In a grieving process, it is essential to find a way to channel the pain and thus be able to overcome the breakup with a partner. Writing can help you vent and clear up your feelings.
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Writing has centuries of history. The earliest known written documents are from the Sumerians in Ancient Mesopotamia, dating from 3300 BC, through cuneiform writing, but Egyptian hieroglyphs are from the same time. Writing has always served some purpose: be it to inform, preach, or record history as in religious texts, entertain with legends and fictional stories as in novels, or to relate personal experiences as in newspapers.
But writing can also be a way through which to channel pain and overcome the breakup, it stands as a therapeutic tool. It can be a good way to expose what we have inside, let off steam, clarify our feelings or our doubts, encourage us, get to know us better and even help us make decisions.
For example, they say that Goethe wrote “Young Werther” in a single night to vent the penalties for unrequited love. In writing we can turn our worries, fears or conflicts at the same time that it provides us with relief or comfort.
The goal of therapeutic writing is not to demonstrate your literary skills, but to silently express everything one does not know or cannot express aloud.
The writer, Diana P. Morales, who has spent more than 23 years as a writing teacher and head of El Portal del Escritor, shares four therapeutic writing exercises to deal with the grief of a love.
Automatic writing
This technique was invented in the early 20th century by the avant-garde writer Dorothea Brande. It consists of writing the first thing that comes to mind, without deleting, without editing or stopping to think. The purpose is never to create a literary work, but to let ideas flow freely, without holding back our morals or shame to find the solution to an internal conflict. This exercise is performed for at least half an hour in which one writes without stopping everything that comes to mind. It is a matter of free association of ideas.
Writing through letters
Writing a letter to a recipient with whom you are in conflict is one way of telling that person how you feel. Then it can be saved, broken, burned … The objective is to discover and release our emotions. An unresolved conflict does not let us move forward. Bringing out what we feel to understand why and even forgive is the goal of this exercise.
Morales recommends ordering the letter in the following way: First you tell why you are angry and you let out all your anger. Then you explain what is causing you sadness or what has hurt you. In the third phase, you talk about fears, what causes you fear of this situation and then we give way to repentance, if there is one, to close the letter from love.
The letter of thanks
This exercise is designed to feel better and relativize problems. The author recommends writing a list of at least 30 things for which you are grateful. The idea of this exercise is to focus on the positive to enjoy it more. A variant is to write three things that you are grateful for each night in a notebook.
Write the life you want
This exercise consists of describing the life you want in the future, in detail. It is about describing your ideal life in all areas. You have to write it in the present, as if you had already achieved it. It was a practice followed by the American writer Octavia Butler: she used to write these letters to herself regularly, claiming, for example, that she would get enough money from her books to buy a new house, and she did.
As a final recommendation and for these techniques to work, the writer maintains that all these exercises should be worked with paper and a pen. That is, by hand, avoiding electronic devices.
