Wellbeing-through-writing: IWWI research
A transformational languaging process for self-aligned living
Languaging the feeling body through writing is a transformational pathway to health, wellbeing, recovery and growth.
Our research illuminates and tracks the precise ways in which writing facilitates and sustains health and wellbeing, and these ways are incorporated into all our programs and workshops.
Our research shows that humans long not simply for expression, but for self-aligned languaged expression.
It is this languaging process that gives rise to personal transformation.
Humans tell stories to make sense of our living. The stories we tell come with feelings and, conversely, our feelings generate stories.
The story-feelings and feelings-stories we tell to make meaning of our lives influence who we are in the world: our relationships, our capacity for coping with challenge and change, and our health and wellbeing.
Humans tell the story we can bear. This is known as ‘my truth’. The stories we tell about our experiences, ‘my truth’, and the stories others tell about us, ‘their truth’, in reality describe and define the surfaces of our experiences.
These ‘truths’, as with all our stories, are accompanied by feelings. Feelings are physical. They are not mental. They are not psychological. They are not emotional. They are what we feel in the physical body.
Beyond the stories we tell about our living, and well beyond the stories others speak about us, is our longing for self-aligned, languaged expression, the claiming of our voice and our visibility, as we know ourselves to be.
The International Wellbeing-through-writing Institute has developed a transformational writing method for accessing self-aligned languaged expression: languaging the feeling body through writing.
Languaging the feeling body through writing is a method for discovering, uncovering, recovering the self-aligned words we need for sustaining wellness at home and in the world.
This practice can be applied to any kind of writing: journaling, novel writing, report writing, academic writing. All writing that engages self -aligned languaged expression will result in an increased sense of wellbeing.
Wellbeing-through-writing practice is an initiatory process. It is a step forward on an explorative journey seeking genuine languaged expressions of self. It is a languaging process that makes change and results in expanding capacity for trust: in self, others, and the world.
Wellbeing-through-writing takes courage, and it requires guidance, encouragement and support to start.
Understanding wellbeing-through-writing
Overview of Adult Experiences of a Wellbeing-through-writing Program
From: Dale, S. (2023). How do adults experience a wellbeing-through-writing program?
Our research
There is ample evidence that writing is good for us. How writing facilitates and sustains health and wellbeing has remained a mystery – until now.
Our research involved 16 adults who participated in a 4-month online wellbeing-through-writing program. This was the first study of its kind: it was salutogenic (i.e., origins of health focused) – it did not focus on commonality of disease (e.g., cancer) or experience (e.g., unemployment); it was conducted outside clinical or laboratory settings (i.e., in participants’ homes); it did not prescribe writing styles – participants received support to write whatever was important to them; it was a longitudinal, qualitative study – most studies in the field are short in duration and measure outcomes quantitatively.
The participants, almost all of whom were from rural and remote areas of Australia, were divided into two groups of 8. They met weekly in online sessions with their group facilitator, Dr Stephanie Dale, and engaged with each other between sessions in a private (unsearchable) group Facebook page.
Data was generated by interviews with participants at 4 timepoints during the study. 12 participants completed the study, resulting in a data pool of 52 interviews, which were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.
The research question was straightforward: How do adults experience a wellbeing-through-writing program?
Detailed exploration of the study is available here.
This online writing program group study resulted in the development of a wellbeing-through-writing model as praxis, that is, a model through which both theory and practice inform each other.
It is important to note that participatory experiences of the process elucidated in the model above were not linear. Nor were they without falter, retreat, or fleeting bursts of forward momentum. Rather, of the myriad personal interior obstacles participants needed to overcome to achieve the desired state of self-aligned written expression, all experienced forward momentum with some or many of the personal challenges they encountered and endured during the study, and all completed some or many journeys across this pathway.
Notably, despite intense trepidations about writing expressed by 14 of the 16 participants at the start of the program, all 12 participants who completed the program experienced periods of writing with ease during the study.
As well, all reported significant positive shifts and outcomes for their wellbeing, often whilst enduring the same challenges they described feeling overwhelmed by at the beginning of the study. From Dale, S. (2023).
It is worth noting that the study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The initiating force of longing
By its nature, writing is the inherent act of seeking self-aligned expression. Writing what matters to us, whether that be journaling, novels or reports, brings encounters with shame.
Shame is a negative force that silences our voices and inhibits our living – all our living. Therefore, simply put, writing – whether or not we want to ‘be’ a writer – is the courageous act of staring down old stories(shames) that have lodged in our bones.
Our research shows humans long for self-aligned languaged expression. Longing is an initiating force. Activated longing requires courage. Shame and courage are counterforce tensions in the territory of activated longing.
Unactioned longing brings defeat, withdrawal, the silencing of self-aligned expression. When the longing for self-aligned expression is greater than the fear of confronting shame, we will act for our longing.
No-one can do this for us. Only we can step forward for our longing. Growth and continued worthwhile engagement in the world demand trust. Trust needs guidance, encouragement and support to be sustained.
Wellbeing-through-writing, regardless of what we(you) want to write (and there will be something), is our ticket through this process.
The Initiating Force of Longing and Counterforce States of Shame and Courage
From: Dale, S. (2023). How do adults experience a wellbeing-through-writing program?
Shame/home as point of departure and place of return
Shame/Home as Point of Departure and Place of Return in the Physical Body
From: Dale, S. (2023). How do adults experience a wellbeing-through-writing program?
Participants who stepped forward for this study were propelled by longing (for self-aligned expression in the world) and fuelled by courage. Shame was their point of departure for engagement with the world beyond their skin.
This initiation force took place in participants’ physical bodies. It was a rupturing of the withdrawn self, a process that, through practice and experience, though it became familiar to participants, was never benign. It demanded trust in the unknown. Always it asked for more.
Effortfully, with support and guidance from the facilitator and their writing companions, they learned its ways and reaped its rewards.
They experienced being witnessed in the light of self, then to the light of other/s and the world. They witnessed others in turn. This was self as gift exchange.
Once old and current shame/s and shaming/s were exposed and released, participants turned for home, the withheld self re-turned, self made peace in the body.
Writing was their pathway into the world; writing was the way home.
Shame and home/longing for home are rooted in the physical body. Courage and trust are dynamic forces experienced through the physical body.
The entirety of this process, in the context of this study, with the feeling body represented by the triskelion, is illustrated in this figure.