One of the most overlooked tools for dealing with painful emotions is to write in a journal. When I recommend this tool to my clients they have numerous reactions. “I don’t write well.” “I can’t spell” “I don’t know what to write about.” Writing is an essential skill, but for many people, it has been ruined because of experiences in the educational setting.
Writing in a journal does not mean writing an essay with perfect punctuation and grammar. It means writing down feelings, thoughts, and emotions that we can’t really share with other people. In this way, the journal becomes a best friend. The journal is always there. You can write in the middle of the night or during the day. If you are afraid of someone else reading your journal, it can be locked up in a drawer. The other option is to burn what you write.
What most people don’t understand about emotions is that the uncomfortable ones can infect our mind. These emotions sit in our psyche. We ruminate over them. As we stew and fret over how we feel the emotion increases and gets bigger. Pretty soon our mind is overcome with all of this emotion.
Imagine your body as a giant container with a lid. Your emotion is liquid in the container. It circles around the container. The more we think about the feeling the more energy is created. The emotion spins and spins in our mind. In order to receive relief from the emotion, it needs a way out.
The emotion can be released from the body through writing. Once you start the words will flow out of you onto the page. The more you write the better you will feel.
To help my clients start a journal I have created an Instagram where I post daily prompts for writing. I have found the act of thinking about the prompts and what I want to write about that day have been beneficial. It has kept me focused on using writing as a tool to achieve better focus and consistency. It has provided a creative outlet that I didn’t realize I needed until I created the Instagram.
Come join me over on Instagram and journal with me to a better healthier you.
Hi, I am new to the site and was pondering through others and what you wrote resonated with me. I myself, started to write out my feeling at a very young age. Mostly, I would do it when confused or in some sort of pain and it helped. To this day I write teaching myself and always learning how to connect through words. I self published my first book to put to a test to see if I could write for other and it worked. That tale is a reflection of all my emotions that I dealt with wrapped up into a novel and sold out of my trunk and get this, I created fiction character’s to carry my weight. I totally agree that writing a journal is the ultimate med at least it is for me.
Hi Lexi51, Thanks for the comment. That’s fantastic you found a way to resolve the pain by creating your fiction character.
Thank you so much for reading. Keep tuning in there’s more.