This episode of “Read. Talk. Grow.” explores restorative writing as a healing tool for burnout, especially among healthcare professionals. Host Dr. Denise Millstine speaks with two leading voices in narrative medicine and expressive writing: Dr. Carolyn Roy Bornstein, pediatrician and author of “A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals,” and Sandra Marinella, writing teacher and author of “The Story You Need to Tell.”
Burnout is real - and writing can help.
In this episode, Dr. Denise Millstine talks with Dr. Carolyn Roy‑Bornstein, “A Prescription for Burnout” and Sandra Marinella, “The Story You Need to Tell” about how restorative writing helps clinicians process stress, grief, and emotional exhaustion. A powerful conversation on healing, meaning‑making, and reclaiming your story.
This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens.
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Dr. Denise Millstine
Welcome to the “Read. Talk. Grow.” podcast, where we explore health topics through books. Our topic is again restorative writing, this time from burnout, and also focused on health care professionals. Our first book is “A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Health Care Professionals” by Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bernstein. And our second is “The Story You Need to Tell: Writing to Heal from Trauma, Illness, or Loss” by Sandra Marinella, which you heard about already on episode 32.
I'm your host, Dr. Denise Millstine. I'm an assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic, where I practice women's health, internal medicine, and integrative medicine. I am so excited about my two author guests today. Our first is Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein. She's a board-certified pediatrician, author, and nationally recognized voice in narrative medicine and physician well-being. She is the writer- in-residence at a family medicine residency program, where she leads clinicians and reflective and restorative writing. Dr. Roy-Bornstein is the author of several books, including “Crash” and her newest, “A Prescription for Burnout.” Her work has also appeared in “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post,” “JAMA,” and other major publications.
Carolyn, welcome to the show.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here, Denise.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Our second author guest and medical writing for healing expert is Sandy Marinella. She's an award-winning author, writing teacher, and speaker who is best known for her book, “The Story You Need to Tell,” which is a widely acclaimed guide to using personal storytelling and expressive writing for healing and resilience. With decades of experience teaching writers and leading workshops for patients, veterans, and health care communities, in addition to high school students, Sandy is the founder of The Story You Need to Tell Project, which explores the transformative power of narrative in times of illness, loss, and change.
Sandy, welcome back to the show.
Sandra Marinella
It is so much fun to be here with you, and I'm really delighted to meet Carolyn and to have read her book. What an honor.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine
It's such a fabulous book. Both of them are. So our new book, let me tell you about it. It is “A Prescription for Burnout” It's a practical guide for a healing practice to write and explore the three elements of burnout, as defined by Marshak, classically. These are emotional exhaustion, cynicism, sometimes called depersonalization, and a reduced sense of accomplishment or effectiveness or efficacy. The audience for this book is health care professionals, but I think we'll make the argument today that these practices could apply to any professional.
Okay, you both know how “Read. Talk. Grow.” works; we discuss books about health topics to enhance understanding. So let's discuss restorative writing as an effective tool to prevent or reverse burnout.
Carolyn, tell us your inspiration for writing the book.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
So there are a lot of books out there on burnout. There are some that are written by physicians themselves who have burned out and are back to tell the tale, what worked for them. And there are books written by experts, researchers in burnout, where I come from a completely different lens I'm operating with. And that lens is having been healed through writing myself from a family trauma.
And that happened many years ago, 20 years ago. But it was so powerful for me that it just stayed with me and I always wanted to write a book about helping others through writing. And right before the pandemic, when the epidemic of physician burnout was sort of just beginning taking off, that's when I felt I found my audience.
Dr. Denise Millstine
And you're among this audience, right? As a practicing physician and a medical educator, I'm sure you've seen lots of inside stories on people who could benefit from this practice.
Sandy, I'm so excited to hear what your thoughts were about this book.
Sandra Marinella
Oh, wow. “A Prescription for Burnout” is just such a humane and grounded approach to talking about this huge problem of burnout with physicians and nurses and anybody in the medical field. And I was so pleased to see that it was a book that covered much of what I talk about in, “The Story You Need To Tell,” but it approaches it and opens it up to this wide audience of people who, as Carolyn pointed out, were really impacted by Covid and the profession.
