These roots that bind us: using writing to process grief and reconstruct the self in chronic illness.

Chronic illness diagnoses frequently cause the shattering of personal assumptions about the self and the world, resulting in an experience of alienation and fragmentation of identity. Multiple studies on the effects of expressive writing have demonstrated physical, emotional, and psychological health benefits, yet little is known about how it might offer benefit in response to a chronic illness diagnosis. Combining the transformation-through-writing model with the dual process model for non-death loss and grief, I take an autoethnographic approach to explore how creative writing about Fibromyalgia (FM) allowed me to progress from a first story/loss orientation to a second story/restoration orientation as part of a dialogical process of self-reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]