When it comes to benefiting from writing, the more expressive we are, the better. Expressive writing works via confronting the thing, not avoiding it. And most important, we don’t just need to confront the experience but make sense of it. Psychologist Susan Lutgendorf found that to get the benefits of expressive writing, we must make sense of the difficult. “An individual needs to find meaning in a traumatic memory as well as feel the related emotions to reap positive benefits from the writing exercise,” Lutgendorf told the American Psychological Association. She continued, “There has to be
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