So much has been asked of the profession and health care. This is just a wonderful tool directed at them, providing so many useful ways of facing and dealing with burnout. And it doesn't make light at all, as so many resources do. They make light of writing to heal as a tool to heal. I think writing, restorative writing is a tool that needs to be recognized and this book takes it seriously.
And it not only takes it seriously, it does some things that no other book has done yet and that I'm trying to do with my upcoming book. And it has taken an integrated into it the latest, the absolute latest on positive psychology and how that is invaluable in terms of us rewriting mindsets and helping ourselves survive something as traumatic as professional burnout. I love it.
Dr. Denise Millstine
So one of the differences between your two books is the audience. I think you would both agree. Sandy, yours is directed really at anybody who is looking at this healing from a trauma, from a new diagnosis. But that person doesn't have to be in health care or have necessarily even a health experience. Where Carolyn, you're truly writing this particular book to your colleagues, to people who are health care professionals. Do you agree?
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Yes, to include nurses. I was a nurse for ten years before I became a physician, but also therapists of all kinds, psychologists.
Dr. Denise Millstine
And I'm doing this interview from an integrative medicine conference where I really like the term health care professionals, because this could mean all different scientists, researchers, people who are providing healing modalities, social workers. I think it applies to all of us. So, Carolyn, you referred initially to, I think, what was your initial exploration or at least effective exploration of using restorative writing and that was at a time of really profound grief. Would you share that with our listeners.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Sure. So I have four children, and when my youngest son was 17, he was hit by a drunk driver, which killed his girlfriend and left him with a serious traumatic brain injury, which devastated our family, as you can imagine. And we sort of put one foot in front of the other and helped him heal and move forward. What I found, writing helped me just process a lot of feelings of anger at the drunk driver who caused all this misery in our family and upheaval. But also there was an aloneness to that experience for me, in that I was the mother of the child who didn't die, the child who survived.
And so there was, I didn't know the term for it at the time, but an ambiguous loss or a disenfranchised grief. And so when I would talk to even family and friends about Neil's second surgery for his leg, for example, or school meeting to talk about learning accommodations, for example, I would get this look, or sometimes people would even say, but he's alive. Like, I should be grateful.
And so I stopped talking about it and only shared my feelings with the page, quite honestly. So it was also empowering, eventually. It irritated me at the time when people would say things happen for a reason. You'll find the reason. And maybe it's semantics and maybe we're saying the same thing, because I do think we create our own meaning. We make meaning. We have to find and search for meaning. And eventually I did.
Eventually, I went beyond writing in a journal to writing for disabilities journal about what can sometimes be an invisible disability, a brain injury. I wrote for medical journals, “JAMA,” looking at the question of, if I as a physician, have experienced something that can help you as a patient, do I share that? How do I share that? How can it be helpful? Am I crossing some boundary?
So I was able to make meaning also by becoming an ambassador for the Brain Injury Association. So I talked to college students and high school students, and I spoke at neuropsychiatric symposia. This was another level of profound epiphany for me, in that when I would finish speaking, people would invariably come up to me and share their stories, and they were touched by my story. And I in turn, was touched by theirs. And I just really experienced this deep connection through shared storytelling, which is sort of the basis of my book and Sandy's as well. Sandy makes that case quite eloquently in her book.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I want to hear Sandy's take on using writing specifically for grief, but I just stopped in my tracks when I was reading the beginning of your book, Carolyn, and it said, referring to this situation where people would say, but your son survived as if you didn't have a right to have the feelings that you were feeling. You wrote, “But how many others? Grief was buried because the loss was also invalidated for a whole host of reasons. How much pain was buried because the loss was stigmatized, trivialized, or unrecognized.” And I think we see that grief does not have to be from the death of somebody. It can be from the end of an experience, a relationship, the loss of a pet, the change in your health.
Sandy, you can probably talk about this much more eloquently than I can, but much of your writing instruction does include grief, yes?
