HER WORLD

Some years ago, when my marriage ended and I was feeling lost, my parents gave me the money to take a trip to Europe. At the time, there were lots of things I needed (such as a therapist), but the check was to be used only for travel, because my parents saw it as a way to help me find myself. So I roamed around Italy and France for a month, stopping in Paris, where I’d honeymooned, visiting a friend in the Pyrenees and standing dramatically atop a cliff on the Ligurian coast, trying to decide whether to jump. There were no epiphanies, though by the time I got home, rocky precipices had lost their appeal. The pain was still there, but somehow while I was away I’d turned a page in my life.

I know other women--divorced, widowed, those displaced from jobs or suffering from clinical depression (which affects about 6.7 million women in the U.S., according to the National Institute of Mental Health)--who have found reason to carry on and the will to face their problems by traveling. For them, getting away isn’t just a matter of avoidance. It’s a kind of therapy. Debra Borys, a Westwood clinical psychologist, says that travel can produce deep anxiety for the psychologically vulnerable. But for the fundamentally healthy, it can have positive effects, fostering a sense of accomplishment, a better understanding of who you are and a deeper appreciation for what you have (even if, like me, when you embark, you feel that you have nothing).

The reasons for this are manifold. Psychologists such as Aaron Beck, author of “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” (Avon, $6.99), have found that clinical depression generally goes hand in hand with a pattern of negative thinking caused by an inaccurate perception of reality. “As you begin to think more objectively,” Beck says in his book, “you will begin to feel better.”

Nothing makes you more objective than travel. It shakes you up, occasionally proving that what you thought was black--for instance, the color of mourning--is white in another culture, such as India. Philadelphia psychologist Matti Gershenfeld recalls how shocked she felt when, in New Zealand, she saw birds that don’t fly. “We always think that what we know is a given,” she says. “Do birds fly? Of course. But not in New Zealand.” And if birds don’t fly Down Under, maybe what you think about yourself isn’t true either. Maybe you’re not a hopeless loser who ought to jump off a cliff.

Another thing about that cliff I was looking over in Italy’s Cinque Terre is that the view of the Ligurian Sea was breathtaking. I had a swimsuit under my clothes, so I could have done a bit of sunbathing. But I had to get moving because I needed to catch a train to Florence. I also wanted to mail some postcards and buy provisions for the trip. There’s a lot to do when you’re on the road--in fact, so much that you don’t have spare time to ruminate on the problems you left at home. “Taking a trip is like existing in a different stratosphere,” says my friend Penny Kaganoff, a travel addict who chose this quote from American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay for her college yearbook:

My heart is warm with the friends I make,

And better friends I’ll not be knowing:

But there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

No matter where it’s going.

On a deeper level, travel lets you reinvent yourself, particularly when you strike off alone. “There’s so much we never discover if we stay close to home,” says psychotherapist Harriet Lerner, author of “The Dance of Anger” (Harper Collins, $14). “The self is never ‘finished’ or ‘set,’ and new situations are always redefining who we are. Sometimes we only learn what is true, or real, or possible, or ‘still there’ by traveling to new places.” Getting away can be especially beneficial for women, who tend to see themselves largely through the roles they play in familial and personal relationships, according to studies by developmental psychologists such as Carol Gilligan.

This is partly what motivated Martha Lindt and Carol Rivendell to found Wild Women Adventures, a tour company for women based in Northern California. Rivendell, who is also a psychotherapist, believes that when women travel with other women, leaving familiar roles behind, they are suddenly free to be whoever they feel like being. “When there’s new music to dance to,” Rivendell says, “you immediately start doing new steps.”

Travel can result in a renewed sense of accomplishment and confidence when challenges are met, as Evelyn Hannon, editor of Journeywoman, an Internet magazine for women travelers, has found. Divorced at 42 after 24 years of marriage, she summoned the courage to don a backpack and set out on a five-month tour of Europe, though she’d never traveled alone much before. “I wanted to test myself,” she says. Challenges often bring out the best in us, but as Rivendell says, they don’t have to be painful: “I don’t believe you have to make yourself uncomfortable to find out what you’re made of.” Start small, she advises, with an easy trip. Then try something more ambitious.

That’s how I worked up to solo trips through China and India. Curiously, when I’m away I’m more plucky than I am at home, and my dreams are richer. More importantly, the trips themselves have changed me. The month I spent in India last year was so unsettling that it motivated me to turn my life around by moving from the East to the West Coast. And in a way, that post-divorce trip eight years ago made me know I wanted to be a travel writer. So I’m with Rivendell when she says, “Travel is a growth hormone.” Of course, we’re biased. If you don’t believe us, try it.

Wild Women Adventures is at 152 Bloomfield Road, Sebastopol, CA 95472; telephone (800) 992- 1322, Internet https://www.wildwomenadv.com.

Journeywoman magazine is at https://www.journeywoman.com.