Hasta La Gadget!

I have always been a proponent of periodic journaling as a tool to help reduce stress: “personal” journals, “gratitude” journals, “why I can’t make a 4-foot putt” journals…. The idea behind journaling is that it helps you take a step back, gather and express your thoughts, reflect on your current circumstances and put things into a more balanced and accurate perspective.

I was recently reading an article about the proven benefits of another type of writing known as expressive writing. In this case, the difficulties you are having can become the fuel you need to create a personal story that can deliver healthy returns. In fact, in expressive writing’s 30-plus-year history, research shows people experience benefits like stress reduction and increased memory and immune function, often reporting fewer visits to the doctor.

The crux of expressive writing is that we all react to and handle stressful situations differently. But when it comes to family caregivers, there is an overarching tendency to keep stressors to ourselves, bottled up as personal secrets that over time can eat away at our mental, emotional and physical well-being.

What I love about expressive writing is that it allows you to become both the author of your story and its sole audience. This allows you to express your innermost feelings without fear of being judged by anyone else.

As you can imagine, whenever I broach the subject of writing, I tend to elicit the same response… “But I’m a terrible writer!” So what! The wonderful thing about expressive writing is that it’s not about having perfect grammar or punctuation. You’re not being graded or expected to perform in public. Its sole purpose is to help YOU.

Dr. James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas in Austin and the expert credited with pioneering much of the work done on expressive writing, believes practicing for just 20 minutes a day for four days can provide a measurable health benefit.

I highly recommend reading his book Writing to Heal, which provides a basic background and explanation as to why expressive writing has shown such great promise. It also includes a step-by-step workbook to help you begin and establish an effective approach to expressive writing. Click on this YouTube link for Dr. Pennebaker’s thoughts on this incredible process.

To help you get started, here are guidelines for each of the four expressive writing days. And, remember: during each of the four days, it is important to write continuously for the entire 20 minutes and to be as open as possible about your thoughts and feelings! Also, if by chance you feel very distressed as you write I recommend stopping the exercise at this time and consider picking it up later.

Day 1

The goal of today is to explore. Take a step back and think about the things that are most on your mind and causing you concern. Write about them and what they mean to you. How has your life changed? Are you a different person today than when you first became a family caregiver? You have a blank piece of paper, write about the event itself and how you felt when your first encountered it and how you feel about it now. Also, think about looking at how this event is tied into other parts of your life, i.e. your relationship with family members, friends, work, etc.

Remember, this is for you and only you so write about what is most important to you… the good, the bad and the whatever!

Day 2

Today continue to expand on your thoughts about yesterday’s event, although you can certainly introduce a new situation if you’d like.

You may want to think about how this situation or specific event is affecting your life both positively and negatively. Also give thought to your role in how the situation is affecting your life. Be as honest as possible with yourself.

Day 3

It’s time to dig deeper. For instance, if being a family caregiver has caused you to make compromises at work, what does this look like and how has this influenced the aspirations that you may have had before becoming a caregiver? Or, conversely, is being a family caregiver causing you to reassess your goals in a more positive way?

There is a range of outcomes and only you can assign an importance to them. I encourage you to work at getting to the heart of your feelings and their impact on you. How is your situation shaping your life and who you are?

Day 4

It’s time to tie it all together and create your story.

Today is the last day of your expressive writing exercise. As you continue to address the event that is weighing on you, think about the issues, thoughts and feelings that you have uncorked. What are your emotions at this point? Look into what you have learned, lost and gained as a result of this event and how it will guide your thoughts and actions in the future. What are you learning and what steps can you take to improve your quality of life.

Just let go. The goal is to create a personal story that you can take into your future.

Post-Writing Thoughts

At the end of each day it is very helpful to reflect on your writing session. Writing To Heal recommends using a scale of 0-10 to assign the value you feel is most accurate for each of these four questions (0 has a value of Not At All and 10 has a value of A Great Deal):

1. To what degree did you express your deepest thoughts and feelings?
2. To what degree do you currently feel sad or upset?
3. To what degree do you currently feel happy
4. To what degree was today’s writing valuable and meaningful to you?

Describe how you feel your writing went. Did anything surprise you?

Now that you have completed this journey, give it time to settle in. Family caregiving is dynamic. It moves from day to day and you can go from feeling great love to… well…. feeling quite the opposite all in the span of 24 hours. The personal story you have created will give you a better understanding of the path you are on and the adjustments you may need to make to have a more fulfilling and happier life.

I am very excited to have introduced you to this wonderful tool. I found that 80 minutes was such a small commitment for such an important building block that can strengthen your life NOW and LATER. I hope you find the same.

Help yourself. Help others.

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Excerpts from Little Rock Crisis: What Desegregation Politics Says About Us

One generation to the next, in city after city, the justice road is being built by each of us

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. -Langston Hughes

As we approach the anniversary of the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, on May 17th, the story of struggle and progress in Little Rock reminds us of the roots of Black youth activism in American racial history.

