Therapeutic Benefit of Blogging Presentation

Here is a copy of the handout from the presentation I gave at the Broward County Main Library for Gilda's Club South Florida about the therapeutic benefits of blogging:

What is the therapeutic benefit of e-journaling / blogging?

Two beneficial viewpoints –

Narrative Therapy –

- Peoples’ lives are a story and problems are a product of social, cultural, and

political contexts.

- Post-modernism / social constructionism – there is no singular truth – there are

multiple interpretations of any one event.

- Through story telling, people discover hopeful, preferred, and previously

unrecognized or hidden possibilities, your story can be told in another way – this is called re-authoring your story.

Journaling has long been recognized as a way to reduce stress, to encourage self-insight, to set goals, organize, help focus, improve well-being, create self-accountability, as a gift to your future self, to create personal time for yourself, and to establish a record of life events.

Why blogging?

The outside observer

Gain insight from others and hear their interpretation of your story

Bearing Witness

Deena Metzger (1992) writes “when it is our own life story that we are telling, we become aware that we are not victims of random and chaotic circumstances, that we, too, despite our grief are living meaningfully in a meaningful universe” (p.55).  She states “we cannot cloister our inner selves…or we will find ourselves bereft of one of the essential components for the process of transformation: interchange” (p. 36).  A therapeutic connection can be a context for restructuring the narrative.  The therapeutic conversation can hold, change, and reconstruct one’s meaning of what has happened.  In grief, we need persons who will bear witness to the evolving story with its nuances of meaning, characters, emotional patterns, consistency, and uncharted courses. “Stories heal us because we become whole through them.  As in the word ‘remember’, we re-member, re-store, re-claim, re-new” (Metzger, 1992, p. 71).

How to get started –

Setting up your blog – decide if you will host the site or not

            Free blogging services such as blogspot – but you don’t own the blog

For people with any type of medical condition, there is www.caringbridge.com –

with free blog sites for the person who is living with the condition as well as

“support planner” sections for caregivers to arrange meals, coordinate care, etc.

            Cheap hosting services such as wordpress (see handout)

* Note - If you host your own site, you need a web host for your blog, such as GoDaddy. There is a process to setting up the blog that can be reviewed at www.howtostartablog.org.

What to blog about?

- Events – things that are important, things you need to just “get out”, events that you want feedback about, updates about your progress (blogging is an excellent way to update all of your friends and family at one time instead of having to update people individually)

- Themes – take an emotion then break it down into subcategories, then break it down further. For example, “Fear” would be broken down into fear of needles, fear of test results, fear of being hospitalized, then explore what is it about each of these fears?

- Positive Thinking - how do you want to see or engage with the world? What are your hopes, expectations, visions of something coming up? Make up a story or project positive thinking into situations that you are planning for

            Gratitude List

            Forgiveness List – to yourself and to others

Then What?

* Look back through blogs and find common themes or recurring difficulties and strong emotions and see if that is something you want to give attention to? Do you notice a consistent period of sleeplessness and agitation in your writing that coincides with three or six month scans?

* Give your future self a gift – write a blog post to yourself in the future about where you hope to be at after some event or amount of time. This is setting the stage for positive thinking and also a way to create self accountability. Look back at old blog posts and see how far you have come and how much you have changed or how much you have remained the same.

Above all, be open to learn and grow every day! When you feel like it, have fun and use humor! And when you are in a serious mood, give yourself the time and attention that blogging provides!

For more information, contact me at lisamzucker@gmail.com