Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 10: Journaling

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For trauma survivors, we can often be caught “in our head”. We analyze, quietly observe, and examine people and places and things due to hypervigilance. We tend to criticize ourselves to ourselves a lot. Survivors suffer from seeing things “black and white”, and we have a bent toward overthinking what others are thinking about us. Our mind can be on overdrive reading facial expressions, checking other people’s emotional temperature, and losing ourselves in old scripts and patterns that we learned from our trauma.

Being creative is often stunted for childhood trauma survivors — like we talked about weeks ago. Writing is not just creative, but often cathartic. Journaling, in its vast number of forms, is a high recommendation from much therapeutic counsel. The idea of getting thoughts out on paper, writing a letter to your abuser and then burning it, allowing your mind to have an outlet for all its over analytic tendencies, and having a space to write down your growth and struggle points — without anything but your own inner resource of your mind (and a writing tool and paper) — this is a beautiful way to find an outlet for your grief and put your trauma into a new perspective. Essays, short stories, and books are all wonderful things that trauma survivors write to share psychological education, normalize their story, or allow others to find strength and hope via their survival. These are all so special.

But what if the world wasn’t going to read it? Is there healing in just the writing itself? That is a hard yes! The power of journaling has even been documented scientifically as a means of bringing out things that are trapped inside, words that you can’t necessarily say out loud, and a way to find a flow as well as a structure to your ideas and story.

I personally love journaling about my day, my emotions, quotes that I hear, revelations that I get throughout the day, small wins of what I call Jubilation Moments, and hardships that I endured. I do this throughout the day on a small app called “Grid Diary”. This app allows you to set out your own daily writing prompts, and then I just put a few sentences in each box every day. I also have a longer “diary style” journal that I write all kinds of things in. This is a place to get out frustrations, work out my social anxieties, talk to myself, talk to a future generation that probably will never read it, talk about my insecurities, write out my ideas and hopes and dreams, and so much more. I highly believe in gratitude lists as well. This is where you write out things you are thankful for — with no end point or count happening, just writing and writing blessing after blessing. I also have an anonymous blog out there lost in the interweb where I write out all my angry thoughts to the people who have hurt me the most — without anyone knowing they are my words. I often am writing any number of entries in any of these journals through tears. The pain flows out my hands, into the world, and I let go. I use the iPhone notepad when I have a really big revelation, and then sometimes read it to my therapist if I need further help working something out. I have a long memoir style word doc where I write my story on a continuous basis that’s just been going on for years — even though probably no one will see it until after I’m gone. It’s really just for me and my healing in the present. All these outlets of just writing with abandon, just writing to write, sitting down, and pouring my mind on paper without judgment — these are all so cathartic.

This year during this self-exploration phase that I’m finding myself in, I recently was challenged to have a pen and pad of paper by my bed and to write out my dreams the second I wake up. I’ve been told that our dreams are always trying to share something with us, even if we have no idea what it is. The more we can remember and write out before it’s a faded thought, the better. This is a new practice for me, so I can’t comment on its healing properties yet — but I’m excited to see where it takes me.

This practice of journaling has been listed as a therapeutic intervention for many years. There are writing therapists who even help you write down your abuse story. Some people are even finding they are able to uncover repressed memories in this way, and the vast majority of us are able to uncover repressed emotions by journaling. There are creative writing courses for the trauma survivor, and so many great resources.

My challenge for you today is to dig deeper by getting your insides outside of your mind and body and down onto paper. If you don’t have any practice yet at all, just start small by setting a five-minute timer and writing whatever comes out. If you already do a smaller journaling practice, maybe expand on that with a notepad just for gratitude or try with me the dream journal in the first moments of the morning.

Whatever bit you are able to do, you will start to see small benefits. When taking a course at school, science has shown us that writing (with a real writing utensil) is the best way to lock in the concepts you are being taught. The brain hears the info, has to regurgitate it to your hand from the professor, which then reinforces the idea that you are trying to study and memorize by writing it out on paper. So, in the inverted way, to release info back to the universe from your mind, unstick your thoughts, and release your emotions, writing a free-form journal without judgment is a beautiful practice indeed.

I encourage you to give it a try. If you are struggling, feel free to reach out on the “Connect” tab of my website and I’ll link you up with my best recommendations or resources. I’d love to hear from you if you take the journaling challenge. Let me know how it’s working, what avenue works best for you, and what releases you are finding through writing.