Writing (or speaking) about our values or areas of our lives that are of particular personal importance can help us feel less threatened by stresses and more able to see situations clearly.  There are many research studies demonstrating this.  For example writing about personal values has been shown to reduce both subjectively experienced psychological stress and the body's adrenaline response to taking an academic exam (Sherman, Bunyan et al. 2009).  This easing in sense of threat tends to boost the exam results people achieve, especially for those who tend to get more stressed (Cohen, Garcia et al.

“ God guard me from the thoughts men think in the mind alone.  He that sings a lasting song, thinks in a marrow bone. ” - W. B. Yeats

I wrote yesterday about the first part of this tenth "Life skills" evening.  I particularly discussed development of Goodwill practice - very much in the "Nourishing positive states" section of the "Four aspects" diagram (below).  In the second half of the evening we moved on to the "Exploring & processing" section of the diagram with the introduction particularly of various forms of therapeutic writing.

Here are mixed bag of psychotherapy-relevant studies.  Foy & colleagues' meta-analysis highlights the value to patients/clients of having good communication between their primary care physician and their mental health professional.  The second paper I mention - free full text - by Mollen et al is a bit of a wake-up call for me.  The authors write " ... we will discuss why people conform to social norms and then extend this knowledge to the field of health communication and behaviour change. We will elaborate on the advantages and disadvantages of using social norm messages, and then offer alternatives for the use of social norms in health communication messages ... Clearly, there is a substantial evidence suggesting that, when unhealthy behaviour is highly prevalent, descriptive norms should not be conveyed in health promotion campaigns.

They taught me more about, in the midst of all this trauma and suffering and uncertainty - of remaining true to who you are,
and what love can be about in those moments. And there are three or four of those that really stand out very strongly,
whose lives were very different but who were kind of my teachers.
A therapist describing the impact on himself of working with clients struggling with AIDS

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Fear is the mind-killer ... I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.  Bene Gesserit "Litany against Fear" from "Dune" by Frank Herbert

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