Flourishing After Adversity
If you've experienced grief, illness, loss, or life-altering setbacks—and you're ready to reclaim your joy—this podcast is for you.
Hosted by Laura Mangum Broome, Resilience Coach and author of Flourishing After Adversity, this weekly show is your go-to resource for overcoming life’s toughest challenges with hope, courage, and clarity.
Each episode dives into real-life strategies for emotional healing, building resilience, managing mindset, navigating unexpected change, and rediscovering your strength after adversity.
Whether you're facing the aftermath of divorce, struggling to move forward after loss, or starting over later in life, you’ll find practical tools and encouragement to help you grow—not just go—through what you’ve been through.
If you're searching for inspiration, resilience coaching tips, or mental health support for difficult seasons, hit play and start flourishing after adversity. You've got this!
Flourishing After Adversity
S1:E22 How Expressive Writing Helps You Move Beyond Setbacks 10-Minutes a Day
S1:E22 How Expressive Writing Helps You Move Beyond Setbacks 10-Minutes a Day
In this episode of the Flourishing After Adversity Podcast, host Laura Mangum Broome explores the transformative effects of expressive writing for emotional healing. Learn how just 10 minutes a day of writing can help process emotional pain, integrate into Laura's iCope2Hope resilience framework, and start your own practice to clear the fog and strengthen your resilience. Featuring the story of Marianne—a woman who found purpose and clarity after an unexpected back surgery—and insights from Dr. James Pennebaker's research on the mental and physical benefits of writing, this episode provides actionable steps to face reality, discover hidden strengths, and envision new possibilities.
Laura also introduces a four-day expressive writing challenge and outlines the iCOPE 5-Step Problem Solving Method to guide listeners towards emotional clarity and practical resilience.
00:00 Introduction to Expressive Writing
01:10 Meet Maryanne: A Story of Transformation
01:55 The Science Behind Expressive Writing
02:37 Step-by-Step Resilience Framework
05:12 Common Traps and How to Avoid Them
05:52 The Four-Day Expressive Writing Challenge
06:48 Applying the iCOPE 5-Step Problem Solving Method
08:33 Conclusion and Recap
Free Resource: Reframe the Spiral: 5 Quick Coping Strategies to Shift Negative Thoughts and Reclaim Your Day https://www.icope2hope.com/reframe
iCope2Hope 3-Step Resilience Framework: https://bit.ly/FrameworkRoadmap
Website: iCope2Hope: From Hardship to Hope https://www.icope2hope.com
Move Beyond Adversity Blog: https://www.icope2hope.com/blog
Free Newsletter: Wednesday’s Resilient Recharge https://www.icope2hope.com/newsletter
Discover how 10 minutes of writing can shift chaos into calm. Today we're exploring something simple but powerful, how expressive writing can help you move through change. By the end of this episode, you'll understand why expressive writing helps heal emotional pain, how it connects to my iCope2Hope resilience framework and how to start your own short writing practice that clears the fog and strengthens your resilience. Welcome to the Flourishing After Adversity Podcast. I'm your host, Laura Mangum Broome, Resilience Coach and author of Flourishing After Adversity. If you've been knocked down by loss, illness, or unexpected change, you're in the right place. This is where we talk about how to rise again with honesty, grace, and a plan that works. Before we dive in, if you've been stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts, grab my free guide. Reframe the spiral, five quick coping strategies to shift negative thoughts and reclaim your day. You'll find the link in the show notes. let me tell you about Maryanne. After an unexpected back surgery, she couldn't recognize her own life. She'd gone from active and independent to still and uncertain friends, told her she'd be back to normal soon, but she wasn't sure what normal even meant anymore. Her counselor suggested something strange. Write about what you're feeling for 10 minutes a day. Not a gratitude list, just raw truth. By day three, something shifted. Maryanne wasn't just listing pain anymore. She was finding meaning in it. Writing didn't fix her body, but it started healing her spirit. Expressive writing isn't about grammar or journaling your day. It's about putting your truth on paper, the words you've been holding in. Dr. James Pennebaker, author of Opening Up by Writing It Down discovered that people who write about emotional experiences actually improve their mental and physical health because when you write, you stop suppressing, your brain starts connecting dots. It's like cleaning a cluttered closet, pulling out memories, deciding what to keep, what to learn from, and what to release. That's why it aligns so well with my iCope2Hope 3-Step Resilience Framework. Let's look at how expressive writing supports each step. Step one, develop a growth mindset. When life changes, suddenly our first instinct