Lucy Smith

The Effect of Emotional-self Disclosure: on Mental and Physical Health Lucy Smith

For many,the effective and appropriate communication of emotions comes easily. Attachment bonds with our care-givers teach us how to acknowledge, identify, and talk about emotions, experiences and traumatic experiences. By using these skills we relieve stress by integrating thoughts with feelings, forming a narrative of our story, and lending structure to the experiences. By doing this we process our emotions and thus move it from explicit to implicit memory. In essence, we move on. What about those who lack sufficient attachment, who have not been taught how to identify emotions much less talk about them? Or those who block their emotions and traumatic experiences in the attempt to protect themselves? These people often experience their stress in the form of unexplained physiological ill-health and psychological distress. This book compares emotional self-disclosure in a group of people attending a mental health day hospital with a group from the general population in order to establish whether differences occur and what these may be. It also considers whether and how emotional disclosure is linked to physical and psychological ill-health within the day hospital attenders.