Today we will discuss about therapeutic journaling. Therapeutic journaling is a deep dive into your internal thoughts and experiences in order to gain self-perspective. Therapeutic journaling is the process of writing down your thoughts, experiences, and emotions.
It differs from the process of recording your daily events in a diary which many of us probably are familiar with. Therapeutic journaling is about delving a little deeper, writing in a way that helps us to make sense of our internal experiences, learn and gain new perspective on our challenges. Writing about our thoughts and emotions enables us to express them in a way that can help us through difficult times to move forward.
You might spend about 10 to 15 minutes exploring your thoughts and feelings about your difficult experiences or about the prompts that are given. Let your ideas flow without worrying too much about the spellings or the grammar. Try to write every day, even if it’s only just for a few minutes.
Therapeutic journaling can help you improve your physical and psychological wellbeing in a way in a variety of ways. It helps you to track your progress. It also helps you to make sense of thoughts, experiences, and organizing them in a more meaningful way. It helps you to recognize patterns. In thoughts, feelings and behaviours, it provides an opportunity for self-reflection. It provides an opportunity to consider experiences from alternative perspectives and practices that help in thinking. It’s likely that therapeutic journaling can help people in various ways.
A recent study found that therapeutic journaling can help to improve psychological wellbeing by reducing intrusive thoughts, decreasing the avoidance of negative thoughts, and improving the working memory. By doing this, it is thought that the people become able to delete, deal with stress more effectively.
So, let’s get started. You can choose one prompt every day. You can think about it and pen down your thoughts and emotions. For example, the prompt is: “What makes you unique?” I would write… “Well, I have never thought about it. Well, let me think I think I’m able to keep my smile intact. I also try to spread this smile and joy with others. While writing this, I’m feeling happy. This prompt has made me think about myself. I’m going to think about some more qualities that I possess which are unique. Are we all really unique? Well, yes, otherwise everyone would be same. There would be no differences. Everyone would be sinking thinking the same way, doing the same things. How boring. Well, let me think about. What would happen if everyone? Is not unique. Well. It’s very boring.”
I think this example must have given you some clarity. Journal writing makes you think. It helps us to explore ourselves, to find out what we’re really thinking about. So let us begin the journey of self-exploration. Let’s try our first prompt. The prompt is… “How different you were five years ago?” Take some time and pen down your thoughts!!!!
This prompt forces us to introspect. It makes us think about all the things we have done for past five years. It helps us go down the memory lane. We re-live those moments. We think about how things were a few years ago. What were our experiences and so on. In psychology, self-introspection means to examine about our own mental state, physical state and about emotions. To introspect yourself is a way to know yourself more than any other person.
Self-introspection has a lot of benefits. It helps you to know yourself better and does build confidence. It also strengthens your emotional intelligence. As Carl Jung rightly said, “Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart who looks outside dreams who looks inside awakens.”
Generally, we spent a lot of time dreaming. We analyse and think about different things outside, but we do not take time to analyse and see what is within our own self. So let us start this journey of awakening. Let us continue with the journey of self-exploration. Look at all your writing as an observer and find out the trends or patterns.
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