The social psychologist James Pennebaker has studied self-writing, and how people are often profoundly helped by writing about traumatic experiences. He’s found those who were most helped by self-writing moved from using mainly the first person pronoun in their writing (I, me, my) to using a variety of different pronouns (you, they, we, it) and causal connecting words (because, therefore, that’s why).9 They depersonalise a difficult situation, hold it at arm’s length, and come to terms with it – literally. This is what we see Marcus doing – seeing difficult situations from multiple
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