Sandra Marinella
Absolutely. I came from teaching writing my entire life and finding narratives in storytelling profound in the lives of my students. And I was in a very stressful college situation when I got cancer. And suddenly I found myself writing to heal myself, writing because I wanted to live. It was so successful, and that just transformed me. That made me say, wait a minute, I need to be taking not just writing narrative, but writing narrative to heal into other lives, which is how I came to know you, Denise Millstine.
And I'm so grateful for that, because in working with my own cancer, I was immediately connected through Mayo Clinic, through the Phoenix Hospital downtown, the Veterans Hospital, through Piper Cancer Center, through many resources here in Phoenix and eventually internationally. Many sources that wanted to bring, that could feel the pain of people writing. And there was all kinds of grief that came out in the stories that were shared in all the classes that I taught.
I mean, I can look at my own life now, look at my journals, and see where I had to process the death of a friend to suicide and the loss of a friend to leukemia. And now I'm working with all these writers in my classes who have lost children, which I think is one of the most painful griefs possible. It's overwhelming how this work is wrapped in grief, that there's so much grief in our lives, in our human condition, and there is no question that we can hold this pain through the kind of writing that Carolyn has covered in her book. We can hold it in and we can even transform it into something beautiful. So I think both of us are trying to point out in our work.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Indeed, and journey through it. And I love how each chapter of your book, Carolyn, really offers a step for thinking further about experiences, and it's very logical progression. But before we get to talking about some of the steps, Carolyn, I wonder if you'll talk about a line in the book because we're thinking about restorative writing, which is really this processing writing, this writing where your healing, your story is and thinking differently, reframing your stories. But you say that we doctors traffic in narrative. And I think it is true that patients tell us their stories, and we hear them as stories and try to help heal from there. Will you just comment on that?
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Yes. What I meant by trafficking stories is that we listen to stories from our patients all day long. We absorb those stories of suffering and trauma and loss and grief. And so there is a lot of secondary trauma and vicarious loss that we experience. And we write stories. We transcribe the stories as we understand them in the medical notes, we write a consultation note and communicate with our colleagues in story.
And I teach narrative medicine, as you mentioned, as a writer in residence and what Rita Charon teaches us, who founded the program, coined the term, is that we doctors need to develop a porousness so that we can absorb these stories. And I agree with that. I think we need to understand these stories in order to understand where the patient’s coming from, make the right diagnosis, come up with the right treatment plan.
I think that the issue is that too many of us continue to carry the suffering that we've absorbed, that nobody's ever told us, it doesn't belong to you. It's okay to set it down. And I think that's where reflective writing can be really helpful. It can be that filter. We can let go of the suffering that doesn't belong to us, while still holding on to the meaning of that very dear, patient-doctor relationship.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I just came from a lecture literally this morning where a woman is a researcher talking about resilience strategies, not writing per se, but she used the analogy of having a raincoat in the rain. That learning tools for building resilience is like wearing your raincoat in the rain, as opposed to going out in a sweater that gets heavy and wet and weighed down. You're still going into the rain, you're still experiencing it, but you've got this sort of layer of tools to help you to not then kind of own that and carry it with you. So what you were just saying just reminded me so much of that.
Sandy, you made a mention about Carolyn's book, that it does include a lot of science in terms, accessible science, but science in terms of how this writing has been shown to be effective. And she refers several times to the work of (James) Pennebaker, who studied measurable health impacts for expressive writings. And you include and are inspired by his work for your book and your work. Will you talk about some of his most important discoveries?
Sandra Marinella
I would be honored too. Jamie Pennebaker is a friend of mine, and I think one of the most amazing people to walk this planet. I truly mean that. His curiosity and his drive to understand words and how they impact us and how they change our lives is really amazing. I think his work is fundamental to the work that both Carolyn and I are doing, and it is fundamental because he realized exactly what Carolyn was just talking about, that everybody was going to a counselor, a therapist, because they had a story that was a secret that they could no longer hold. And he thought, this is odd. It seems like there would be a simpler way than spending years in therapy to get a stuck story out.
And so he began to do the research of having students write in journals. He would have them come three or four times to the basement in the psychology building where he worked, the only place he could get. They'd have to come at night, and he would give them the prompt of writing about a difficult time in your life and write about your feelings and your thoughts, what happened.