is to resist. We want our old life back. We want certainty. Writing helps you face reality with honesty, not to agree with what happened, but to tell the truth about it. you might start with, since the diagnosis, I feel, and finish the sentence. The hardest part about this season is, and finish the sentence, research shows naming emotions, helps calm the brain. That's what I call radical acceptance. The first step towards resilience. Before you can move forward, you have to face what is. When you write, you give your heart room to exhale. Step two, discover your superpowers. Once you write through the pain, something new appears. Signs of strength. Moments when you kept going, times you showed courage, humor, or faith you didn't know you had. as Dr. Penebaker found people's language shifts from emotional words, like sad and angry to reasoning words like, understand and realize. That's your brain healing. Moving from chaos to clarity. Try this prompt. When I look back, I see I survive because I, and finished the sentence. The strength that helped me do that was, and finish the sentence. every strength you name becomes a superpower you can use. Again, writing helps you see the resilience that was already there. Step three, think outside the box. As you keep writing, you'll notice your focus shifting from what happened to what's next. Your words start carrying insight and curiosity. If this challenge is preparing me for something new, what might that be? What could this experience make possible? That's when resilience turns into growth for Maryanne writing, led her to mentor others. Recovering from surgery, what felt like loss became purpose. And that's the goal, not going back to who you were, but becoming someone stronger and more whole. When life gets hard, most of us fall into three traps. The first one is avoiding emotion by staying busy or pretending we're fine. The second one is endless venting, talking without reflection, reliving pain instead of releasing it. And the third is toxic positivity. Skipping straight to it's fine before facing the truth. Expressive writing offers a healthy middle ground, private, honest, unstructured. It lets you feel without falling apart and think without overthinking. I want to share the four day expressive writing challenge with you. You don't need to be a writer, you just need to be honest. Here's a simple way to begin on the first day, write what happened, focus on emotion, not perfection. On day two, write again. Explore what you feel underneath on day three, look for meaning. What have you learned? Where did strength show up? And on day four, shift forward, what would healing look like? What's one small step toward peace after four days? Reread your words. Notice what's changed. Are your thoughts calmer? More hopeful. That's your mind reorganizing your story. That's resilience at work. Once you've written, apply the iCOPE 5-Step Problem Solving Method, step one. Identify what's in your control. Step two, control your response, not the circumstance. Step three, decide the most likely outcome you want that's in between the best and the worst outcomes. Step four, make an action plan with small achievable steps for this week and step five. Evaluate what worked and what still needs attention. Writing clears emotional space, so these steps feel doable. It's the groundwork that makes action possible. Maryanne discovered that writing gave back her voice. It didn't erase her scars, but it reminded her she still had power. That's the quiet miracle of expressive writing. You don't need to be brave all at once. You just need to be honest long enough to hear what strength sounds like. Resilience isn't about denying pain. It's about facing it and still believing in your future. Every time you write your story, you take back authorship of your life. You can't control every storm, but you can choose what to build after it. Writing helps you design that blueprint one sentence at a time. So start with only 10 minutes today. Find a quiet corner, open your notebook and let your truth speak. You might be surprised by what hope sounds like in your own handwriting. Let's do a quick recap. Writing helps you process emotion instead of suppressing it. It strengthens every step of the iCOPE Framework: acceptance, confidence, and creativity. The four day challenge is a simple way to begin 10 minutes a day. Pair your reflections with small, intentional action. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to start. If you want help calming your thoughts during hard moments, download my free guide. Reframe the spiral, five quick coping strategies to shift negative thoughts and reclaim your day. You'll find the link in the show notes. That's it for today's episode of Flourishing After Adversity. If this message encourage you, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps others find the show and hope they need. Better yet, please share this episode with three people in need of hope. Until next time, remember, adversity can make you bitter or better. Choose better. You've got this.