My Shrink Says ... Blog!

Why do people write confessional blogs? It's a creative outlet. It's a forum to vent. It's an exercise in exhibitionism. To mental-health experts, though, it's more than that: a blog is medicine. Psychiatrists are starting to tout the therapeutic power of blogging, and many have begun incorporating it into patient treatment. A forthcoming study in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior even suggests that bloggers might be happier than nonbloggers.

Mental-health experts say blogs are a step up from plain old diaries, chiefly because of the built-in audience. As kids, we learn that if we air our problems, we get help. We associate communication with consolation, particularly when the going gets tough. Blogging fulfills that primal need for sympathy. "Writing is an effort of the brain to communicate for comfort," says Harvard neurologist Alice Flaherty. "Diaries are a form of that communication, but removed. Blogging gets you closer to that sympathetic audience, and that's what makes it therapeutic." According to psychologist John Suler, the anonymity of blogging provides another therapeutic boost: it's high intimacy with low vulnerability. But blogger beware. "Revealing too much," says Suler, "can cause shame or guilt." So blog to your heart's content, but leave some things to the imagination.
Written by Jessica Bennett NEWSWEEK
Jun 30, 2008 Issue

This brief commentary appeared in Newsweek and I was happy to see that my hunch was right. It is therapeutic after all. There is something comforting about the possible audience. One writes for oneself but is aware that anyone may read this any time. This has that liberating feeling, like being comforted, understood, and above all one gets the soothing feeling of communicating with others, even if we have the faintest idea of who that might be.

It is really YOU, yes, you who are reading these lines at this moment. Most times I avoid addressing you, and it really feels strange to overtly establish a dialogue with you. You are usually the anonymous witness of my life, you become an intimate yet unknown observer of my thoughts and feelings. Suddenly, within the last week or so, I got a message or comment of a student of mine from LM. She came across my blog and left a couple of nice lines about discovering a different person from her formal language teacher. It is true that I don't think of that when I write, but the fact that people that know me have had access to my reflections and crazy virtual doodling without me even knowing their name is an extraordinary event. It's the virtual alter ego, or the virtual sibling, or whatever one may wish to call the reader of one's blog - who are sometimes accidental or occasional visitors and other times frequent sharers of my life. I guess, the phenomenon does give me a sense of liberation, of open self-disclosure, and of comfort. We do not always have a chance to reach out to many people we see all the time, and maybe wish we shared more with. This is a way of becoming more transparent, even when I may be totally unaware of who some of them are, or as in the case of my student, I know there is one of them in a group of about forty or fifty people. And there may be some others whom I'll never know ever passed by here.

You see, I'm no longer addressing you, even if for this once I AM doing so. It's just that I keep digressing more within the labrynth of my mind and easily forget you're there. And that's ok - that's what this is all about. Without knowing it, you see, you are also part of my therapy.

I do my best to avoid revealing too much, like the article says, that may give me shame or guilt later on. However, to the careful observer, these lines here show much of my heart and soul, and definitely shed a light on the rest that remains unsaid. There, again, lies the beauty of this habit of blogging, at least for me. I display in detail the tip of the iceberg, but the seven eighths that go unseen are thus under pristine clear water. And if I ever go beyond the sensible point, I hope you'll be sympathetic, understanding, and forgiving, as you would with a friend, right?