And he would do this for three or four days, and he found out and was able to publish in 1986 with (Sandra Klihr) Beall, a study that showed that, wow, this makes a huge difference when people can release and tell their story.
And so we now have in our work and Carolyn's work and my work, and anybody who's listening to this podcast can use this simple little paradigm to make their life so much better if they have a problem. You just sit down and write about the problem, and the first time you write about it, you're trying to just tell the truth of it. And then as it evolves, if it's successful, if it's going to lead to better health, you probably will start looking at it from other perspectives and develop some insights about it. And then you will eventually end by constructing a story and learning to understand something from that story.
And that is really profound if you think about it in terms of not just our work here, but in terms of all therapy, in terms of all mental health and physical health. because he taught us, not only can you use this writing, and I’ll let you look up the there's 400 solid studies. But really, Jamie says there's more like 1000 in studies internationally that have been done.This writing that we're talking about is not a panacea. You can't do it when you're we're not ready. It does not have all the answers, but statistically it works. A lot of amazing results there come out of it.
But I think important to remember that it's not simply getting rid of the story, the release of the story, or telling the story, but it is indeed, and this is what has profoundly affected the work I'm doing in the book that I'm writing now. We need to construct in our own minds a story, a complete story, it helps us understand what happened to us and then helps us be able to live with that story in a new way. Be able to accept it and find what we learned and how we can grow. Sorry I get so excited about Jamie Pennebaker.
Dr. Denise Millstine
No need to apologize. I think, you know, you're talking to believers in how important this process is. But, Carolyn, if we have listeners who are thinking, oh, this sounds amazing, I'm going to jump right in and start doing this process. Let's be cautious for a minute and just think, are there any risks in writing for healing? Are there any warnings you would set out for people.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
So I think what you're probably referring to is something that James Pennebaker discovered for himself when he was writing and going through some personal issues at UT Austin, which is that you can feel worse before you feel better with this modality. And I think, as we know from trauma narratives, where psychologists will use writing with people going through loss, grief, trauma, and PTSD symptoms, where they'll describe their situation and then repeat it over time and the impact of it decreases as the trauma narrative goes on.
So one of the ways that it works is, as Sandra was describing, is just the expression, just the catharsis. But then it goes deeper than that. With writing, we can own the narrative, as Sandy also said, we can shape it. We can build it, we can construct it, we can look back on it. We can see how far we've come. We can get perspective where we used to be, where we are now, which is really super helpful.
So the difference between rumination, just telling ourselves these stories over and over again versus reflective writing is with rumination, you're spinning your wheels, you're saying the story, but you're not getting anywhere. Whereas with reflective writing, we ask the questions; what is there for me to learn here? What wisdom can I glean from this event, this conversation, this situation that I'm going through? Is there beauty here that I can find? Can I even find joy?
So that's sort of the different the next level, so to speak, of really examining what we've created and, and finding the, the deeper meaning, the inner strengths, maybe even that we have, that we can then build upon our own personal, practical wisdom that can come from this writing.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Hey listeners, we hope you're enjoying this episode of “Read. Talk. Grow.” If you find our discussions helpful and insightful, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate “Read. Talk. Grow.” on your preferred podcast platform and don't forget to tell your friends to listen. Your support will help us reach more readers and those eager to learn about health through books. As always, feel free to drop us a line at readtalkgrow@mayo.edu with suggestions for books, topics or any comments. Thanks for listening.
That's really so beautifully said. One thing that I'll suggest to people who are approaching this type of work who are looking at a traumatic experience, is that it can be very important to know who your support system is and to have, perhaps a mental health professional or a spiritual home that you know, you can turn to. If in cracking that open, it starts to feel very heavy and dark as you're continuing to get to that point where hopefully the healing has occurred. So I'll just offer that to, listeners who might be considering and are feeling a little uncertain about what might happen initially with, especially revisiting something that they've maybe tried to or been forced to kind of package away.
Sandy, there is a chapter in the book about bearing witness, which is I think, something you truly have done throughout your career, in your current writing workshops and also as a high school teacher. What does that mean to you to bear witness and why is it so important?
