“Creative imagination…can exercise a healing function. By creating a new unity in a poem or other work of art, the artist is attempting to restore a lost unity or to find a new unity within the inner world of the psyche, as well as producing work which has a real existence in the external world.”
—Anthony Storr, from Solitude: A Return to the Self

Write first without processing to reflect on what you are writing, on whether it sounds good, whether it is right, the way it ought to be said. Without reflection, your truest concerns should come to the surface in a spontaneous, unpremeditated way. Then you can reflect and, in reflecting, you may be able to make some sense of what came to the surface. You may be able to sense some truth that had eluded you before.

The therapeutic aspect here, what is healing, is that you are not writing for anyone else, to get a good grade, to receive praise for what you have done. Who you are is not dependent on what you write when you write the truth of who you are. Then neither the doing nor the being is dependent on the other. They go hand in hand; you are not at odds. There is a strong sense of congruency. You are in alignment with yourself.