Writing for Healing

As a spiritual life coach, I am a great advocate for writing. Writing is absolutely the best way to heal yourself. We’ve all heard of keeping a journal and when we think of journals, we think of teenage girls with a diary kept under lock and key and hidden beneath the mattress. Recordings of unrequited love with childish illustrations occupy each page. Dreams of a bright tomorrow are also recorded. But the most recorded is what is being said to themselves – I hate my nose, I hate my hair, I wish it wasn’t so curly, I wish it wasn’t this mousy brown. My legs are too short. My legs are too long. I have a big stomach. My cheeks are too chubby. I wish I wasn’t so fat. If I wasn’t so fat, then the boys would look at me too. If I wasn’t so ugly, I would attract attention for the right reasons – boys would at least be talking to me. I might just get an invitation to the school dance, if I didn’t have so many freckles. I don’t think I need to keep going for you to get the picture.

This internal dialogue starts so early in life. Girls and boys as young as six start on a road to self-destruction through developing eating disorders. These anxieties get expressed in so many ways – always in ways that cannot be detected or become too noticeable to the outside world. Eventually shame starts to kick in as well. This child is self-harming and then hiding it from the people who love them, and the sense of shame from having these secret thoughts and behaviours, prevents them from having a carefree young and happy life. (Does this sound somewhat like your younger life?)

We take all these anxieties and shameful feelings into our adulthood. We then wonder why we have so many hangups. We wonder why we’re constantly depressed and why we’re unhappy. We wonder why we can’t form meaningful relationships where we actually let someone into our lives. We dread making ourselves vulnerable because of the lessons learned through childhood – being vulnerable equals hurt, disappointment, bullying, mocking.

Fortunately for most of us, we realise when we move into adulthood that everything is not right in our lives. We start to seek out help to get through all the negative talk that has already seeped so deep into our very DNA, our conscious awareness of who we believe we are or should I say, our very deep-seated perception of who we are. If we are lucky enough, we get to peel back all those layers, with the help of a life coach or medical professional in an attempt to find ourselves once again.

This is where writing to heal yourself is such a valuable tool to use. If you imagine all those thoughts that you have had about yourself that are so destructive to your very essence. If you imagine all the negative conversations that you’ve had with yourself. You’ve never been able to take any of those thoughts out of your head or have those conversations with someone, anyone – the fear of ridicule and shunning has always run too high. So when you start on your journey of working through all this negative baggage that has become you, writing these thoughts and feelings down, is like opening the plug on the bathtub and letting out years of stagnant water that has just been sitting there, doing nothing and serving no-one.

My recommendation is always to start to a journal. There is no set way as to how you use that journal. Some of my clients use it from both the front and the back. In the front they record all the positive thoughts they’ve had in any particular day. They record their hopes and their dreams. In the back, they record all the negative thoughts they’ve had that day. They record all the memories that have affected them adversely and in the front, all the blissful memories that contributed to making their lives somewhat livable.

I also have a wonderful exercise for client to do, where moments in time are plotted out along a lifeline. Here we record the highs and the lows. We record all the emotions around these highs and lows and again, clients are free to express themselves in whatever way makes them feel relief from the burden of negative energy that they’ve been carrying around for years. Seeing your life recorded on paper, gives you a better perspective of the reality of your life, and in that way, the perceptions are recognised and released.

I encourage all my clients to do an exercise every time they are feeling that the world is against them, which entails writing down how they feel, and what their perception of that particular circumstance is. Then to be as objective as possible, and figure out how much of the actual circumstance is perception and how much is reality. It’s a bit of a fact-finding mission, but when you have all the facts, you can so easily see how you’re allowing your fears to overtake your life. You can so easily see how you worry about something that has not yet happened and is not even likely to happen and to you get to understand just how much time you waste in these thoughts that drown out any sense of well-being and self-confidence.

#spirituallifecoach #coaching #writing #perception #healing #journal