How do we know if the American civil rights movement of the twentieth century has had a measurable impact on our sociopolitical lives, today? You could just turn on your television because we’ve discovered that the protest actions of a brave few Black youth can determine the political and social attitudes and actions of countless others–even decades later.

In Little Rock Crisis: What Desegregation Politics Says About Us, we frame the story of the Little Rock 1957 desegregation crisis through the lens of memory. Over time, those memories – individual and collective – have motivated Little Rockians for social and political action and engagement.

A Native American saying states, “It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.” Accounts of the 1957 desegregation crisis in Little Rock have taken many voices–all telling a unique story about experience with the crisis. Very few of the numerous accounts of the crisis examine it as a living incident.

For many, that road toward a better democracy began in Little Rock, where they were introduced to nine teenagers who changed the world. But the “crisis” in Little Rock affected many more Blacks than the Nine – both now and then.

It was between 1956 and 1958 that dozens of Black teenagers in Little Rock sought to integrate the capital city’s largest high school, Central High School. After several attempts over two years, with varying Black teenagers (and brave parents), nine courageous teenagers met on a September morning in 1957 to try justice again. On first attempt, local and state sanctioned mobs, assisted by the Arkansas National Guard were allowed to prevent the Black teens from going to school.

When the pinnacle of success can be one block over, yet inaccessible to Black you, you are wrought with agony. When the epicenter of “opportunity,” denies you because of Black you, you may lose part of you.

Federal law mattered not. Little Rock, like most “desegregation” cities in the south, was not interested in equality for Black youth.

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike? -Langston Hughes

Little Rock, Arkansas, is also the birth home of Mom. Mom was a teenager in 1957, and one year younger than the youngest of the Nine. Her oldest sister was in the same class as Ernest Green, the first African American to graduate from Central High School. My grandmother taught many of the Nine in Sunday School or Choir at Bethel AME Church in Little Rock.

But, Mom could not take part, having been strongly denied by her father, the opportunity to integrate Central:

“As a teenager, however, I was angry with my father’s response and his decision to allow providing for his family to take precedence over activism for civil rights. He said “No” so quickly, so forcefully! … I couldn’t have comprehended any logical or illogical explanation about the adult complexities of being dependent for one’s livelihood on the whims of a white employer.”

Though living Black in America remains a painful experience for many Black youth today, as it did then, there are positive residuals from social movement “crisis.” Black Little Rockians, from the Silent Generation to Generation Z, attribute their current engagement in political affairs to community memory of “crisis.” The result? Their politics have taken shape. They are more engaged.

Last year, research at Pew indicates that political engagement can take on many different forms, and that on every measure of engagement, “political participation is strongly related to ideology and partisan antipathy.”

But, political participation is also strongly linked to one’s motivation or impetus for engagement, In The Little Rock Crisis: What Desegregation Politics Says About Us, it is clear that one’s introduction to politics through the lens of a social (in)justice movement, such as the Little Rock “crisis,” is the reason many cite for why they 1) initially got involved in politics and 2) why they remained involved throughout their lives.

———

After the Nine, came the Greensboro Four and the Nashville Sit-Ins (of which Mom was also a participant as a student at Fisk University). Then came Freedom Rides, SNCC, the Black Panthers and so many other opportunities for young activists to compel this nation to do what is right.

And, yet today, the criminal injustice systems fought against in the 1960s remain strong in Baltimore, Ferguson, Detroit, Chicago, New York, Cleveland and far too many other communities, and is met with the same injustice in many of our nation’s urban schools, where Black youth are left behind day after day. Such is the cycle of structural racism – alive today, alive in Little Rock in 1957.

Over the last few years we’ve seen the spirit of Little Rock play out across the country as millions of Black youth engage in activism against inequity. Though the cause differs, the quest for universal freedom is the same.

When Black you is made thug you by Black leaders,
you’re a stranger in your own house.

Today’s Little Rock can be found in Ferguson, Baltimore and countless other locales where injustice reigned, lives were lost, and souls changed forever. And, the secret’s out! – We’re all better citizens for having been witness to a crisis.

Those who live(d) in the shadow of crisis believe they have been significantly changed–questioning if what they went through is a crisis at all. We think it is so much more. Each burst of Black youth sociopolitical activism is an American breakthrough that impacts each of us across generations; a re-birth of democracy in action.

Ravi K. Perry, received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University in 2009. He is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Mississippi State University, President of the National Association for Ethnic Studies and the Affiliate Equity Officer at the ACLU of Mississippi. You can follow him on Twitter: @raviperry

D. LaRouth (Smith) Perry received her Ph.D. in American Culture from Bowling Green State University in 1998. She is a Little Rock native and is an Independent Scholar. She resides in Tampa, FL.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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