Letters Home: How Writing Can Change Your Life

Vance, a psychotherapist, frequently ""assigns"" her patients the task of writing letters to parents who have emotionally, physically or sexually abused them; to spouses, lovers, siblings, in-laws or others who have hurt or betrayed them. She maintains that openly confrontational, emotionally candid letters--even by people who are not in therapy--can be a potent agent of change, enabling the letter-writer to work through suppressed feelings, to confront past wrongs, to revise self-destructive scripts or self-images learned in one's primal family. Although readers may question whether face-to-face encounters with significant others--or a phone call--might work just as well as a letter, Vance's straightforward, no-nonsense manual, packed with samples of her patients' emotionally charged letters, lends support to her claim that her epistolary approach can produce therapeutic results. In many instances, the letter recipient's evasive denials, or non-reply, forced the letter-writer to come to terms with the past and move on; in other, luckier cases, a brutally honest letter triggered a process of mending relationships. By looking over the shoulder of her correspondents to critique their letters, Vance tells prospective letter-writers how to spot psychobabble, how to avoid being restrained or too nice and how to decipher respondents' covert meanings. Her patients' letters form the core of this original self-help guide, which will give similarly inclined readers the courage to put pen to paper in an attempt to resolve long-standing conflicts. (Sept.)