Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change

by Elizabeth Bechard

In Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth, journalist Jim Rendon devotes an entire chapter to the exploration of expressive writing and post-traumatic growth. Expressive writing, he says, is a form of deliberate rumination. Unlike the variety of rumination in which you’re still awake in the wee hours of the morning worrying about the fact that your husband left the oven on—that’s intrusive rumination, according to psychology researchers—deliberate rumination involves consciously reexamining and reflecting on a difficult event or circumstance as a way of intentionally processing it. “Talking, writing, and expressing oneself,” Rendon writes, “is central to enabling the kind of deliberate rumination and narrative reframing that is required for growth.” One of the most commonly used and well-researched techniques in expressive writing research is the Pennebaker Paradigm, a distinct set of four writing prompts designed to encourage deliberate rumination and perspective-taking about a difficult or traumatic event.