I recall the early morning of October 5, 2017, when I barely slept an hour, woke up shaking and trembling with no idea of what was going to happen next. I had just written a letter to a group of my closest friends detailing the most private details of my life and the meaning I found through that experience, and how it shaped my identity and the person I became today.

A March 3rd Psychology Todayarticle by David B. Seaburn, a marriage and family therapist, captures that experience almost perfectly. He talks about the way most of his patients told him what their problem was. "It was rare for people to say depression or marital conflict, or abuse." Instead, they would often tell him a story, "take the scattered speech in their mind and... fashion it into a structure with syntax, and then speak it, and feel it and wait to see what it meant to the story-listener: me." Stories often give more words to a problem than the problem itself: they give meaning, too.

Writing helps even more, as it uses language to make sense of life's events. Often, our thoughts and feelings are random, and they don't have words, but writing and language shape those wordless thoughts and emotions. "we take the random flow of what is in our hearts and minds and shape it, like a sculptor might shape some formless clay." We edit, rewrite, start over again, and ask people we trust to enter into dialogue with us. In our search for meaning, we are also creating it, and "the impact is visceral because it is so bone real."

In his personal experience, Seaburn recalls writing the first chapter of a novel in which a woman loses her son and husband a catastrophic way, a way he didn't understand as possible when he first started writing the story. He walked upstairs for his wife to look him in the eyes and ask "What's wrong?"

Seaburn responded by telling her that "i've dug myself a hole and I don't know if I'll be able to get out of it." To him, that is simply the risk we run by using language to make stories that have meaning. But that risk is also the great reward. "I felt stunned not only because the story was difficult, but because I was being transformed through the process of writing it." In that experience of writing the opening chapter was the transfiguration of what he was looking for into a clear story. "For me, at least, therein lies the healing potential of writing."

The healing that comes in this process comes when you want to make sense of things, and use language to create a form of expression. That isn't to say that writing a story about an experience cures a problem: Seaburn makes a clear distinction between curing and healing. Writing is healing in "that it can alleviate, it can diminish, that it can reframe, that it can put things in their place." Next is a metaphor that writing and expression onto a page makes a container that carries what we need to carry, regardless of what it is.

And the claims and allegories that Seaburn makes here are not only backed up by metaphor, but evidence. Using language to make meaning through writing does really matter to people who may be suffering. Researcher James Pennebaker found that among HIV/AIDS patients, patients who spent 30 minutes writing about their negative life experiences measured higher on CD4 lymphocyte counts (how well their immune system functioned) than controls. Pennebaker explained this phenomenon by saying that "by writing, you put some structure and organization to those anxious feelings...It helps you to get past them." Pennebaker and his group have also found that suppressing trauma-related thoughts compromise immune functioning.

But there is one caveat to trauma-related stress writing: there has to be meaning. Work from the Susan K. Lutgendorf and her group found that people who relive upsetting events without focusing on meaning report poorer health than those who derive meaning and gratitude from their experiences. "You need to be focused on thought as well as emotions," Lutendorf says. "An individual needs to find meaning in a traumatic memory as well as to feel the related emotions to reap positive benefits from the writing exercise." A story, then, is not a narrative retelling of events. It contains a narrative plus plot, which means there has to be some sort of resolution to the conflicts we face, even if we make those resolutions. That, after all, is how we take control of our own destinies.

In the words of Seaburn, "the idea that telling one's story in written form provides the writer with the opportunity to alter his or her narrative and in the process alter themselves." He later puts it beautifully in saying that "this is the amazing thing -- In the end, writing is action. It is movement; it is change; it is renewal and redefinition; it is healing." That isn't to say that it's easy, as I can attest from first-hand experience in this kind of meaning-searching story telling that it isn't. As Seaburn describes such a type of writing as courage, because you go into the darkness having genuinely no knowledge of what's going to happen, not only when you write, but when you share that writing with others.

So write to heal. Take yourself on an adventure, and transfigure your suffering into meaning. It's not easy at all. You'll go in with fear and trembling, and likely will for a while, but go into the experience being aware that you won't be the same person once your adventure writing is over. You have no idea what's going to happen when you embark, but you have to trust that it'll work out for the best, and life will go on, and the reward and risk will all be worth it in the end.