Psy-Splash

Originally, I had a sound plan for finding therapeutic blogs to study for my dissertation. Using a ping site, I would read, say, every fifth blog to see if it was a journal style blog suitable for my study. However, since I am now looking specifically for blogs being used for self-therapy (or for confessional, coping, or other therapeutic purposes), using this process will take much, much longer. Just to get an idea for how difficult it may be to track down blogs being used for this function, I did a few searches on ixQuick and Xanga to see what I could find. It didn’t take much searching to find a few by using the keywords “trauma survivor” “cancer survivor” “molestation survivor” “confession blog”. I skimmed the blogs, and (aside from the one confession blog that I found, which had a lot of juicy gossip-type details) the material was pretty superficial. Still, it would work for my study. There was an abundance of blogs written about surviving cancer, and I was considering using only blogs about this topic when the thought hit me: what about the bloggers who didn’t survive cancer. So I did a search for blogs written by people with terminal illness. I read one of them and after only a post and a half I wanted to cry. For most of this study, I have been taking a methodical, technical approach to this topic. I was enjoying the literature that informs one of how to literally break healing down to science. I’ve had my methodology loosely planned out for years now. What I wasn’t prepared for was the human aspect of what I have been working on: I had forgotten about the people who are suffering. Intellectualization is an easy way to distance oneself from emotions. And now, as I begin to analyze real therapeutic blogs, I need to prepare myself to reconnect with my goal for doing this: people. People and their pain. And hopefully, how I can help them with it.