News Release

This issue of AHN News is a special resource edition on the healing power of WRITING & JOURNALING . We open the issue with an article on "The Art of Journaling" by award-winning author and cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien. This month we also highlight six of the many wonderful books recently published about writing and healing, each offering a unique angle on the topic.

Write Your Self Well: Journal Your Self to Health
By Ina Albert and Zoe Keithley

This book is both a guidebook and a journal designed for those undergoing medical treatment and wishing to journal for healing. The first 45 pages are devoted to essays about writing and healing -- why it works, its benefits, and how it can work for you. The remaining 100 pages are full of blank space for you to write, interspersed with quotes and prompts to get you started.... more...

Write Your Self Well
A New Book Shows How Writing Leads to Improved Healing

      WHITEFISH, MT -- Expressing yourself through writing can re-shape, re-mold and re-cast traumatic experiences, significantly improving the healing process. So says a new book designed for patients and doctors.

      “Every unresolved issue begs, borrows or steals the energy we need for our own healing,” says healthcare communications expert and author Ina Albert.

      So why don’t more healthcare providers involve writing in their treatment? “Ask most of us to write and we freeze,” explains Albert. “Most of us become overwhelmed at the thought. We give up before we start.”

      Together with co-author, Zoe Keithley, Albert has penned a comprehensive, easy-to-follow guide to writing designed specifically for individuals suffering from illness in Write Your Self Well … Journal Your Self to Health , (Mountain Greenery Press, 2004, ISBN Number: 0-9753196-0-4; $16.95) available through Amazon.com or www.writeyourself.com.

      “Most of us deal with only part of our life experience,” says Albert. “The moment we bury what we can’t bear to look at, we decrease our chance for the recovery we desire. Unresolved issues become crippling.”

      Twenty minutes a day, everyday, is all it takes to begin to release suppressed pain and transform it the energy we need for own healing. The real possibility awaiting you, according to the authors, is participating in your own healing beyond what medical treatment can provide by bringing the health benefits demonstrated in more than two decades of clinical trials in expressive writing out of the laboratory and into patients’ rooms and treatment centers everywhere.

      Write Your Self Well provides a gentle process that allows you to explore images, quotes, thoughts and scenes that can trigger a sight, a sound, a smell, a movement or a touch that takes you back to another time and all its details as if it were happening right now.

      The book shows you how to explore the images that you decided at some point were best left undisturbed, and discover what you have wanted to say for a long, long time.

      “Patients who actively participate in the writing process experience clear and dramatic health improvements,” says Albert who offers workshops and interactive presentations on this subject using the methods demonstrated in the book.

      Write Your Self Well provides a Personal Healing Chart so patients can track their own progress. Over a 30-day period, patients can chart changes in stress, pain, symptoms, moods and shifts in the quality of their personal relationships.

      The authors devote a special section on their web site (www.writeyourself.com) to health care professionals and physicians that suggest ways in which the journal can be introduced to patients.

      Write Your Self Well … Journal Your Self to Health is a complement to medical treatment and is a powerful tool for patients, physicians, healthcare providers, caregivers and families.

      Ina Albert, APR, APRP, is a writer and healthcare communications administrator and consultant for acute care, community and psychiatric hospitals, experiential therapists, alternative practices, nursing homes, and behavioral health organizations for more than 35 years. She develops and facilitates workshops for healthcare providers, clinical staff, business groups and individuals in vision management and interpersonal communication skills.

      Zoe Keithley, MATW, is a master teacher and director in the renowned Story Workshop® methodology at Columbia College, Chicago. Keithley teaches fiction writing, has published both prose and poetry and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards.

      More information is available at www.writeyourself.com. Ina Albert can be reached in Whitefish, MT. at (406) 863-2333, or by e-mail: writeforhealth@aol.com.

Here’s What the Experts Say About “Write Your Self Well”

      Write Your Self Well …Journal Your Self to Health, by Ina Albert and Zoe Keithley, is a fresh workbook that should appeal to people who are looking for a way to deal with health problems. The authors do a masterful job in setting up a series of writing exercises that should be both fun and thought provoking. For the last 20 years, studies have been finding that expressive writing can boost physical and mental health. This workbook translates these research findings into action. This is an excellent journal.
                      James W. Pennebaker, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology,
                      The University of Texas at Austin, author of
                      Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions

