Journal Therapy
Journal therapy uses expressive writing and therapeutic journaling techniques to facilitate transformation and healing. Sometimes journaling about difficult events feels easier than talking about them. Journal therapy can support you in processing difficult or traumatic events in a supportive therapy environment.
The writing process, no matter how much time we devote to it, contains a tremendous potential for healing.
Louise DeSalvo
Journaling therapy can help you to learn specific therapeutic journaling methods to facilitate increased self-awareness and new insights and perspectives about your life. A skilled journal therapist can teach you how to cultivate positive emotional experiences that nurture a greater sense of resilience and inner strength.
Research shows that certain types of journaling practices can decrease anxiety and other symptoms of trauma and post traumatic stress disorder, or ptsd. Therapeutic journaling with an experienced therapist or coach guiding you offers a way to process difficult material without feeling so overwhelmed. Using therapeutic journaling prompts for therapy can support you in working through trauma and difficult events. It’s possible to put difficult events in perspective and learn how to feel a sense of peace and joy again.
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation with Jen to see if you would work well together.
“Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.” – Julia Cameron
Therapeutic Journaling
Therapeutic journaling practices can support your self-awareness and personal growth, creativity, and resilience. Therapeutic journaling can guide you in exploring your personal stories and transforming the stories into cohesive narratives that support healing. These practices can help us to make sense of loss and illness experiences and transform these experiences into a more meaningful and purposeful life. Therapeutic journaling can help us to reimagine our lives in the aftermath of loss, illness, and other difficult life experiences.
In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood.
Susan Sontag
Therapeutic journaling practices can help us to learn what we do not already know about ourselves and our lives. These writing practices can support us in seeing our experiences from a new perspective.
Therapeutic Journaling Coaching
Journaling practices have long been used to promote self awareness, insight, and personal and spiritual growth. I began journaling as a young girl at age 7, so I was excited to be introduced to journaling therapy and therapeutic writing as a counseling graduate student by one of my professors, Richard Riordan, Ph.D., who had published about therapeutic writing practices in the early 1990s. As one of my clinical internship supervisors, he invited me to keep a journal of my experiences as a young counselor. I still recall the benefits of doing so, all of these years later.
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
Journaling practices have been shown to decrease burnout and compassion fatigue and increase resilience in healthcare professionals. One study showed that expressive, affirmative, transactional, legacy, poetic, and mindful writing prompts increased resilience and decreased depressive symptoms, perceived stress, and rumination in a group of individuals who had experienced trauma.
Narrative Therapy
A Narrative Therapy approach starts from a foundation that the problem is the problem, and the client is not the problem. It is a compassionate therapy approach that supports the client in externalizing the problem and gradually coming to see that the problem is not the full story of the person.
The problem is the problem, the person is not the problem.
– Michael White and David Euston
Journal therapy combined with narrative therapy offers a powerful approach for transforming negative beliefs about oneself.
Journaling as Therapy
Journaling as therapy practices have been shown to promote perspective taking, enhance understanding of ourselves and others, and promote healing. Journaling in therapy has also been used to assist people with chronic pain, chronic illness, grief, anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma.
Journaling therapy can help us to make order from what feels like internal chaos during difficult times.
Often, our narratives begin in chaos. They become healing narratives as we organize them…
Louise DeSalvo
Therapeutic Journaling and Journal Therapy for Grief
When I was in my late 30s, I experienced a series of significant losses that were so profound that it was difficult to speak about them. Talk therapy helped for a few sessions, but then it began to make me feel worse. Writing about the difficult experiences offered a way for me to make sense of what had happened and to shape what felt like inner chaos into a cohesive story.
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.
Anne Frank
Shaping our stories into a cohesive narrative has been shown to be healing, and it was for me. Writing for healing has been such a powerful practice in my own life that I’ve been using it in therapy sessions with my clients and teaching it in workshops. I love sharing this work, because it helps people process difficult events, and recover a greater sense of peace, happiness, and wellbeing following difficult events.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Maya Angelou
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation with Jen to see if you would work well together.