Conclusion

At this point you have completed the past authoring or autobiography exercise.

People are much healthier and more hopeful and less depressed and more productive if they have truly derived the most relevant information from their past experiences. You can tell if this has happened (1) if there are no longer past memories that haunt and bother you, or that make you feel resentful (2) if your story has been written in a manner that would allow you to tell it to another person so that they could understand it.

Some of the effects of such writing seem to take a while to fully manifest themselves. Often people feel worse, not better, in the aftermath of such detailed consideration of the past. The positive benefits seem to start occurring about two weeks after the exercises have been completed.

If you have found this exercise helpful, you might consider proceeding to the present and future authoring sections. The present authoring exercise helps you analyze your personality faults or virtues, according to standard personality models. The future authoring exercise will help you clarify your values, stabilize your identity, identify your goals, and formulate implementable plans, over a three to five year time horizon.