A general principle of mental health is that the less we are able to express, the more unwell we get. It's when we have to stifle our rage, sadness or fear that we start to develop secondary symptoms – sleeplessness, paranoia, bitterness, poor digestion – just as our spirits can lighten and our horizons expand, once we can find a way to lend outward form to our pains. However, the problem is often one of occasions. We may in theory be ready to say and feel all sorts of things, but our outward circumstances may be highly unconducive to free expression. Perhaps the person we'd really like to say something to is dead, or they may, just as problematically, be distracted, fragile or frightening. We then make the error of imagining that there can be no point in speaking and on this basis stifle our emotions to our increasing cost. But this is to miss out on an unexpected quirk of our psyches. What may matter most in many situations is not, as we might think, that the person we need to speak to is actually able to hear what we have to say, but rather that we have a proper, in-depth chance to say it anyway. There can be as much benefit in shouting our feelings to a deserted beach, a large pillow or an empty chair as there would in having a lengthy dialogue with an intimidating parent or an obtuse lover. The best technique in this tradition may be to write a letter that we never send, either because the person in question is no longer alive or because we just have no expectation that what we could write would remotely be understood. The discipline of writing a long letter has the effect of galvanising our hitherto confused and disparate emotions and forces our intelligence to lay out our story in a systematic and emotionally logical way. As we write, we turn what might have been an inchoate sob into something intelligible, plausible, compassion-inducing and moving. We go from I hate you so much or why why why to a full, leisurely recap of how we felt, why we suffered and what the legacy of our injury has been. We can be like a grown-up lawyer making a case in a courtroom of adults on behalf of a frightened or muddled child. We can take our absent reader into the details of a story that they refuse to see existed and may have done their best to silence. We are giving ourselves an opportunity to feel legitimate in our own eyes. We may realise that the real audience we needed all along was ourselves. We suffer unnecessarily when we think that the only form of catharsis is one that can unfold in the physical presence of a person who damaged us. Our freedom is fortunately far greater than this, because the real sceptic we need to win over and explain our full story to is chiefly and crucially always ourselves.心理健康的一個普遍原則是，我們越不善於表達，我們就越不健康。當我們不得不壓抑自己的憤怒、悲傷或恐懼時，我們就會開始出現繼發性症狀--失眠、多疑、苦悶、消化不良--而一旦我們能夠找到一種方法，將我們的痛苦以外顯的形式表現出來，我們的精神就會變得輕鬆，我們的視野就會變得開闊。然而，問題往往出在場合上。理論上，我們可能已經準備好說出和感受各種事情，但我們的外在環境可能非常不利於自由表達。也許我們真正想說的人已經死了，或者他們也可能心不在焉、脆弱或令人恐懼。於是，我們就會錯誤地認為說話沒有任何意義，並據此扼殺我們
