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While nearly half of all marriages will end with divorce, pre-marital relationships, at least once in every person’s life, almost always end in break up. Every person who becomes involved in a relationship will eventually and inevitably experience the dissolution of the relationship.
Positive psychology can be used to mend broken hearts, and one study has shown that engaging in positive writing about the relationship immediately after the breakup occurs can help assuage the negative or damaging feelings experienced during breakup, demonstrating that the power of positive psychology can be more powerful than medication.
Writing as therapy is not a new concept, but it has most often been applied to other types of circumstances, such as sexual abuse and rape. However, the power of writing can be a very useful tool in overcoming heartache. The most extraordinary discovery revealed by the research was that negative writing, or writing about negative aspects of the relationship, did not positively impact the participants. It was positive writing and writing about positive aspects of the relationship that most contributed to the healing process.
The researchers, from Monmouth University in New Jersey, believe that the broader implications of positive writing will lead to better therapeutic use of the tool. More research, explains lead researcher Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr., “Might also examine if more specific writing instructions in the positive condition (e.g., focusing on perceived benefits or reinterpretation) can produce even more increases in positive emotions or in other positive outcomes such as personal growth.” Lewandowski believes that positive writing techniques could be used to assist people working through grief, divorce, and other negative experiences.
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I couldn’t agree more that writing can be so very healing in loss. One can also be encouraged to write down what they continue to be thankful for as gratitude is a powerful healer in itself.
Minor Tangent
Although the often quoted statistic of 50% of a marriages end in divorce is factually true but flawed since it is based on simple math of dividing the people who get married in any given year by those who divorce that year.
But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will.
But for college graduates, the divorce rate in the first 10 years of marriage has plummeted to just over 16 percent of those married between 1990 and 1994 while rates for those without a college degree are almost double that.