About wellbeing-through-writing

Writing is the most accessible, affordable and widespread health and wellbeing resource available to our world.

Dr Stephanie Dale is a world leader in the wellbeing-through-writing sector.
A newspaper journalist by trade and training, in 2014 she drove to the Australian outback to share her media communications skills with individuals and grassroots organisations. Instead she founded The Write Road, an award-winning community building initiative through writing for isolated Australians enduring drought, flood and fire, and newly literate Indigenous adults.
Stephanie’s research delivered evidence that writing is a legitimate health practice, quite distinct from writing as an art form.
What is wellbeing-through-writing?
“An embodied languaging-through-writing process that enables people to locate, identify, release and transform troubling feelings – acknowledged, unconscious and subconscious – that are psycho/physiologically affecting their ways of being in the world, thus facilitating the changes necessary for human health, wellbeing, recovery and growth.”
Dr Stephanie Dale, adapted from Dale (2023) in Writing for Wellbeing: Research, Theory, Practice
Wellbeing writing is an overlooked resource in the health and wellbeing sector. Writing is also largely ignored in the arts/creativity-and-health sector. As a mental health professional in a remote corner of Australia said: “how do we explain to people this is not a writing workshop?”
Wellbeing-through-writing is a languaging process. It is more than ‘writing thoughts in a journal’. The embodied writing process developed by IDr Stephanie Dale is a process through which people will find not just expression, but self-aligned expression.
Find out more about Steph’s leading edge wellbeing writing process: languaging the feeling body.
About my logo …
The logo I now use is the foundational diagram of the wellbeing-through-writing model developed in my doctoral research. The logo represents the four primary stages of the embodied writing process, from the initiatory stage of activated longing (for self-aligned expression) to overcoming to claiming and, finally, home-ing. It is worth noting that throughout the process of guided embodied writing the first two of these stages are in play at all times. Once the final stage of home-ing has been reached, all four stages are simultaneously in play.
The triskelion at centre represents the embodied practice of the whole of the process. Further explanation of the model is available here (my research), here (training development through my research) and here (the original research paper).

The forerunner: The Write Road
In 2014, an Australian journalist in a dying industry, I drove west to rural and remote areas on the other side of the Great Dividing Range. My intention was to share valuable media skills with grassroots organisations, small businesses, and everyday people with something to say. I called the initiative The Write Road.
A local Rural Resilience Officer asked if I would create a journaling workshop. She said: “psychologists are always asking us to write things down, but we don’t know where to start.” The inaugural journaling workshop, accompanied by a ‘get started on a writing project’ workshop, was delivered in one of the most remote corners of the NSW. Men and women who did not identify as writers downed tools on farms and drove up to two hours through the dust for a writing workshop.
Said the resilience officer after the workshop: “people walked away two feet taller.”
Over the next ten years I drove more than 200,000 kms delivering wellbeing-through-writing programs (and occasionally media training) to more than 3000 rural and remote people, including people in recovery from drought, flood and wildfire, and newly literate Indigenous adults.
In 2020, there was one outstanding question: why? Why did people drive two hours through the dust and take an entire day away from their land for a writing workshop? And why did they leave observationally taller and brighter of spirit than when they walked in?
Curious about how of why writing had such a powerful impact on the health and wellbeing of people who did not identify as writers, I began work on a doctoral thesis exploring the relationship between wellbeing and writing. More information available here.











