In Pennebaker’s essay “Telling Stories: The Health Benefits of Narrative” , he writes of many benefits that narratives have to healing. He first describes of a study that he had done in which he asked a population to write their “deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of your entire life”(4). He then studied the effects of the writing exercise, and found that writing the narratives drastically reduced their doctor’s visits, increased their grades if they were in college, and allowed them to even gain jobs faster (if they had once lost them). I believe that narratives do benefit the overall emotional health due to the fact that when putting a broken memory into a story, pieces start to come together and make sense. Pennebaker writes: “By integrating thoughts and feelings, then the person can more easily construct a coherent narrative of the experience. Once formed, the event can be summed, stored, and forgotten more efficiently.”(9). An experience is better understood in when put into the words of a story. From that story, a meaning can root from the events that had happened. Many times, when traumatic events happen, people are left wondering why that happened to them, or what caused that to happen. If a story is created from the memory of the experience, this will allow the event to be better understood, and the patient can move towards recovery sooner.
