Exploring the Depths: The Transformative Power of Therapeutic Journaling
Oh, That’s Just Life.
Love hearing that, don’t you? The well-meaning statement that lets others off the hook. How many times have you had to endure people saying,
‘Life just happens right’, simply because they have no idea what else to say. Often ‘Life Happens’ is a substitute for ‘Sh*t Happens’. But Life Just Happens doesn’t mean you have to keep things bottled up.
So how do we take care of our mental health and stay balanced, despite this life of ours?
Developing a set of self-care tools for emotional balance, personal growth, and well-being seems to be crucial, now more than ever.
Journaling has long been recognised as a valuable tool for mental health, self-expression, reflection, and personal growth. There are numerous benefits to engaging in regular journaling, such as alleviating anxiety, stress, and emotional dysregulation. However, there are distinct differences between journaling for everyday self-expression and therapeutic journaling. Keep reading to delve into the world of therapeutic journaling and how it can help you harness emotional regulation, and body awareness and facilitate a gentle healing release.
Understanding Journaling for Self-Expression
Any form of journaling can have beneficial effects on emotional well-being and stress reduction to a degree. Having an outlet to self-express without a specific therapeutic agenda can still be an enjoyable and creative practice. Jotting down your thoughts, dreams, goals, and experiences is a great way to document your memories, explore your interests, or simply unwind after a long day. It can create moments of mindfulness and relaxation.
Not everyone is ready to delve into deep thoughts and emotions or feel the need to do so. The well-known Dear Diary is one such form of journaling without the explicit intent to engage in emotional regulation or healing. The Dear Diary method allows your journal to ‘bear witness’ to your life and thoughts and to some degree, your feelings. Offloading in your journal can lessen the tension within. And for some, this level of release is enough.
While this form of journaling can be enjoyable, therapeutic journaling goes beyond surface-level musings and taps into your emotional core.
The Power of Therapeutic Journaling
Therapeutic journaling is a focused and intentional practice that helps navigate and process emotions on a deep level. It involves using writing, art, or collage as a tool for self-discovery, healing, and personal growth. By combining self-reflection, body awareness, and emotional exploration, therapeutic journaling offers a profound means of understanding ourselves on a deeper level and it’s this level of understanding that empowers us to face our past, heal, and make changes to achieve the life we want.
Digging Deep into Emotions
Delving into our warehouse of emotions can be a frightening process. The subconscious mind, full of all its complexities can often feel like a stranger. Accessing challenging thoughts and emotions means having tools to tap into the subconscious mind and bring to the surface that which we have spent a lifetime avoiding, or being unaware of.
The subconscious mind is like a sieve. It absorbs everything we experience on a sensory level, every thought we have and every feeling we experience, and stores them in its infinite warehouse. And just like a warehouse, we can gain access to its contents if we have the right keys.
Therapeutic journaling is one such key that can access the subconscious and go beyond the superficial.
It can explore the underlying emotions beneath our experiences, thought patterns and habitual defence mechanisms that show up in our relationships. Instead of merely describing events, therapeutic journaling examines the patterns, triggers and unresolved emotions by exploring the emotional landscape and making connections to past experiences and the impact these experiences may have had on us and on our relationships, including with ourselves.
Harnessing Body Awareness
A key element to self-awareness comes through being conscious and in tune with our bodies. Our bodies hold valuable clues about our emotions and experiences.
Therapeutic journaling prompts us to pay attention to bodily sensations and cues. For deep healing to take place, we have to be willing to delve into the body/mind/heart connections and explore the emotional aspects of our being. Healing takes more than the mind simply thinking itself so. For authentic healing to occur, allowing the body to speak is imperative. Incorporating body awareness into the journaling process, can open doors to self-awareness and for a profound healing to take place.
Let’s look at a typical scenario; You come home after spending time with a family member, feeling tired with a pounding headache. Your partner tries to engage with you, but you pull away and shut down because you don’t have any energy left to engage. You down a couple of paracetamols and head off to bed, oblivious to what your body is screaming at you. Sound familiar?
Instead of engaging in the default setting of retreat and shutdown, therapeutic journaling could help you break this pattern and move towards self-awareness and empowerment. Here you could attempt to journal by closing your eyes and tuning into your body. You may notice tension in your neck and stomach and your heart rate may be elevated. At first, simply pay attention and acknowledge what your body is feeling, then become curious.
Becoming curious is the gateway to exploring the subconscious. You might start journaling what your body is feeling and then delve into the ‘Whys’.
· Why do I always feel drained and tense when I go see this family member?
· Why do I hate going around there, but feel guilty if I don’t?
· What is it about my relationship with this family member that feels overwhelming?
· How has my upbringing impacted my present life?
· Why do I shut down when I’m confronted with their anger?
· Why can’t I stand up for myself?
· Why does their opinion of me still affect my sense of worth?
