I encounter a new client who has an existing practice of writing down their thoughts. When I work with clients, one of the first skills that I encourage clients to practice is journaling. I think it often gets a bad rep: “What’s the point in that?” “What will writing your problems down do about the problem itself?” The list goes on.
Why do I encourage journaling? Because it teaches us, as individuals, to commit and decide. We are committing to our imperfect selves when we write about ourselves, which includes our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. It’s a decision that “what I experienced is what I experienced”, that the experience we went through was how we perceived it to be. What do I mean by all of this? Imagine you went through a tough break-up, and there are lots of mixed emotions involved. Anger, sadness, guilt, grief, all of these can be emotions involved in this experience. It can be easy to lose track of everything that we are going through internally where we’re simultaneously trying to juggle all of it. I like to use the analogy “trying to grab smoke”. Just as you think you have an idea of what’s going on, another emotion comes flying in and changes the picture. Men are often left dwelling on Anger, however in most cases Anger is just the tip of the iceberg. It masks sadness, guilt, fear, and many other more vulnerable emotions. With this in mind, focusing only on Anger is really missing the heart of the issue itself, that life (and how we feel about it) can be very complicated.
When we journal, there is a conscious commitment to each and every one of these emotions, while also laying it out in a medium that allows us to have some perspective on what it was we went through. Think about it: how many times have you said something out loud that you had been thinking and then say, “Well that sounds a whole lot weirder when I say it out loud”? I’ll go out on a limb here and say you’ve been there before. Journaling gives us a framework that we can fit the misshapen, imperfect pieces of our lives into. It helps us keep track of what’s really going on in life, how we are progressing towards our goals, whether or not we’re pretending something isn’t bother us…in my (non-clinical) opinion, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that we can keep everything “upstairs” and simultaneously be able to efficiently and mindfully continue to grow towards our goals in life.
I encourage clients to start practicing journaling in the following way: there is no right or wrong way to get started. You weren’t confident in or skilled at riding a bike the first, second, or third time that you ever tried. Start out by jotting down (I recommend hand-writing, it forces us to slow down and more critically think about our work) whatever is on your mind. Goals for the day, things on your mind, even the mundane if all else fails. The goal is to develop a relationship with yourself, not create a New York Times best-selling memoir. Write about things you’ve never written before, doodle, write down things you want to remember. Over time and with consistency, you’ll probably find that the topics that you journal about become more and more related to the pieces of life you have been avoiding. These are the pieces that we need to write about/get out the most, and this is where you’ll find your internal work needs to be focused on. Happy writing!
