Writing to Process Emotions

By Seth Shaver

A new cancer diagnosis. A debilitating heart attack. An emergency surgery. The death of a beloved family member or friend. These are just a few events that cause a swell of challenging emotions within us. Often it seems like more than we feel equipped to experience at all once, much less be able to process. While feeling and processing all these emotions is vitally important, we don’t always know exactly how to do that on our own. Thankfully, there are as many strategies for processing emotions as there are people who feel them. 

Before we discuss one of these strategies, we will look a little closer at the idea of processing our emotions and how valuable it is. Thankfully, emotional processing has become a more accepted part of the healing process as the value of wholeness has become more appreciated. Despite this ongoing shift, many today still struggle with the vulnerable reality of processing emotions. “It is easier in our society to be naked physically than to be naked psychologically or spiritually.”¹ As difficult as this kind of vulnerability can be, we must learn to process these emotions if we are ever to find any sort of healing.

The idea of processing emotions also scares a lot of us because it is not “practical” nor does it have an easy way to measure it, even when the alternative wreaks havoc on the lives that we want to live. However, as Christians, we should shy away from this misunderstanding because we have been given multiple examples and unique language for emotional processing through scripture. At its core emotional processing is incarnational (it manifests in our physical bodies). We can either honor this physicality of our emotions, or it will manifest in unintended ways; ways that can have more power over us than power for us. 

One way to wade in the waters of emotional processing is to use the written word. As John Fox says in his book, Poetic Medicine, “The process of writing weaves together our experience and our imagination. As we write, these interwoven elements help us to discover more about life, about nature, about our experience of loss and love—about how our life is ultimately connected to everything around us.”² In writing through the varied emotions that we feel, we find a way to tease them out and often are able to make sense of them better than letting them jostle around inside our heads. 

As we write as a means of processing our emotions, we can engage what we are feeling without getting bogged down with its analyzation. This writing is not about explanations. It provides distance and perspective, allowing us to better identify the complexities of what we are feeling. “Only when you express the struggle and uncertainty of illness—your anger and sadness and fear—can you respond to it.”³ And only by responding to our emotions will we ever be able to fully process them and heal.

Another challenge present when we try to process our emotions is that they are complex and not always logical. So, we need a way to navigate them in a manner that does not overwhelm our capacity to move forward. Writing to process our emotions creates space for us to look at them externally, giving us the chance to witness what all emotions we are feeling. This is especially helpful with those emotions that seem to contradict one another—joy and sadness, hope and despair, faith and doubt. Though we tend to struggle with holding on to two opposing emotions, a too-little recognized truth is that we do not have to abandon our “negative” feelings before we embrace the “positive” ones of growth. “Such disparate feelings might drive one crazy in a more rational context, but [writing such as] a poem has the ability to hold mixed feelings, which makes it a unique vehicle for helping us understand difficult or painful issues in our lives.”⁴

Yet another roadblock to processing our emotions is in the lie that we must know exactly how to describe the emotion and its impact on us before we can ever say or write anything about it. The opposite is often more true. “Writing is especially helpful at those times when I don’t have words for how I feel. Those times when there is no language to match my feelings. It’s not like the feeling is beyond words—it’s that I go mute. I silence myself. When I silence myself, I lose contact with experience in my body. As a result of that, whatever experience I am having is not able to be named.”⁵

If we will find ways to reconnect with our bodies and our environments through even the simplest expressions, we will find that the “right” words for our emotions will come. Sometimes it will be obvious once we get started. Other times, it might surprise us. Either way, writing about what we are feeling can usually lead us to the words we need to identify exactly what we are feeling. 

Having unrealistic expectations about the goal of writing to process our emotions can also hold us back. “You do not have to begin by writing either a Psalm or Zen satori poem! A simple metaphor or image, drawn from your own experience, may express your healing need and help you to make your spiritual connection.”⁶ This type of writing does not have to be for anyone but you. Too often, we hold ourselves back in fear that the vulnerability that we put down will be leveraged against us or judged for not being “eloquent enough” or “lyrical enough.” That is not the point. While elegant and lyrical writing has plenty of use and place in life, writing to process our emotions will often be much more raw and visceral, because that is often how emotions feel.