Sandra Marinella
We want to be heard. I think each of us matters, and I think we each have a story. And from time to time we have stories that are pretty unbearable and pretty hard to carry. And I look back through the years, I found my meaning and my purpose in life in doing exactly what you're talking about, about being there to help people open their story, to share their story, learn how to hold their story, and hopefully rewrite, reauthor, reframe and carry a better story forward.
And as Carolyn was talking, I was thinking of so many people who have walked through my lives who have carried all their lives, some painful, painful story. And my story with Barbara is probably the most profound. And it was she was coming to the Veterans Hospital and she was constantly being mean to everybody. It took a while in her writing for her to begin to come out in her poetry and to begin to tell her truth, but she did slowly reveal to us that 20 or 30 years earlier, she had been raped, and the fact that she could, in slow increments over the weeks and months, share that story, release it and then began to see that it wasn't her. This story was not her. This was a trauma that she had experienced, but she was a different human being who made different choices about how she would now live her life. And she's done exactly that. She's become a playwright and an artist. She's gone back and got an MFA. She's just become a delightful person to know who no longer needs my trauma writing group.
But I think that is so critical. When you can hear and hold another person's, it can be a small story. We do that with our friends daily, right? They call us, they're upset about something. And if you can just told this story, instead of saying, I busy, I can't do it now. Carolyn has a good example of that in your book with a doctor who a patient calls and he says, call ER. And I am thinking, oh, you just lost the right to a witness in holding help. That story. Thank you for asking me that question, because it's so critical that we give that gift to each other, Denise.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I think the reason it impacted me is as a primary care physician I feel like very much in practice, what I'm often doing is bearing witness, and I see a very incredible healing aspect to that. And this is also part of that porousness, Carolyn.
Carolyn, you referred to meaning making in several of the chapters or exploration of your meaning through writing. Will you talk about that and why that's an important aspect of this.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Right, as opposed to other ways that we can relieve stress or blow off steam. Right? We can dance or move or run or meditate. I mean, there are many different modalities that we can use, but what's been studied and what has been found to be most effective is that the modality that uses language, it's the language-based modality that sets it apart in terms of the effect of outcome.
And for the reasons that we talk about this empowerment, there's agency, there's owning your story. Joan Didion famously said, I write entirely to know what I'm thinking, and I don't think she meant she doesn't know what she thinks until she writes. But I think she meant that we don't always know the impact of what has happened to us until we begin to write.
And I'm sure Sandy has had this experience, too, where I'll be doing a workshop and one of the participants will share something they've written and then just say, wow, I never knew I felt that way before. I never knew I was carrying that grief, that anger, whatever the emotion is. But there's just a recognition of the self in some of this work that's really amazing to witness.
Dr. Denise Millstine
In that light bulb moment where you see those two things as being connected but never having pulled those stories together or pulled them to how you're currently behaving, for example. So Sandy, Carolyn's alluding to sharing writing when she's leading a workshop, and she also makes the point in the book that writing is generally a solitary effort. We think of sitting down with our pen to paper or our fingers to keyboard, and that's something that you often are doing on your own. But that writing in community is also really important. Where are places where people find themselves writing in community, and why does that matter?
Sandra Marinella
Well, I want to start with why it matters, because it's critical. I think we need relationship. We need people. I mean, we know that there is study after study. I think the Harvard Study of Adult Development says the most important thing in life longevity is our relationships, our community, and how we build that and how important it is to us.
So I'm thinking in writing, which already is solitary or can be solitary, we especially need it. We need to reach out to each other. And you can usually find writing groups in libraries. We had a group at Mayo Clinic. Denise hosted me there for several years. I do groups when I'm not writing a book, I do groups. There's a might write of those groups, I think online now from other writers, and I'm proud to see what's happening.
And sometimes I think I want to be sure that it's based on a lot of this work that, Carolyn has spent her time doing, so that we are giving to people what is the best healing in transformational steps possible when they're taking themselves to the page. Because it can be very solitary and very problematic for those that don't like to be alone. But it doesn't have to be. We have many resources.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Thank you for that. I think, yeah, there are lots of formats where people can share writing in community, whether that's a formal workshop or a class or joining a writing group, getting together with friends, people that are trusted.
