JOURNALING

Have any of you been told by a therapist that you need to process your various emotions? But perhaps you have difficulty with "regulating" or "expressing" your emotions. After all a lot of us in this group have been trained that our feelings don't count, we have to suppress our feelings, and that we don't have a right to express our feelings.

Also you may be remembering or having flashbacks of your past. These seem to occur randomly or sometimes something that never used to trigger them bring them up out of your subconscious. You are torn between wanting to remember certain things and between wanting to block out those same memories.

Or do you just have a hard time sleeping at night? Those thoughts about what coulda/shoulda/woulda are bouncing around inside your skull. Or you just can't get your thoughts to shut off and because you are trying to relax, every manner of things pops into your head: scenes from your uncomfortable and embarrassing moments when you're growing up, scenes from a show you watched, something bothering you at work, clips of a song, and nothing can seem to shut off this tumble of emotions and images in your mind.

Actually there may be a way to help yourself. You may have heard this before, but perhaps wondered when you find the time. Well the answer is, there is ALWAYS time to look after yourself. You just have to MAKE time. And make yourself a priority. Which for some of us is hard to do when we're so used to looking after everyone else! Some of us are workaholics and we don't want to lose focus on that. Some of us might be alcoholics or relationship dependent and we don't want to stop and think about why we are doing what we are doing. We just want to keep doing it because that's all we've done in the past. We are afraid to change because we don't believe in ourselves.

Well journaling may help you. What writing down things can do for you is help you organize your thoughts: that's good for some of us anxious ladies. Anxiety is something that causes our thoughts to race. When we are in that state of mind, there is no/little organization to them, they just race around and sometimes overwhelm us. We feel like we lack control.

Another thing it can do: help you become aware of thought patterns. Help you record things like sleep habits, eating habits, and mood. If you notice that you log in your journal that you drink 8 cups of coffee per day, and you have trouble falling asleep, you might notice this when you write it down: because maybe you didn't really think you drank THAT much coffee! If you are depressed a lot, maybe you could write down events or your menstruation cycle and notice that your mood may be linked more to events or hormones or if you are always down no matter what is happening, this could indicate a chemical imbalance. A trick my therapist taught me: if you can't sleep at night, write about what is bothering you during the day.

Perhaps your therapist has given you "homework." Or perhaps you are reading a book that wants to remember certain things or change the way you normally think. Do you remember when you used to study for exams? Didn't it help you to remember things to write them down?

It's a great way to look back at things later and see how much you've accomplished. It's good to refer back to once in a while. It's self-validation. It's something you can share with someone you trust, or something you can lock up in a safe/secure file.



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Other Links:

http://www.nomadjournaltrips.com/journal_writing
Journal Writing
Journal writing is known to be beneficial on a practical and therapeutic level. We think so highly of journal writing, we built our entire company around it!

http://www.createwritenow.com/
JOURNAL WRITING: THE PLANET'S BEST SELF-DISCOVERY TOOL
by Mari L. McCarthy
When You start and keep a daily Journaling for the Self of It™ practice, You discover who You really are, You heal your psychophysical wounds and create the life You desperately desire to live!
   http://www.journaltherapy.com/rosen.htm
A Brief History of Journal Therapy
by Kathleen Adams Journal Therapy is the act of writing down thoughts and feelings to sort through problems and come to deeper understandings of oneself or the issues in one's life. Unlike traditional diary writing, where daily events and happenings are recorded from an exterior point of view, journal therapy focuses on the writer's internal experiences, reactions, and perceptions. Through this act of literally reading his or her own mind, the writer is able to perceive experiences more clearly and thus feels a relief of tension. This has been shown to have mental and physical health benefits.

Contributed by Alexis Saskia Geddes
http://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/
Morning Pages
Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages– they are not high art. They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Occasionally colorful, more often than not Morning Pages are negative, fragmented, repetitive or bland. Good!  Worrying about your job, the laundry, the weird look your friend gave you – all that stuff distracts you from your creativity. It eddies through your subconsciousness and muddies your day. Get it on the page first thing in the morning and move on with your day with a freer spirit.