishes the power of any one (the critic).
Freeing the words is the writer’s first task. Nothing helps, supports and guides us through that task like FREE-Writing.
If you’ve a query or a comment on writing or FREE-Writing, email me HERE
For a F-R-E-E-Writing Tutorial, click here