Sandra Marinella
Can I ask you a question about that? Just to follow up, I'm wondering because we have this group at Mayo and I'm wondering if you see, this is something we were hoping, so hoping that this writing to heal would be integrated into hospitals and all kinds of hospital programs in the future. Do you think, is it fair to ask that of you? What do you think this is growing and we're seeing any possibilities here?
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
I mean, I have been seeing more and more studies, programs, workshops. I mean, hopefully they will be, as you said, more integrated and not just for research purposes. You know, as I think the science just gets stronger and stronger.
I'd also say it also occurs to me that I would even make the case that when you are writing in solitude, you are also affecting the relationship. You are also connecting. And I'll tell you what I mean. There is a perspective taking when you're writing, some of the writing prompts that I give are, you know, to tell a story of an interaction with a patient or colleague and then tell the story from the patient or colleagues perspective.
So you're putting yourself in someone else's shoes, and I think you can validate, you can go back to that patient and say, you know, I was thinking about our conversation and this, this, this is what I thought you might be getting out of my at my off base here, am I right when I've done that myself, the first thing the patient will say is, wait, you were thinking about me, and I think they're just kind of blown away that you would clock out at 5:00 and keep thinking about them, but I don't know if you remember, it was sixth grade science class for me. But learning about that Heisman (Heisenberg) principle of uncertainty, that studying something changes to something, even when you're not doing anything to it, just by observing it.
And I think the same is true in my mind of relationships. If you're exploring a relationship, trying to find the meaning in it, find the beauty, find the joy, you won't see that person the same when you go back to that patient, that colleague. And so I think even if we are writing in solitude, in isolation, I think there still is an element of connecting and you're connecting with something larger than yourself. You're connecting with a community of writers. You're connecting with ideas, with art, with the world when you're writing about these things.
Sandra Marinella
Yeah, that is so beautiful, Carolyn. And I just want to add on to that, that I think we forget now that Zoom has magical properties, that we can actually turn the video on and see each other and see each other's eyes and reactions and respond. And as we were speaking, I got tears in my eyes because I was remembering a moment of community with cancer patients in a writing class where one bald-headed cancer patient was talking about how she was excited to learn new things, and another cancer patient flipped his mic on and goes, I need to be in this class with you. I need to learn from you. I need the engagement and the power of that moment sticks with me of how we can learn from each other when we write together. Thank you for that.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Both of those comments are so beautiful. There's a lot within the book that is about empathy and compassion, and I hope our listeners will go and look at those two aspects of the book. But one that I don't see talked about as much and I think is important, positive, impactful, Carolyn, is wonder. And you say that restorative writing can help you reconnect with wonder, sort of that childlike mind. Will you share with that is with the listeners.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
So we can experience wonder, experience awe with amazing trips, amazing settings, a beautiful sunset, walk in the forest. But we can also experience wonder and awe in our daily lives. And here's where I think that writing opens us to that. I was reading, I guess it's a year now. It feels like it was just a few months ago.
There was a study in JAMA open network and at the University of Michigan, Sanjay Saint and his group published a study on sacred moments, and they interviewed or surveyed 600 or more internists and asked whether and how frequently they experienced sacred moments with their patients. And they defined a sacred moment as a brief period of deep meaning with a patient. And over two thirds of those internists said, yes, I know what you're talking about. I've had those moments.
And I think, well, the follow up question to that was, did you share it with anybody? Did you share it with your colleagues? And that answer was overwhelmingly no. Which I think writing can help with that. We can name it and normalize it. And I think in naming it and normalizing it and talking about it and writing, we can open ourselves to recognizing a sacred moment, because it can be brief and small and practically nothing.