Keep asking why until you get down to the underlying emotion, which may often connect you to your childhood and upbringing. Once you have made a connection to the underlying emotions, therapeutic journaling can help facilitate a healing release.
Facilitating Release and Healing:
The Benefits of Therapeutic Journaling
Therapeutic journaling provides a safe and non-judgmental space to process deeper emotions. The act of writing enables us to externalise our emotions, freeing them from the confines of our bodies and mind. By releasing these emotions in a gentle and controlled manner, we create space for healing and self-acceptance to occur and thereby growth in emotional intelligence.
Having emotional intelligence not only means becoming aware of what lies beneath the surface but also being aware of where they originated from and having self-compassion and self-acceptance. The ultimate aim of healing is to develop self-acceptance, self-love, and the ability to shine despite everything you have been through.
Benefits May Include:
- Decreased anxiety
- Nervous system regulation
- Calmer mindset
- Improved relationships
- Improved self-esteem
- Self-awareness
- Emotional Intelligence
Think of therapeutic journaling as a valve release. Therapeutic journaling provides a safe outlet to release the emotional pressure within your body and mind, by slowly tapping into your emotional warehouse in a controlled manner.
Titration is key; being in control of the release is important for emotional and mental well-being. Dumping everything stored inside of your body and mind at once could lead to nervous system overload and shutdown.
If you feel overwhelmed at any point through your journaling practice, it’s imperative you seek the assistance of a professional therapist. Never suffer alone, therapeutic journaling is but one way of tapping into your emotional warehouse, but for some, having the guidance of a therapist is more suitable and a safer option, especially when dealing with trauma of any kind.
Examples of Therapeutic Journaling
To better understand the transformative nature of therapeutic journaling, let’s explore are few examples that you could try at home.
Emotional Inventory:
Take time to reflect on your day, you could start as though you are writing a ‘Dear Diary’ entry, but then pay attention to how your body is feeling when you recall the day's events. Write about the moments that evoke the strongest feelings for you, pay attention to where in your body you notice the tension; describe the sensations in your body, and then delve deeper into the reasons behind them.
This practice can help you to gain clarity, identify patterns, and better understand your emotional triggers.
Unsent Letters:
If you don’t feel like simply expressing your thoughts and feelings about the day, you could try writing a letter to someone, whether living or deceased, with whom you have unresolved or unfinished business. Let it rip; pour your heart out in this letter, express every thought, feeling, or wish you have about the person. Make it as fierce or as heart-wrenching as you need, don’t filter what wants to come up. Then rip the letter up into smaller and smaller pieces until you feel you have released the energy.
This exercise allows you to process and release emotions that may have been lingering within you, and that may have held you back from moving forward.
Dialogue With Your Inner Self:
Engage in a dialogue with your inner self by writing down a conversation between your present self and a younger version of yourself and then bring in the older wiser version of your future self.
Have the present version of yourself express a current issue you may be facing, then ask the younger version of yourself to connect it to any earlier issues or situations from the past. Once you have expressed past and present emotions, ask your wiser future self to guide you through the situation to get you to a place of peace and wisdom and offer goal-setting ideas- like a vision board, so you may move forward in confidence and self-compassion.
This technique offers a deeper connection with all aspects of yourself and promotes understanding, healing, and growth.
You could use numerous methods to develop self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and equanimity. The above are just a few you could delve into.
Over the past couple of decades, therapeutic journaling has been my go-to and has helped me through many a Dark Night of The Soul type of moments. Digging my way through cPTSD hasn’t been fun, but over the years I have developed a three-step therapeutic journaling process to add to my arsenal of self-care tools and that combined with initially a trauma-informed therapist, has helped me heal, grow, and develop a sense of self-worth and acceptance.
Over the years, I have consistently used therapeutic journaling for self-reflection and emotional regulation. I've trained my body and mind to signal me when I need a release. Typically, I sense the tension accumulating in my body and my thoughts scattering; that's my cue to schedule some one-on-one time with my journal.
Through consistent practice, you too can develop the ability to listen, understand, and recognise when it's time to process and let go of the emotions and tension within your body, heart, and mind. Let therapeutic journaling become a valuable tool for your mental and emotional health.
Final Thoughts
Therapeutic journaling offers a profound means of exploring our emotions, promoting self-awareness, and facilitating healing. By becoming curious, delving beneath the surface, and incorporating body awareness, we can bring buried emotions to the surface and process them in a gentle and transformative way. But remember to approach any form of self-exploration with an open, curious, and kind heart.
Happy Journaling😊
Starlah Rose
If you're interested in exploring the advantages of Therapeutic Journaling, click on the image above to learn about my unique 3-Step Process to Improved Emotional Wellbeing.
Contact
hello@starlahrose.com
© 2024 Starlah Rose
All Rights Reserved
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Contact
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© 2024 Starlah Rose
All Rights Reserved