Journal Therapy and Coaching
Welcome to a sanctuary where your words become a bridge to self-discovery, inner peace, and healing.
As a Journal therapist and coach, I invite you to explore the transformative power of writing. Journal therapy can support you through challenging times. It can help you process emotions and discover your authentic voice.
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
Jen Johnson is a board certified coach and licensed counselor offering Journal Therapy and Coaching services.
What is Journal Therapy and Coaching?
Journal Therapy and Journaling Coaching offer a structured, intentional form of writing designed to support emotional, mental, and physical well-being.
Unlike casual journaling, journal therapy offers guided prompts, reflective exercises, and mindfulness techniques aimed at:
- Processing emotions
- Managing stress and anxiety
- Navigating grief, transitions, or trauma
- Gaining clarity in decision-making
- Cultivating self-compassion
- Unlocking creativity and personal growth
Your journal becomes a trusted, judgment-free space where you can explore thoughts, untangle emotions, and find meaning in your experiences.
How Journal Therapy Works
Customized Writing Prompts
Prompts tailored to your current goals, emotional landscape, and needs.
Mindfulness-Based Techniques
Journaling combined with breathwork, grounding, and mindful awareness.
Supportive, Nonjudgmental Space
Jen provides compassionate guidance as you reflect, process, and integrate your insights.
Tools for Ongoing Practice
Journaling skills and exercises you can continue to use long after our sessions.
Is Journal Therapy Right for You?
Journal Therapy may be a fit if you:
Feel overwhelmed by emotions or transitions Struggle with anxiety, self-doubt, self-criticism, or overthinking Are looking for new ways to manage stress Are healing from grief or past experiences Desire more clarity, self-awareness, and emotional balance Crave space to reflect, slow down, and reconnect
Ways to Work Together
1:1 Journal Therapy Coaching Sessions
Personalized sessions via Zoom where we explore what’s on your heart and mind through guided writing and reflection.
Writing as Refuge- Mindful Writing for Transformation Workshops
Jen offers writing workshops several times per year. Click here for information about Writing as Refuge: Mindful Writing for Transformation workshops.
Let’s Begin
Your story deserves to be heard—even if it’s just by you.
Contact Jen to book a discovery call.
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
Journal Therapy
Journaling therapy can help you to learn specific therapeutic journaling methods to facilitate self-discovery, transformation, and resilience. A journal therapist can teach you how to cultivate positive emotions that nurture inner strength and self-awareness.
Research shows that certain types of journaling practices can decrease anxiety and other symptoms of trauma and post traumatic stress. Therapeutic journaling 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.
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
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, illness, and other difficult experiences. They can help us 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.
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. I was fortunate to learn journal therapy in graduate school with one of my professors, Richard Riordan, Ph.D., who had published about therapeutic writing practices in the early 1990s. During my clinical internship, 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, not the client, is not the problem. It is a compassionate therapy approach that encourages externalizing the problem. It helps the client to realize 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 from a narrative therapy perspective 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 difficult to speak about. 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.