Healing Journal Writing

My book "Why Good Women Date Bad Men" mentions healing journal writing and it is something I utterly believe is invaluable when you are healing yourself from dating bad men!

Getting your feelings down on paper, for your eyes only, is one of the best ways I recommend to all my ladies of making sense of what can be a totally confusing, self-questioning nightmare. You may make no sense whatsoever when you begin to pour it all out on the page and that is utterly and totally okay because when you are in that raw state, nothing makes sense!! 

Starting to write is the hard part but oh boy once you do start you just won't want to stop. All of that frustration, that confusion, that heart ache will come rushing out of you into the jumbled up, misspelt words and who cares about neat handwriting and paragraphs, just write...and write...and write!!

So how do you start? The picture above is of my heartbreak diaries/journals, back several years ago when I was soul searching and soul pouring into them...3 years worth! I had A LOT to get out so I bought several of the same and I liked the design of clocks because it reminded me to "Give Time Some Time" a saying I had stumbled across that I liked so much, it was one of the first things I wrote down in the journal and I had a ring made by a lovely friend with it stamped on and I wore it on my wedding ring finger. Anyhoo...I'm guessing I took that picture above after only a few months of journal writing because there's a mountain of them in my cupboard now!

So, you can scribble down on a notebook or you can go get yourself a special book for the task, the choice is yours. My journal writing has progressed to stickers and different coloured pens with doodles now because I am in that happy place in my life that those pages in the picture, pages of future dreams are full of but take your time to get to happy scribbles because right now you want to get alllll those befuddled and angry feelings out. So once you have your book to write in, chose a place to write it in. As you can see, I wrote mine on my bed...it was my safe place for a long time. The bed I shared with no-one else, in my bedroom that no-one had been in but me since the day I moved into my on-my-own house. I needed that. Sanctuary.

The reason to have a 'place' to write is because when you take yourself to that place with your journal, your subconscious will go "hey, we're gonna do some writing, some un-loading, yeah I can do that" and you are instantly in that frame of mind, ready to write it out and the more you do it, the quicker each time you will relax when you sit down and be ready to write in your journal. You will begin to see it as treasured time. Speaking of time, some people do it at a certain time of day, allowing 10 minutes or half an hour for being in 'their place' and journal writing, they look forward to it throughout the working day. They teach children and family to respect that time that they need to be alone and write...again that takes a few attempts but bare with it, it will happen. When my children were small, I got up in the morning 15 minutes earlier and sat with my cup of tea and wrote a little...until they came wandering in for sleepy wake-up cuddles. Or you may be someone who takes your journal with you everywhere you go and jots down when things come to mind and that's fine too. There is no right or wrong, whatever works for you. 

But WHAT do you write and why bother? Have you ever had one of those days or weeks where you just can't get out of your own head? Thoughts churn round and around and your emotions are all over the shop. You just can't figure out what's going on with you and you get more and more frustrated and more and more tired. And then it all spills out. Out of your mouth to a friendly ear and without receiving advice or solutions you already feel a million times better...just for getting it out!! That's journaling, getting it out, on paper...the good, the bad and the ugly. But the amazeballs thing about journaling is that you don't have to sensor it at all! You can be self-indulgent, you can be selfish, you can be down right nasty with your words and your journal won't hate you for it!! 

So what about that advice or those solutions that you may get from spilling to a friend? Well here's the magic! Magically you DO get that from journaling. Whether it all falls into place while you write or whether you have some distance from your words, a day, a month and then you re-read them again and the solutions become crystal clear, the answers are all written there in your words. 

 

So, what about that advice or those solutions that you may get from spilling to a friend? Well here's the magic! Magically you DO get that from journaling. Whether it all falls into place while you write or whether you have some distance from your words, a day, a month and then you re-read them again and the solutions become crystal clear, the answers are all written there in your words. Our brains are designed to find solutions, to heal our woes and to plonk us back out there almost good as new. The human race wouldn't have survived if Mrs Caveman had sat in the cave demoralised and disheartened when her latest rabbit catching snare idea had produced no fluffy bunnies. No, she sat and she thought and thought whilst cavey hubster was off chasing lions and she drew little stick diagrams in the sand until her brain figured it out. So get your stick and figure it out. Just write. 

Don't over think, just think about the bad man or the latest dating confusion you have going on and write some words. Doesn't even have to be sentences at first. Think of an event that happened or a feeling that you had. Think of a promise that was never fulfilled or something that has been taken away from you. It's easier to start with negatives because we are designed to look on the dark side of live, again primeval instinct thing (seeing danger so we avoid it) Be as negative as you bloomin well want to be and write a few things down. You may find it irritating or draining but bare with it, put your pen down and try again the next day if it doesn't happen at first. Don't worry, that subconscious will figure it out. You may be so stifled, so anxious, so frozen that it doesn't come easy for you at first. That's okay and not a reason for self-blame, be patient with yourself. 

Slowly you will begin to heal, you will feel progress and you will see it in your words as the language changes, as the things you write about change. I realised after 6 months of diary writing that I hadn't cried that day. I was very, very broken when I started to write so it took that long, it may take you much less. It was a changing moment for me and I wrote it in my diary. "A whole day without tears!"  A few months later when there had been more and more no tear days, I went back to that original entry and wrote at the bottom "several days at a time without tears now - June 27th" and again later "a whole month and nothing to cry about!!" There is a little dancing stick woman drawing next to that scribble because by then, I was brave enough to go dancing again!