What Therapeutic Writing Really Means for Anyone Living with Pain
What would it mean to stop fighting your body and start listening to it instead?
For many people living with chronic pain or illness, that question feels almost impossible to sit with. We are so conditioned to push through, manage, fix, or at the very least distract ourselves from what hurts, that the idea of turning toward it, pen in hand, can feel counterintuitive at best and frightening at worst.
But that is precisely what licensed psychotherapist and writing workshop facilitator Elisa Friedlander invites people to do. In Episode 71 of the Writing with Purpose podcast, Elisa shares how writing became her medicine, why the journal is the one space where we can be entirely unfiltered, and what she has learned, through her own experience of chronic pain, complex spinal surgeries, and a diagnosis of complex regional pain syndrome. She shares honestly about the difference between what pain can take from us and what it cannot.
The Journal as a Sacred Relationship
Elisa has been writing since she was six years old. As she puts it, she’s always had too much for her brain to contain, so writing became her way of channelling what she thinks and feels into a form she can work with.
Elisa frames her journalling as a sacred relationship rather than a tool or technique. She speaks of the journal, with a capital J. As something that earns trust over time, that requires care and reciprocity, and that has been present through the pain and the not-so-pretty parts of herself.
This framing matters, particularly for anyone who has had a painful experience with writing in the past, such as a diary read without permission. In these circumstances, writing may feel unsafe because there’s a sense of being violated by someone who has gone through what was private. Elisa's response to that is to honour it. The journal, she says, has to earn trust, and there are many small and gentle ways in.
One of those ways is a technique known as illegible writing, where you write freely and then write over your words, again and again, until nothing is legible. You are still writing and still experiencing the cathartic release of emotion or freeing of the mind. But nothing can be read back, by you or by anyone else. It is, as Elisa describes it, an inroad into the relationship with the page. An act of exposure therapy where each small attempt builds the evidence that you are safe.
What Pain Cannot Take
Elisa's own story with chronic pain is not one she tells for sympathy. She tells it because it’s the source of everything she teaches, and you can see the passion radiate from her.
Elisa managed pain from early adulthood, eventually discovering she had an early-onset degenerative disc disease. For years, she worked as a psychotherapist, sitting with clients, running sand play and puppet sessions with children, containing her pain throughout her working days until she found herself leaving her office in tears each evening. When surgery finally became unavoidable, things did not go as hoped, with complications that never fully resolved her situation. Eventually, Elisa faced a diagnosis of complex regional pain syndrome, a neuro-inflammatory condition where the brain continues firing pain signals long after tissue has healed.
Through all of this, writing remained a constant, and it was through journalling that Elisa arrived at the insight she describes as pivotal.
"This pain is not going to take my essence."
Reading memoirs during that difficult period, Elisa learned to appreciate what she had taken for granted. The memoir narrative did not fit her, as she had always been someone who stopped in the middle of things to take in the world. Someone who noticed and felt awe. Journalling gave her a clearer understanding of the narrative she had always been living. Pain could take her driving, income, mobility in some ways, but it could not take her vibrancy, curiosity, essential self. Putting that on the page made it real.
Quieting: A Different Way of Listening to the Body
The name of Elisa's therapeutic writing programme is Pain Meets Pen, and she chose the word ‘quieting’ in its subtitle for a specific reason. In a culture that wants to fix everything, quieting is a different proposition about learning to listen.
When we are in pain, the most natural human response is to distance ourselves from the body that is causing us trouble. People often speak of feeling betrayed by their body. And when someone betrays us, we pull away, hold anger, and do what we must to survive the proximity. But that distancing, Elisa explains, can increase pain, exacerbate symptoms, and do the opposite of what the nervous system needs.
Her six-week workshops, run over Zoom with participants from across the world, guide people through embodied, therapeutic writing practices that gently reverse that distancing. Writing from the body's perspective, asking what a painful part of the body might be saying, sitting with the sensation rather than pushing it away. The journal, she says, creates something remarkable: you are distancing yourself from the material enough to look at it clearly, and at the same time, you are drawing closer to yourself. Two roads converge in the same place.
Dream journalling is part of this work, too. Elisa describes a period when she had a series of unsettling dreams with an overall theme of unease and fear. Nothing in her waking life seemed to explain it. Through journalling about the dreams, she uncovered that she was holding unacknowledged fear about progression in her spinal condition. She had not let herself consciously dwell on it, but her body, her psyche, found another way to surface it. Once she filled her blank pages about it and gave that frightened part of herself a voice, the dreams stopped – immediately!
Nature as Writing Prompt, Water as Medicine
Elisa lives with an oak tree visible from her writing window and describes it with warmth. Nature, for her, is not a backdrop to writing, but a muse.
She tells people in her groups to gather writing prompts from the natural world in the way a child gathers things on a walk, picking up a leaf, turning it over, asking what this small thing might be teaching about life. She invokes Mary Oliver in the same breath, because that is exactly what Oliver did in taking a blade of grass and asking it the deepest questions. Going outside, or even imagining going outside, and then bringing what comes to the page brings everything alive.
Then there is the bathtub – a strange way into writing, you might think. Elisa writes in the bath, with a waterproof notebook and pencil. She describes being submerged in water as the only place she ever experiences something close to an absence of pain. Water, she says, opens channels. There is intention and a deliberate release of expectation and output. She goes in not to write but to simply be present for the writing to appear.
Elisa’s unusual ritual is a reminder that the conditions we create for ourselves matter enormously. It’s all about giving ourselves a space with no expectation of performance. This in itself is an act of agency, and sometimes that is where the most honest words find their way out.
Your Turn: A Journalling Practice Inspired by This Conversation
Elisa talks about the journal as a place of deep listening – somewhere we can give voice to the parts of ourselves we have been pushing away. This practice is built around that idea. Rather than writing from the mind's perspective, you are invited to write from somewhere closer to the body itself.
Choose one of the following entry points, whichever feels most alive for you right now.
Listening Inward
Sit quietly for two to three minutes before you write. Close your eyes. Let yourself settle. Notice what is present in your body. Just observe. What is there? Where do you feel tension, heaviness, warmth, or stillness? Then open your journal and begin: What my body is carrying right now is...
Writing From the Body's Point of View
Choose a part of your body that has been asking for your attention, whether through pain, tiredness, or simply a sense of being neglected. Write a short piece as if that part of you is speaking directly to you. What does it want you to know? What has it been trying to tell you?
Write an Unsent Letter to Your Pain
If you are living with chronic pain or illness, write a letter to it and acknowledge it honestly. What has it taken? What, to your own surprise, has it not taken?
There is no right way to do this. The point is simply to let the material come out of your head and onto the page, and see what arrives.
Want to explore therapeutic writing further? Listen to the full conversation with Elisa Friedlander by searching 'Writing with Purpose' on your chosen platform or watch the recording on the Journalling with Anna YouTube channel.