Journal Writing For Better Mental Health

Starting in the 1950s Carl Rogers brought Pers...
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Even if you’ve never fancied yourself a writer, you are the best historian of your own life. Journal writing is a fun way to analyze and celebrate your own life. If you’re undergoing a course of therapy, journaling can also act as an excellent supplement to the emotional work you’re undertaking in your sessions.

Journal writing helps you to take notice of your emotions. A starting point for many therapists is to get you to recognize and honor your own emotions. You’re asked to check in with yourself, see how you’re feeling. Journal writing helps you to become adept at recognizing and articulating your own emotions, both to yourself and eventually to others.

Journal writing helps you to identify life patterns. Though everyone’s life is a tangle of emotional patterns, it’s sometimes hard for you to see your own. Do you become acutely depressed every Tuesday? Angry every payday? Sad when it rains? Having the printed record of a journal is a great first step in analyzing your life.

Journals are great spaces to practice affirmations and statements. Remember when writing lessons one hundred times was a punishment for forgetting them? Writing helps to reinforce learning. Your therapist may help you to restructure negative thoughts by making you repeat affirmations or strong statements, and a journal will allow you to repeat them to yourself in context and in writing.

Journals are a great workspace in which to evaluate your therapy. It can be difficult to talk to your therapist about the therapy process. If you have doubts or questions, a journal will help you to find words to communicate your apprehensions. This will help you to talk about them in counseling.

Journals are an excellent space in which to record triumphs. As you progress though a course of therapy, you will also progress emotionally. You’ll overcome anxieties, become more courageous and kinder to yourself and others, and you’ll become more joyful. Recording your triumphs will help you to celebrate them, and will keep your victories fresh and relevant to you as you continue on your way.

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

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People are unique, but not totally unpredictable. Even the least routine life is a slave to patterns. We all develop patterns and systems of thought and behavior in our life. For example, given a conflict, some of us always come up fighting; some shy away. Some of us can congratulate ourselves on a job well done, and some always denigrate their achievements. Some people place blame exclusively on others, and some people always blame themselves when things go wrong.

You might be able to identify some of your own patterns, and if so, you’ll probably recognize that we all have a few that drag down our quality of life. For example, if you habitually downplay your own achievements, you’re likely to feel that you’re not good at anything.

But this may go further-as the result of your negative self-image, you won’t strive to do great things. As a result, you’ll consistently appear to be a ne’er-do-well to yourself, reinforcing your original beliefs. This ever-strengthening spiral of negativity may eventually crush you into a serious depression.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is designed to help us to confront and break these patterns. A cognitive behavioral therapist acts as a kind but impartial outsider, seeing the biases and negative patterns that we are too close to see. To defeat these biases, the counselor challenges them-she tries to show in conversation that our assumptions are harmful and untrue. She often coaxes us to confront our fears in real life. As we boldly face the things that we want to avoid, and our worst fears don’t come to pass, the fears dissipate and we gain new, constructive patterns of thought.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is especially effective for many people because it is concerned with changing your life in the present. It was developed in part as a reaction to psychological practices that dealt mostly with the emotions of our childhood. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the therapy method of choice for many counselors, and has proven effective across a wide range of afflictions, difficulties, and disorders.

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Five Stages Of Mental Health

Noted Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote the book “On Death and Dying” back in 1968. It’s been a model of dealing with grief ever since. The basis of Dr. Kubler-Ross’s philosophy is the five stages of grief: depression, anger, bargaining, denial, and finally acceptance. She theorized that most people journey through those five stages as they come to terms with their own processing of grief. On some level you can apply that approach of those five stages to many aspects of your life and relationships even your own mental health.
Consider that perhaps you are feeling depressed. Not just the ordinary blues but something that is running a lot deeper. The kind of feelings which make you apathetic towards everything whether that is your physical appearance, your job or even your marriage. This depression can easily lead to anger as you grow frustrated with feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. As your depression and anger build you could slip into denial thinking that “this will all blow over.” You can begin bargaining with yourself that if you accomplish certain tasks then you’ll be fine. Of course, all of this is really setting yourself up for potential failure. Acceptance comes when you finally decide to seek out professional psychiatric help.
Guess what? Those five stages might not stop there but continue throughout your therapy sessions. It’s absolutely conceivable that you’ll hit on all of those emotions through the course of your treatment. Understand that your therapist will be anticipating these different levels and will know just how to handle them. As you journey through your therapy you’ll be challenged to confront many issues and that’s all perfectly normal. Many people are amazed at what they’ve been carrying around for years. Once those feelings are released it’s like the weight of the world is lifted off your shoulders. And isn’t that what we all want?

Noted Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote the book “On Death and Dying” back in 1968. It’s been a model of dealing with grief ever since. The basis of Dr. Kubler-Ross’s philosophy is the five stages of grief: depression, anger, bargaining, denial, and finally acceptance. She theorized that most people journey through those five stages as they come to terms with their own processing of grief. On some level you can apply that approach of those five stages to many aspects of your life and relationships even your own mental health.   Consider that perhaps you are feeling depressed. Not just the ordinary blues but something that is running a lot deeper. The kind of feelings which make you apathetic towards everything whether that is your physical appearance, your job or even your marriage. This depression can easily lead to anger as you grow frustrated with feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. As your depression and anger build you could slip into denial thinking that “this will all blow over.” You can begin bargaining with yourself that if you accomplish certain tasks then you’ll be fine. Of course, all of this is really setting yourself up for potential failure. Acceptance comes when you finally decide to seek out professional psychiatric help.   Guess what? Those five stages might not stop there but continue throughout your therapy sessions. It’s absolutely conceivable that you’ll hit on all of those emotions through the course of your treatment. Understand that your therapist will be anticipating these different levels and will know just how to handle them. As you journey through your therapy you’ll be challenged to confront many issues and that’s all perfectly normal. Many people are amazed at what they’ve been carrying around for years. Once those feelings are released it’s like the weight of the world is lifted off your shoulders. And isn’t that what we all want?

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