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Writing about upsetting experiences has been shown to be beneficial for people’s physical and psychological health. The disclosure of personal thoughts and feelings is, of course, a component of all psychotherapies. Psychotherapists have long assumed that the effectiveness of psychotherapy hinges on how the therapist responds to the patient’s disclosures. Freud thought that psychological dysfunction was caused by past traumatic events which the patient had repressed but which continued to shape the patient’s behavior. A therapist could alleviate a person’s symptoms by interpreting the origins (in past events and relationships) of the patient’s transference reactions toward the therapist. Rogers believed that for therapy to be effective, client disclosures must be met with therapist responses that reflect unconditional positive regard for the client. For Beck, the therapist helps the patient learn how to identify and empirically challenge the dysfunctional patterns of thinking that are revealed in the patient’s disclosures. In short, different schools of therapy have different conceptions of the kinds of responses that therapists should provide to their clients. Despite these differences, almost all therapies are effective. The expressive writing intervention is effective in the absence of a therapist or any other audience, which suggests that disclosure itself is therapeutic. The expressive writing technique is straightforward. People write about emotional upheavals in their lives three or four times over the space of about a week. The expressive writing method was first developed in the 1980s (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986) and since that time almost 200 published …