Hemingway Was Wrong: Nobody Gets Strong at the Broken Places
Hemingway was half right. Here's what forty years of research says about the other half, and why the wound was never the thing that made you stronger.
Third of three essays on loss and the meaning we make of it. The first, “Pain is not a gift, but it can be fertile ground,” is [found here]. The second, “Meaning is not found. But it’s not made, either,” is [found here].
There is a sentence people say to the recently ruined: You’ll be stronger for this.
Its cousin — what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger — is found on modern coffee mugs, but Nietzsche wrote that, more or less, in 1888 just before he collapsed in a Turin street the following January, an event from which he actually didn’t come back stronger. Which, perhaps, tells us something about the warranty on his claim.
We love it all the same, and I think we love it because it kinda lets us off the hook. After all, if the wound itself is doing the work of strengthening, then the bereaved need only endure. And we, standing beside our lovely broken-winged little birds with our comfort casseroles and platitudes, need only sit shiva with them so long because — here’s the companion coffee mug — time heals all wounds, right?
Right?
Don’t misunderstand me. Post-traumatic growth is a real and well-documented phenomenon. Some people do come out of catastrophe reporting deeper relationships, clarified priorities, and a new intimacy with what matters. But that growth — that promised strength — can’t possibly be immediate or guaranteed. I suspect even those to whom strength comes quickly had to do some real, unglamorous, sit-in-the-shit kind of work to get there.
The question is what the work actually is. And on that, the science is far less coy than the philosophers.
There are many ways to rebuild after a difficult or traumatic experience — CBT, somatic work, EMDR. But here’s one you may not know about, and it is badly under-prescribed: directed, expressive writing in the tradition of James Pennebaker, and its clinical grandchild, Written Exposure Therapy.
In 1986, Pennebaker asked people to write for twenty minutes a day, four days running, about the hardest thing that had ever happened to them. Then he measured their bodies and found they slept better. Their immune function improved. They went to the doctor less in the months that followed. In the four decades since, the protocol has been run hundreds of times — on cancer patients, veterans, caregivers, the chronically ill — with fairly consistent results: lower anxiety, less rumination, faster wound healing, better blood pressure. In fact, in one randomized trial published in JAMA, patients with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis who wrote were nearly twice as likely to show clinically meaningful improvement as those who didn’t. And this was on top of the medical care everyone was already receiving. All the result of…writing?
Then clinicians Denise Sloan and Brian Marx at the National Center for PTSD built a five-session treatment out of these bones and called it Written Exposure Therapy. In a (different) randomized trial in JAMA Psychiatry, five sessions of writing performed as well as twelve sessions of Cognitive Processing Therapy, a first-line PTSD treatment. It also held up again against Prolonged Exposure therapy. So much so, the VA and Department of Defense now list it as a recommended treatment for PTSD.
What’s more interesting than this is that when researchers looked at who Written Exposure Therapy worked for, it worked equally well regardless of age, gender, co-morbid depression, or estimated IQ. In other words, being smarter didn’t make the treatment work better, nor did being a writer or liking to write. This medicine does not care whether you’re good at words. It only cares whether you go back in and use them to tell the whole, hairy truth.
So why does this modality work?
When Pennebaker went looking for who actually got better, it was not the people who wrote most beautifully. It was not the ones who cried hardest onto the page, either; catharsis, that great cultural darling, turns out to be a lousy predictor of physiological wellness. It was the people whose language changed from the first day to the last. The ones who, by day four, had arrived at a state researchers call narrative coherence.
The mechanism is still argued over, but the likeliest explanations converge on a story that goes roughly like this:
First, disclosure quiets the alarm. Putting an experience into words — even (especially?) ugly, unedited, and out-of-order words — measurably calms the amygdala and brings the prefrontal cortex back online. Researchers call it affect labeling. You name the thing, and the thing loosens its grip. It’s like rolling the shades up on a vampire at dawn.
But a hard experience arrives too large and too hot to be reorganized (or vaporized as the case may be) in a single sitting. So you return. And each time you go back to the page, write about that one thing again, and survive the looking, it frightens you a little less the next time because the danger your body keeps predicting never arrives, so the nervous system can finally stand down. A mind that can settle creates the conditions for a body that can feel better, and it also creates greater cognitive capacity, or space, to both re-see an event more clearly and re-author it more coherently.
