The Healing Power of Writing
by Pam Roberts
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993, I happened to be a member of a writing group. Every Tuesday evening, I kissed my kids good night and drove up the hill to the home of the facilitator, Genie Zeiger. No matter what she provided as “prompts,”- poems, phrases, photos- I wrote about my experiences with cancer. As per the workshop’s guidelines, I read aloud my writing and heard back from fellow participants what was strong about it.
“What sticks with you about the writing?” Genie asked after each person read.
“What honest and brave writing,” I often heard from my fellow participants, and it helped me feel brave in my cancer journey.
Over the months and years as I underwent surgery, chemotherapy, and adjustment to a “new normal,” I found that writing in this safe group setting was healing. Many nights I arrived at the workshop in a turmoil of thoughts and emotions, feeling like I was about to explode, and then was able to follow my pen into a place of stillness. Writing my confusion, grief and fears transformed them, opened my heart, and eventually led me into acceptance and gratitude.
Ten years later, with Genie’s mentorship, I began to lead this style of writing workshop, which I named Spirit of the Written Word, at Cancer Connection. Back then, in 2003, I was two years into a four-year program at the former IM School of Healing, learning energy healing. When we students were encouraged to bring our healing out into the world, I decided that the best way for me to be of service was to lead writing workshops like the ones that had been so central to my healing from breast cancer. Over the decades of leading Spirit of the Written Word at Cancer Connection- and other places- I’ve witnessed my experience of the healing power of writing occur again and again for participants. There are studies that show that writing about challenging experiences can be transformational and they back up my observations.
In the workshops we form a safe and supportive community. Especially in the Cancer Connection group, where we are already connected by cancer’s impact, we find relief from the loneliness that a cancer diagnosis can bring. Often participants comment about how healing it is to write in a group where other people “get it.”
Writing our stories allows us to unearth what is deep in our hearts and helps us make sense of things. Through our creativity we can discover our resilience and strength of spirit.
PAM ROBERTS, facilitator of Spirit of the Written Word writing groups, is writing a memoir about loving and losing her son Thomas. A grateful longtime breast cancer survivor, she is thankful for a clinical trial that has put her into remission from a more recent lymphoma diagnosis.