"I go over it enough on my own"

You might say you don't need to tell anyone because you think about it plenty. You've turned it over. You've considered the angles. Thinking is processing, and you've done the processing.

Slepian's finding in chapter 5 is the answer, and it's uncomfortable. The going over, the mind returning to the secret on its own, wasn't processing. It was the thing that predicted lower wellbeing. People whose minds wandered to their secrets more often were worse off, not better, and they weren't worse off because they were concealing more. They were worse off because of the wandering itself. Going over it alone isn't the cure for carrying it. It's the form carrying it takes.

There's a reason for that, and it's the difference between one mind and two. When you go over the worry alone, you bring to it exactly what you brought yesterday. The same facts, the same fears, the same worst case. Nothing new can arrive, because the only source of new material is you, and you've already been consulted. The wander is a loop, and a loop doesn't resolve, it repeats.

What's known about processing suggests that getting it out of your head helps, and getting it in front of another person helps more. Joanne Frattaroli, in 2006, pooled a hundred and forty-six randomised studies of what researchers call experimental disclosure, mostly writing about a difficult experience for a few sessions, and found a small positive effect on health and wellbeing. Small. Earlier books in this series say so and I'll say it again. Writing helps a little. Lepore's study in the last chapter is the one that shows what talking adds. Talking alone into a recorder helped about as much as talking to a supportive person on intrusive thoughts. But it was the supportive person, in the researchers' account, whose validation mattered for how the stress was carried afterwards, and the dismissive listener took most of the benefit away. Another mind, responding well, does something a page can't.

So the going over you've done isn't wasted, exactly. It's just been round the same track a hundred times. The telling puts a second person on the track, and a second person brings a fact you didn't have, or a question you hadn't asked, or a plain "that sounds hard", and any of those ends the loop for a while, which is what processing is.