From The Daily Inter Lake
Albert promotes writing's power
By: Candace Chase

Ina Albert sees the pen as mightier than the scalpel when it comes to healing lives.

The Whitefish author penned “Write Your Self Well…” based on a simple rule. The more you write about what you fell, the better you feel.

She based the book, co-written with Zoe Keithley, on years of clinical research and decades working in health care communication.

“Patients can lower their blood pressure, reduce stress, strengthen their immune responses, speed recovery and experience fewer symptoms by writing about what they feel,” Albert said.

The author heeds her own advice. At 69, she looks at least a decade younger than her chronological age.

Albert shares an elegant home above Whitefish with her rabbi husband Allen Secher. As she reflected on her life, her schnauzer bounded irreverently across the polished wood floors.

“That’s Farfel,” she said introducing the dog. “That’s a little noodle you put in soup.”

Farfel’s name gives you a clue to Albert’s east Coast roots. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she attended college in Massachusetts at Brandeis University, where she majored in English.

After College, Albert worked as an aide in the political cauldron of the New Jersey Legislature.

“For six years, I was the only woman on the senate floor,” she said with a laugh.

Facing the end of her first marriage with two boys to care for, Albert tapped a colleague from her legislative days for a job. Alan Marcus had founded what became the largest lobbying and public relations group in New Jersey.

He promptly hired her to take care of hospital fund-raising and public relations. In those days, she recalled, college didn’t offer degrees in public relations.

“So you had to learn by the seat of your pants,” Albert said.

She moved on to work directly for health-care facilities. A quick study, Albert graduated from 75-bed nursing homes to a 1,000 bed teaching hospital in Orlando, Florida.

She set up her own consulting firm in 1985-86.

Albert recalled her work for a new children’s psychiatric hospital as a transforming experience. Called Laurel Oaks, the facility used cutting edge therapies to treat children with severe emotional and mental disorders.

“It was heartbreaking and yet exciting at the same time,” she said.

The hospital built a ropes course on the hospital grounds. New at the time, the ropes concept uses physical activities to help people conquer fears and build self-confidence, cooperation and trust.

“The parents came in and worked with the kids,” she recalled.

In another program, the staff used journaling to bring parents and their children together. Parents filled out a journal recalling the worst things they had to face as teenagers.

“At graduation, the parents gave that legacy to the kids,” she said.

Albert began to appreciate the power of writing to heal.

Another incident fired her with a passion to help patients assert themselves in the health care setting.

She was hired by another Florida hospital to create a plan to cut down on their high nursing turnover. Albert started by observing inside the troubled hospital.

One day, a young man came to the emergency room after a fall from scaffolding.

“This young guy was laying on the table with a broken arm,” Albert recalled.

The nurse attending the man was talking about her date on Saturday night while the physician expounded on his divorce proceedings. With no warning, the resident picked up and yanked the patient’s arm to set it then walked off.

Albert rushed over, took the young man’s hand and asked him if he was okay.

“Just the touch of my hand and he started to cry,” she said. “Patients should never be treated that way.”

For Albert, these experiences turned a career into a passion to humanize hospitals for both patients and healthcare workers.

To help that hospital she put the staff through rudimentary team-building. When people feel important in the scheme of things, she said they lose that anger that fuels dissatisfaction in the workplace.

Albert conducts workshops that tune people into themselves as energy beings. They learn how their negative energy infects other people and visa versa.

“It’s what I like to call a thought virus,” she said.

She helps health-care workers reconnect with why they got into healing and hospitals figure out what situations drive them out. Albert said. Nurses want to be “hands on” but also need to feel valued by their patients.

“It’s a very special relation ship when it’s working,” Albert said.

The healing relationship gave rise to “Write Your Self Well…Journal Yourself to Health.” It targets both patients and health-care providers as partners in the process of healing.

Albert started the book in 2002 while still living in Chicago where her co-author Keithley worked as a master teacher in her well-known Story Workshop at Columbia College.

For their book, the authors tapped John Schultz’s Story Workshop approach as well as the expressive writing research of James Pennebaker and Allan Paivio’s theories of the functioning of language.

Albert used local people to evaluate their journaling guide.

“We tested a number of people in Whitefish,” she said.

She found the exercises helped her subjects unearth long-forgotten incidents.

“They stated to think about their lives in a different way,” she said.

Recnet years provided a self-test of journaling for Albert as she dealt with the loss of her mother to Alzheimers. She remembered feeling empty for weeks.

“Then I sat down to wrote one day,” Albert recalled. “Then the tears came.”

After her dad died, she sued journaling to capture snapshots, touching moments and forgotten memories of her parent’s life. She finds writing continues to help her as she confronts the challenging of aging.

“Growing through journaling really grew me to face my elder years,” she said.

Albert encourages people to experience expressive writing at a free, interactive workshop she will conduct from 6-8 p.m. Wednesday at Kalispell Regional Medical Center’s Buffalo Hill Conference Center.

Many valley bookstores as well as Amazon.com have her book for sale at a price of $16.95. People can also order through her Web site writeyourself.com

Albert joked about selling copies out of the trunk of her car.

“I’m like a Bible salesman with a carton of books,” she said with a laugh.

The author received endorsements for the book from Pennebaker, well-known futurist Leland Kaiser and Rev. John C. Cusick of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Readers will also find kind words from a Whitefish physician in the foreword to the book. Dr. Suzanne Daniell called the book a wonderful tool for empowerment and healing.

“This is a gift the self can give the soul,” Daniell wrote.