      “Write Your Self Well…Journal Your Self to Health is one of the best things I have read on the use of journaling to improve a patient’s health. The objective of this work is ‘to offer the benefits of expressive writing experienced by participants in 20+ years of clinical trials to all patients suffering from chronic or acute illness.’”
                      Leland R. Kaiser, Ph.D. Futurist, Educator, Consultant
                      Founder, Kaiser Companies

      “A new book by Ina Albert and Zoe Keithley, Write Your Self Well, is a marvelous tutorial on the emotional and medical benefits of expressive writing. It emphasizes the healing benefits of journaling and offers directions that patients can take even if they’ve had no past writing experience. Journaling is a very important adjunctive therapy and the medical profession would do well to accept this new concept of self help.”
                      Wallace Salzman, MD, Author of the trilogy, Ortho-Para Novel/Treatises

      “All too often, when sickness or age overtakes us, they begin to control us and define how we see ourselves. But we are not our sickness or the candles on the cake. We are always so much more. The wisdom found within the pages and exercises of Write Your Self Well will give you the skills to continue being a spirit-driven person. And when we are in touch with our spirit, even when the body weakens with age, sickness or handicap, we can do amazing things and continue to be unbelievably well and alive! ‘Write yourself well’ with these pages and you will discover how alive you really are!”
                      Rev. John C. Cusick, Director, Young Adult Ministry Office
                      Archdiocese of Chicago

      “Patients and healthcare professionals working together towards healing is a concept that works. Write Your Self Well…Journal Your Self to Health, by Ina Albert and Zoe Keithley is one of the best tools I’ve seen for facilitating that partnership. This journal can help transform normally passive patients, into active partners in health by simply connecting them with their greatest loves and their deepest fears, all at the same time. This is a great idea!”
                      Jim Schulman, Communication Consultant and Body-Mind Therapist

About the Authors

Ina Albert, APR, APRP, has been a healthcare communications administrator and consultant for acute care, community and psychiatric hospitals, experiential therapists, alternative practices, nursing homes, and behavioral health organizations. She developed and facilitated workshops for healthcare providers, clinical staff, business groups and individuals in vision management and interpersonal communication skills.

More recently, Albert has been leading Life Transition and Vital Aging workshops for older adults. Ms. Albert is a certified seminar leader for Spiritual Eldering Institute in Boulder, CO, and for Private Paths, Common Ground, a life transitions workshop created through Midway Center for Creative Imagination in Washington, DC.

In addition to her work in healthcare communications, she has directed healthcare marketing and public relations programs and has written numerous articles on healthcare communications, patient relations and alternative medicine for major health care publications including Conscious Choice and Strategic Healthcare Marketing Newsletter. Ms. Albert also has published several short stories in Chicago Parent Magazine and Hudson Valley Magazine. A graduate of Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, she has completed graduate studies in Foundations of Holistic Health at De Paul University in Chicago.

Zoe Keithley, MATW, is a master teacher and director in the renowned Story Workshop® methodology at Columbia College, Chicago, where she taught fiction for fifteen years. She was also writing workshop director and archivist for Tell Your Story Project, a celebration of Chicago's sesquicentennial.

Ms. Keithley’s training in fiction writing at Columbia College, Chicago, and fifteen years on the fiction writing staff there give her a deep writing stratum that is both theoretical and practical. More recently, she has been privately coaching fiction and non-fiction writers.

Ms. Keithley is a writing specialist for Northeastern Illinois University and Chicago Public Schools where she inspires creativity and imagination among students in elementary and high school classes throughout the Chicago school system, in college and graduate students and among adult learners.

She is the author of “Image and Reading,” a chapter in a collection on reading edited by specialist Jeffrey Wilhelm. A prize-winning author in fiction and poetry, she was a finalist in the 2001 Zoetrope All-Story Competition, an Illinois Arts Council Fellow (1997), and a finalist in American Fiction, V.9, 1997. She holds a number of other awards as well and is published in prose, including contributing breakthrough research on “Voice” in the Journal of Basic Writing (1992), Crain’s Chicago Business

The More You Write About What You Feel,
The Better You’ll Feel.

Journaling Rules of the Road:

• Forget about your high school grammar teacher. She’s not standing over your shoulder. Just write what you feel.
  
• Don’t let the blank page scare you. Look at it as an opportunity to be yourself.
  
• Remember, nobody will read what you write without your permission.
  
• Flip through the pages of the journal. Let your eyes scan the quotes. Whatever takes your attention has meaning for you. Write whatever comes to mind.
  
• As you write about your feelings, you release the stress you’ve been carrying around that makes you sick.
  
• Writing allows you to draw on positive energy that hasn’t been available to
  yourself before.
  
