Journal Writing

I am a huge proponent of journal writing. When you begin to write things down it helps you to sort things out. A lot of times though, you'll get to the reasons why. Journal writing is easiest when we are angry probably because we are looking for a way to express our anger. If you really get into it and keep writing, but deeply, you can explore the real reasons why you are angry which a lot of times will be fear, pain, hurt, resentments. All this leads to greater self-awareness.

Anger is the easiest motivation for picking up a pen and writing things down or getting to your electronic journal, and rightly so, anger is an all encompassing emotion, but it can also be helpful when you are feeling confused, overwhelmed, anxious, stressed out, depressed. The reasons why will usually come at the end. When you first begin writing, it allows you to process your emotions. What you are actually doing is bridging that gap, making that connection between emotion and cognition, feeling and thinking. Remember I was talking before about how when that connection is lost, emotional reactions take over and become a positive feedback loop that we don't understand because we haven't kept the cognitions connected to the emotions. Journal writing can help us make those connections again.

One thing to remember about journal writing: when you write things down, they only pertain to that day, at that moment. We think so many things throughout the day and they are ever changing. What journal writing does is allow you to process things at that moment. Hopefully it's a buildup to a breakthrough that goes deep, but that's few and far between. That's not usually what is happening every day. Usually it is a process that we are going through, learning to make that connection again between cognition and emotion. During that process, many things are changing. My point is that when you go back to read it, what you wrote may not make sense to you anymore, and that's ok.