Expressive writing is a practice of writing out your inner feelings and thoughts for a set amount of time, without censoring yourself. The method goes like this.
- Write for about 15 to 20 minutes a day.
- Write 3 to 4 sessions in total, usually on four consecutive days.
- While writing, don't stop and don't censor anything. Don't think about spelling either. If you run out of things to say, it's fine to write the same thing again.
- Write about the topic that weighs on you most right now, or about a painful episode from your past.
Because you keep writing without censoring yourself, it resembles Freewriting. The difference lies in what each one emphasizes.
Freewriting is a method that came out of writing instruction, while expressive writing emphasizes the wellness side, the improvement of body and mind. Right after doing expressive writing, people often feel worse, because you're dealing with the topic that bothers you most at the moment. But when you look at the results a few months later, the same finding has appeared repeatedly: people are better off in body and mind, for example by visiting the doctor less often. The effect size is small. At first, the explanation was that bringing out suppressed emotions lowers the cost of holding them back, but now the core is thought to be the process of organizing scattered experiences into a coherent story. Still, I think it's a method worth trying, since it's easy to approach, with the feel of keeping a diary, and still yields benefits. Especially when you're going through a hard time.