Journaling Grief
Journaling grief can help you to make order from the internal chaos that comes with loss. This is a therapeutic writing practice that can support you in healing from loss. Sometimes it’s easier to write about grief than to talk about it. Sometimes it’s hard to find someone who can really listen.
Journaling grief offers a way to express your feelings and thoughts in a safe place. Therapeutic journaling offers an opportunity to practice meeting whatever feelings arise with loving-kindness and self-compassion. Writing about our deepest feelings about loss and how it has affected our lives allows us to embrace our own humanity with kindness and acceptance. We all experience the pain of loss at some point in our lives.
Writing Grief
Writing grief gives the feelings a place to go. When we put the feelings on paper, this allows us to shift perspective from being entangled in the feelings to allowing them and observing them with kindness and acceptance. It allows us to metaphorically sit down beside our grief and be present with it with an open heart.
Journaling for Grief
When journaling for grief, we can write about who or what was lost and our deepest thoughts and feelings related to the loss. Any or all of it – the anger, sadness, regret, longing, denial, depression, heartbreak, relief, and the acceptance. We write about how the loss has affected our life. Perhaps we write about what we are learning about ourselves and the world through our grief journey. Or we write about how the loss has shaped our life differently.
With journaling for grief, we can write about the meaning that we make from the loss. If it’s time to let go of what or who was lost, we write about the letting go. If it’s appropriate or desirable to consider how we will sustain a relationship with who or what was lost, then we write about that as well.
Grief Journaling prompts
Journaling prompts can help us to start writing about grief when we don’t quite know where to begin. Some journaling prompts that may be helpful:
What I wish I had said is…
What I miss most is…
What I appreciate most is…
The most painful part of this loss is…
What I have learned about myself from this loss is…
The strengths that will carry me through this loss are…
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