Journal about it in the third person

Write through a hard experience narrating yourself by name to combine distancing with expressive writing.

Why it works

Expressive writing helps by organizing a chaotic experience into a coherent narrative. Writing in the third person adds the distancing layer: you describe what "they" went through and why, which keeps you in the reconstruing, sense-making mode rather than reliving the raw emotion sentence by sentence.

How to do it

1. Write for ten minutes about the event, referring to yourself by name throughout.
2. Focus on why things happened and what it means, not just what you felt.
3. Reread it the next day from the same observer stance to spot the pattern.

Evidence

Expressive writing has a substantial research base for modest improvements in well-being and stress processing, and self-distancing studies show third-person framing enhances adaptive reflection — combining them is a reasonable extension of both lines of work. (observational)

The specific combination of third-person framing plus expressive writing is an inference from two literatures rather than a single tested protocol.

Sources

• Pennebaker, expressive writing program of research; Kross & Ayduk, distanced self-reflection

Common mistake

Free-writing a blow-by-blow of the emotion in first person, which can deepen rumination instead of resolving it; the distance and the "why" focus are what make it work.