• Journaling can reduce the symptoms of illness, lower blood pressure and promote healing—all of which can reduce your doctor bills.
  
• There’s wisdom to be found in exploring difficult life experiences. Writing about them gives meaning to your experience and is part of your legacy.
  
• Journaling gives you a voice in your own treatment and healing. It may even improve your relationship with your doctor.
  
• Research pioneer, Dr. James Pennebaker, and health care futurist, teacher, administrator and psychologist, Dr. Leland Kaiser reviewed this book and
  endorsed it.
  
• So did a priest, a therapist and two Internal Medical physicians, along with the people who tested the journal.
  
• So….Write Your Self Well!
  

How Do We Know Journaling Works?
Research

      Research confirms that expressive writing can shape, mold and recast human experience, and that rediscovering ourselves through writing about meaningful events in our lives can reduce stress and increase healing.

      This is the internal work of the patient. Clinical trials have found that this work can have a positive and collaborative influence on the therapeutic work of the physician. The purpose of Write Your Self Well is to bring the results of clinical trials out of the lab and into the lives of those who would like to benefit from it. Here is some background research you should know about:

• Early in the 20th century, Dr. Pierre-Felix Janet argued that very stressful life experiences could undermine health. He said that memories of stressful events are organized at the perceptual level as fragmented and disorganized sensations: sounds, images, and feelings that are similar to, and as distressing as, those accompanying the original event.
  
• In the mid-1980s, James W. Pennebaker, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, held a series of trials in which healthy individuals who wrote in journals about distressing experiences saw clear improvement in terms of fewer doctor visits. The study showed a strengthened immune system and a decrease in self-reported symptoms; students showed unexpected improvement in grades as well; and, unemployed engineers found jobs before their non-disclosing out-of-work associates.
  
• Then in 1999, Joshua M. Smyth, Ph.D., University of North Dakota, conducted the first written disclosure experiment on 112 chronically ill patients with rheumatoid arthritis and asthma. JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) in 1999 reported that: “47.4% of patients had clinically relevant improvement ( 33 of 70 patients), whereas only 9 (24.3% of 37) in the control group had improvement. Health effects were reliably observed four months after the structured writing exercise and appeared to be meaningful to the treatment process.”
  
• The Writing Cure, (1999, Eds. Lepore and Smyth, Washington, D.C., American Psychological Assn.) An anthology reporting research over the past two decades about written disclosure, strongly confirmed the effectiveness of expressive writing.
  
• USA Today reported written disclosure experiments in an article entitled “You’ve got trauma, but writing can help” on July 1, 2002.
  
• The Annals of Behavioral Medicine (August 2002) published the findings of a University of Iowa study which concluded, “Engagement of both thoughts and emotions while journaling about a stressful or traumatic experience can raise awareness of the benefits of the event,” Ullrich and Lutgendorf, the study’s authors report.
  
• “The Writing Cure” and “Our Journal” recent feature articles in New York Times Magazine, Medicine 2004 edition, April 18, 2004:
  - “The Writing Cure” Narrative Medicine trains medical students to listen to   patients’ stories. Students develop companion medical charts to journal their   responses to patients, improve patient relationships and reduce their stress.   Expanding the use of narrative medicine, sociologist Arthur Frank asks, “What   would it be like for ill people to tell their stories and for doctors to read them? “
  - “Our Journal” Lynn Redgrave and her daughter chronicle recovery from cancer   together.

Conclusion:

• As John Naisbett said in Megatrends many years ago: effective healthcare is a matter of balancing high tech and high touch.
  
• Participating in the creation of your own healing beyond what medical treatment and pharmaceuticals provide is the real possibility.
  
• Hospitals can improve patient satisfaction and loyalty by including patients in the healing process.
  
• Medical students are now being trained to listen to patients’ stories part of their training in narrative medicine.
  
• Positive physical results in ongoing research in expressive writing continue to be observed.

Interview Questions

• What is unique about Write Your Self Well?
  
• When illness saps patients’ energies and limits their powers of concentration, how do we interest them in journaling?
  
• What about the people who don’t like to write?
  
• We keep hearing that healthcare facilities are short-staffed. When will they find time to encourage patients to journal?
  
• Has this journal been tested with patients? What were the results?
  
• Is this just another unnecessary healthcare cost?
  
• Why can’t people simply use a lined tablet to write in rather than spend money on your book?
  
• How long have you and Zoe been working in this field?
  
• Do you have any success stories to share with us?