Blogging to heal

Among the most popular blogs are blogs, in which people talk about their own experiences and how they were able to overcome them or at least learned how to live with them. It seems to me that blogging can have therapeutic virtues.

So the question becomes: How can blogging be part of a healing process? 

We touch here on what is known as narrative psychology and the power of meaning: giving meaning to one's life [see my other post on the powers of meaning and example], to the events that made up our stories.

For those who have gone through traumatic life experiences, at first these events will be disruptive, debilitating. Their world, the world as they knew it will come to an end. Its structure will be disaggregated. 

Overtime and as new experiences will shape up what is to become their new world, they will be able to give new meaning to the traumatic past experiences. This is when healing can start happening. Once we start finding the words to express what it is we went through, it seems like we are on our way to reach the end of the tunnel. What was dark and felt like a burden will find words, a way to express itself. 

First, blogs allow their authors to access language. The blog turns into a realm of expression, which allows to give past events a locus, a place where they are not completely a burden anymore. In the space created by the blog between us and the events we went through, we have the opportunity to become the authors of our own stories. We are given the opportunity to rewrite our story, to infuse it with a new meaning. We are being restored to a sense of mastery over what happened to us. 

From the back sit, we are in the front sit again, and can now take an active part in leading the way. In fact, what happened to us and the way we overcame the traumatic aspect of it by expressing it, giving it meaning and integrating it into our narrative, our lifestories, learning to live with it again, can become a source of inspiration for others.
And this is the second reason why blogging can contribute to the healing process: blogs are out there, can be anonymous, but they are out there and can be read by others. For the author, this is another benefit: seeing that from one's traumatic experiences, others can learn and replicate in their own lives the strategies set in place, go a similar path, turn into authors themselves.

By creating for ourselves resilient strategies, we might inspire others to do the same in their own lives. This is what blogs allow for.
In a way, a person having gone through that process can be a resilience tutor for others who have gone through similar experiences but haven't found a way out just yet.

The only way out is through, Jon Kabat-Zinn