When I did this protocol on one of my own wounds related to adoption, I didn’t get from the stilled mind to the feel-better-body in one leap. Here’s roughly how it actually went for me:
Day one. Two days old. She left me there. How could a mother just…leave!? her baby?! Just walk out the fucking hospital doors like she’d forgotten her purse in the car and then decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to go back and buy the milk after all. I have her eyes, but I never got to see her eyes. Not in life, anyway. Because she delivered me and then disappeared. Did she hold me? Did she nurse me? Did she betray her plans to the doctors or breastfeeding coach? Or did she decide straight away I was a problem to solve, not a daughter to raise. I was an inconvenience, a secret she kept so she could keep running. So fucking selfish. And yet, I hate that I long to have known her.
That’s what a wound sounds like when you finally let it talk. Messy. Disorganized. Kinda all over the place like the pain of the trauma itself. But I came back to the page, and the sting stung a little less the next day, and the facts began settling into some kind of order based on the facts I’d gleaned after I found her and heard her story.
Day two. She was six when her uncle started in on her. She was fourteen when she picked up the bottle to make the pain stop. She wasn’t yet twenty the first time she ran. She was twenty-three when she got pregnant and landed herself, eight months later, in that hospital with no money, no job, no partner, no help and absolutely no intention of going back to that life or conscripting a baby girl into it. And then I was born.
Notice what happens when you lay the facts along a timeline. I stop being the beginning of the story. I am a character in somebody else’s. This subtle linguistic and cognitive turn is what gives the brain the data it needs to see the threat as past, not present, and become curious about the why instead of stewing in the hurt.
Day three. Why does a girl molested at six drink at fourteen? Because it works, at first. Because nobody came. Because something had to give. Why does a woman with no money, no support, and a body that was never treated with respect hand over a baby in secret and take that secret to her early grave? Because she had nothing to raise a child with and she knew it. Because telling would have cost her the last thing she had, which was the ability to keep moving.
Those questions have answers. Miserable, ordinary, historically well-documented answers. And every last one of them shifts the focus to her and not me.
She was not selfish. I was not an inconvenience. I was the one thing she had worth protecting, and the only way she knew to protect me was to hand me over to someone else who had more resources than she had.
And only then — only after the pile of feelings was organized into a sequence of neutral facts, and the sequence allowed for reasons — could the last thing arrive: meaning.
Day four. I understand now that I was not discarded. I was survived. I see that she was not a bad mother but a woman who couldn’t get what she needed for herself and therefore couldn’t give what she needed to a baby. And I realize, finally, that the abandonment I organized my entire life around was a description of her circumstances, not a description of my inherent worth.
Pile. Order. Meaning. Relief. That climb is what the researchers mean by narrative coherence, and it is not a mood, or a mindset, or an attitude adjustment. It’s an intentional (even if subconscious) assembly. It cannot be rushed or skipped, and it will not happen in a single sitting no matter how many spoons of comfort casserole you eat while your cousin tells you not to worry because you’ll be stronger for this.
You will not be stronger for this. Unless you work at it.
(By the way, if you’re interested in the whole story of my relinquishment and reunion, you can find it in my new memoir: Uprooted, which drops July 28th!)
But back to the science. Tell the new, more neutral, more coherent story enough times, and it becomes the one you reach for even when you’re triggered. This isn't wishful thinking, but a property of how memory works. Every time you retrieve a memory, it comes back out a little soft, a little unstable, and therefore briefly editable, before it gets filed away again. Researchers call this reconsolidation, and it means the version that goes back on the shelf is shaped by the state you were in and the understanding you carried when you went in after it.
Which is to say: every return is a rep.
Think about what actually happens when you build muscle. You load the bar. You lift. You tear the tissue. But the tearing is not the growth, just like the trauma is not the strength. Nobody in the history of the human body has gotten stronger at the moment of the tear. Strength arrives afterward, in the repair, and only if you feed it and rest it and come back and do the whole miserable thing again and again. This writing protocol works the same way.
Hemingway wrote that the world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. I have loved that line my whole reading life, and I’ve decided it’s only half right, and the wrong half is the half everybody — myself included — quotes. Strength does not just appear at the break. It is the result of tending it, and tending is a verb, which means somebody has to do it.
Hint, hint. Nudge, nudge.
So tell me, dear reader: have you tried the directed writing like this before? And if so, what was your experience? Do you agree with Hemingway or me or have another take on where strength comes from and what it requires of us?
Comment below. I read every one.
I’ve got more where this came from, including courses that pick up where Pennebaker and others left off. You can find them at www.thewritingcure.com.