Angry Bards

I'm tired of being angry at my ex-boyfriend. My best friend suggested I write an email to him, saying everything I want to say, but send it to her instead. It seemed like a bad idea, delving into those feelings even more, but I did it anyway. Miraculously, I felt much better afterward. A fluke?

--Puzzled

I get it: You were all, "Write a letter he'll never read? Um, I wasn't dating Santa." However, psychologist James Pennebaker finds that writing about upsetting events in our lives can act as a sort of mental crime scene cleanup -- in a way that simply thinking about these events or venting emotions does not. Pennebaker theorizes that the process of organizing your thoughts to write them down coherently leads you to reinterpret and make sense out of what happened, thus diminishing the power of the events to keep upsetting you. Accordingly, Pennebaker's research suggests you could speed your healing by using what I'd call "explainer" words, such as "because" or "caused" -- as well as insight words (like "understand" and "realize"). The research also suggests it may help to do this writing thing more than once -- even repeatedly. So you might want to keep hammering out those emails about him as long as you continue to have, um, strong feelings about him -- like, say, the recurring idea that he should part his hair down the middle. Ideally with an ax.