22% of women and 11% of men reported having had a traumatic sexual experience prior to 17.

And the people who endorsed it were more likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, high blood pressure, ulcers.

That started to be wondering why.

Sexual traumas were somewhat unique in that they were the kind of trauma that people were most likely to keep secret.

James Pennebaker is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

The author of over 300 scientific articles and eight books, he has opened up groundbreaking research,

on expressive writing and its profound impact

on everything from anxiety and depression to chronic pain, disease, inflammation, grief, and well-being.

But having a trauma and then keeping it secret from others, and it didn't matter what the trauma was,

exacerbated the health risks to the person.

And this made me wonder if keeping a secret so bad for you, what if we brought people in the laboratory and had them write about it or talk about it?

Would that improve their physical health?

Just really excited to dive into the work that you've been doing.

I'd love to jump in on the expressive writing side and eventually work our way around in the conversation too.

Some of the more current, really just like examining of language and the tool. So let's start at the beginning.

If we take a step back in time, I'm so curious how you first become interested in the connection

between writing and well-being. I was never particularly interested in writing well-being early in my

career. In fact, I had bounced around in many areas,

and I went to graduate school because I was interested in essentially the mind-body problem

and how psychological factors can influence physical health. And I was actually writing a book on some of my early work on physical symptoms,

how we come to know, how we feel. And I thought, you know, it would be interesting to come up

with a questionnaire that could get a sense of what kind of people report physical symptoms.

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