One of the most sacred moments in my practice was I started doing home visits for new parents, and I remember going to the home of the mother who had given birth, who was my patient. I was at her birth when she was born, and now she was giving birth, and there was just, you know, sitting in her kitchen having coffee. Nothing unusual about the newborn, she was perfect in every way. But that moment just stayed with both of us. Do you remember Dr. Bornstein, when you came to my kitchen and I made your coffee? And so I think we can make meaning out of the mundane when we're writing. We're just open to it. And I think that is really a key is cultivating that openness, which is something that writing can help with.
Dr. Denise Millstine
I really liked in the chapter too, how you compared it to curiosity, where you could be curious about something, which means you're seeking to know more versus wonder. And forgive me for paraphrasing, but is just appreciating the awe of the moment, not to seek to carry it forward or to answer something that you detect is unknown, but just to just to hold that that space and the meaning of it. So I thought that was really, really beautiful. Thank you for that.
Sandy, let's say we have listeners who are looking to get started. What do you think they should do? Should they go and buy eight journals and the most beautiful, expensive pens they can find? Should they just open a document on their computer? How do they get started?
Sandra Marinella
I think they listen to their inner voice. I think we all kind of follow a different little pattern. And I love Julia Cameron's book, but I don't journal every day. I had to find my own practice and I do have it, and I think everybody has to search and find what works for them. If you write early in the morning, like Carolyn does, and I do my practice is different than hers.
But I have to get up, get the dishes done, get out of the house because it's part of my tick not hung ritual. I will honor my dishes, and then I will go to my cafe and honor my words. Because if I stay at the house, I'm going to honor the house. And I don’t want to honor the house all day. I want to get some work done.
So you have to open yourself up. You have to quiet the critical voice that tells you you can't do it. You have to forget about grammar and your spelling. If you just want to do the reflective writing, you have to put your pen on a page or your fingers on the keyboard.
And the research that I received from Pennebaker, I think it was Pennebaker said that, you know, keyboard or journal, either one is okay. Your keyboard can be your journal, you have to find your pattern, and you have to find your practice and you have to adhere to it. You have to follow it, you have to make it sort of a sacred thing.
And I very much appreciated, Carolyn, that about your book, that you make it seem like something we will do. We will do this. We will try this, we will try this, and we'll keep doing these different things, because everyone out there should be able to find several ways to tap into their words, from all of the wonderful guidance that you give.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
So you also mention something that about no grammar. And I think that's important because I get so often and you probably do too. I'm not a writer. I'm not a writer. I can't do that. And, you know, when I do workshops, I try to level the playing field right away and look none of us are Shakespeare here, that's not the point. And the and that there are no wrong answers.
There's no right answer. What's right for you one day might be wrong for you. The next step, what's right for you, might be wrong for me. So. So it's totally individual. And in that way, I think a reflective writing practice is inherently self compassionate. And that's something we don't give ourselves very often. We don't give ourselves so much grace. We hold ourselves to an exacting standard that doesn't have to be there and a reflective writing kind of levels that playing field for us.
Sandra Marinella
I think that is said beautifully. I think we have this critical voice that I have heard in my writer’s work hour, and one of my favorite prompts has always been write a compassionate letter to yourself from your wise self, and tell me what beauty you find in your present self or in something you did. I vary it all the time, but I mean just to acknowledge your okay, you can hold this, you can hold this stuff.
Thank you, Carolyn for what you've done for us.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine
Yeah, thank you both so much. There's so much wisdom in those final words, and I hope that our listeners feel inspired to look at restorative writing and to look at writing to heal and to see if this is a tool they could add to their toolbox or bring back out of their toolbox and engage with to heal from any trauma, to approach any grief. And if they are a health care professional facing burnout, to look at Carolyn's book, to truly take the pathway to see if they can turn the tides on that.
It's been truly my pleasure to talk to the two of you. We've been talking about “A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals” by Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein and “The Story You Need to Tell: Writing to Heal from Trauma, Illness, or Loss” by Sandra Marinella
Thank you both.
Sandra Marinella
Thank you.
Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein
Thank you.
Dr. Denise Millstine
“Read. Talk. Grow.”is a product of the Women's Health Center at Mayo Clinic. This episode was made possible by the generous support of Ken Stevens. Our producer is Lisa Speckhard Pasque and our recording engineer is Rick Andresen.
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