Spirituality and Self Help » emotions

Using Words For The Health Of It

shimon — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:23:28 +0000

This is a guest post by Diana M. Raab. Diana is the author of Healing With Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey (Loving Healing Press, 2010). You can visit her blog or website. Diana is participating in the WOW! Women On Writing Blog Tour.

When life takes an unexpected turn, writing can be a beneficial form of release from stress, due to either emotional or physical factors.

Many published authors, including myself, have used writing as a catalyst for their survival during difficult times.

Some of them include: Anaïs Nin, Joan Didion, Reeve Lindbergh, Tobias Wolff, D.H. Lawrence, Isabel Allende, Vivian Gornick, Kathryn Harrison, Sue William Silverman, and May Sarton.

For us, writing has provided purpose and meaning to our lives. It gives one a reason to wake up in the morning and continue on with the day.

D.H. Lawrence, for example, sat at his mother’s bedside and while she was dying, wrote poems about her. He also began composing an early draft of Sons and Lovers, his novel which explored their complicated, loving, painful and close relationship.

Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past while sick in bed with asthma. Flannery O’Connor wrote some of her best stories while dying from lupus. I wrote my first book, Getting Pregnant and Staying Pregnant back in 1983 while on bed rest with my eldest daughter.

The book began as a journal typed on my Smith Corona that was mounted on a specially-designed bed table my husband built for me. After my daughter was born, I condensed the journal into a prologue and added research to create a self-help reference book for women having similar experiences.

Now, more than twenty years later, the book is still in print and has helped many women cope with problem pregnancies.
My most recent book Healing With Words: A Writer’s Cancer Journey also began as a journal and was recently published as a self-help memoir to help others battling cancer.

My background as a writer allows me to help and teach others while helping myself navigate through difficult times.

May Sarton and Anais Nin also used journaling to pull them through difficult times. In her book, Recovering, May Sarton chronicled her battle with depression and cancer. Anaïs Nin used her journals to write to her deranged father who left the family when she was young.

In Nin’s case, her journal entries became a springboard for a four-volume collection of published diaries. As one can see, journaling can be a cathartic way to express feelings. My attitude is: “Direct the rage to the page.”

I have a writing colleague who says, “If it hurts, write harder,” and for years those words were posted above my computer, until they simply became a part of me.

At an Associated Writing Conference a few years ago, Dr. James Pennebaker, author of Writing to Heal said, “Writing dissolves some of the barriers between you and others. If you write, it’s easier to communicate with others.” He does have one rule that he calls, “the flip out rule,” which proclaims that if you get too upset when writing, then simply stop.

Pennebaker believes that there’s a certain type of writing which erupts when we’re faced with loss, death, abuse, depression and trauma.

Whether affected by change, loss or pain, finding the time to write is critical to your healing process. Some people prefer to journal about their experience, while others may lean towards the fictional or poetic modalities to help them escape their own realities. Whatever your choice, once you try it, you’ll see that writing, in any form, can be healthy and empowering.

Reasons to journal

To discover yourself
To vent frustrations and cherish joys
To record and remember events
To fine one’s purpose
To plan for the future
To tap into your intuition
To become empowered
To build self-confidence
To allow self-expression
To uncover secrets, sometimes unknown to us
To improve communication skills
To improve mental health

Journaling tips

Date entries
Don’t worry about grammar
Be honestly and write deeply
Write quickly
Don’t erase
Write for yourself

Journaling prompts

Make a list of things which make you happy.
Make a list of what makes you angry.
Make a list of your accomplishments.
Write about your morning. Waking up, breakfast, the newspaper, the thoughts. Visualize a place you love and write about it. Give details.
What is your first memory?
Describe your childhood room.
Who are the people you love?
Describe a grandparent.
Write about books which have changed your life and why.

How Writing Can Save Your Life

shimon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:45:55 +0000

This is a guest post by B. Lynn Goodwin. Lynn is a freelance writer, editor, teacher, former caregiver, and the author of You Want Me To Do WHAT? – Journaling for Caregivers (Tate Publishing), which can be purchased at Amazon, through Writer Advice, or from your local bookstore. She is published in numerous anthologies, magazines, newspapers, e-zines, and blogs, and she owns Writer Advice . When you visit the website, be sure to click on Journaling for Caregivers. Lynn is participating in the WOW! Women On Writing Blog Tour.
Have you ever been a caregiver for a spouse, parent, child, special needs child, or yourself?

If so, you know that you spend every spare minute driving to medical appointments, stopping at the pharmacy, cooking, answering questions,

paying bills, giving medicine, adjusting machines, returning phone calls, and helping with matters that used to be private.

Why write about it?

Writing gives perspective and restores sanity. Writing is a lifeline as well as a record. Writing will improve your life and could even save it. Do not underestimate the power of journaling.
It allows you to vent, delve into issues, and untangle messes. It lets you analyze or celebrate. It allows you to finish a thought without interruption. Journaling releases mental toxins and deepens awareness.

What do you do if you don’t know what to write about?

One way to avoid facing a blank page is to use sentence starts. There are over 200 of them in You Want Me to Do WHAT? Journaling for Caregivers, and they will trigger all kinds of memories, plans, and ideas.

Want to try it right now? Pick one of the sentence starts listed here:
Today, I want…
Sometimes I wonder…
I lust after…
It’s hard to admit…
What if…
I will always love…
Finish the sentence and keep going. You are journaling. Explore your hopes and fears. Vent. Analyze. Process. Reflect. Make discoveries and find the hope that can hide when you are overwhelmed by your daily routine.

Are judgment gremlins nagging at you as you write? Ask them to go outside or tell them to play on the freeway. Your journal is yours. It does not need their approval.

Journaling helps you see yourself and your loved one from a new perspective. Journals never interrupt or argue. They let you evaluate, interpret, and rediscover your love.
Use the prompts in You Want Me to Do WHAT? to ease the stress of caring for a patient with dementia, stroke, cancer or any degenerative disease.

Use them if you care for someone with special needs or a mental illness.
Use them if you are a primary caregiver, spouse of a primary caregiver, or a long distance caregiver.
Use these prompts if you are in any kind of dependent relationship. Use them to process the end of a relationship. They will help you understand what happened.
Writing is therapeutic. It saves lives. Your truths are eager to come out. Let them spill onto the page, and see what doors writing opens for you.

How Journaling Improves Your Emotional Life

shimon — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:53:57 +0000

This is a guest post by Chaundra McGill. Chaundra is the owner of writing reflections and the author of the new free e-book, $1 Therapy: Achieving Emotional Well-Being Through Reflective Writing Therapy.
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of keeping a journal? If the image of a teenage girl divulging her first crush on the pages of a padlocked diary springs to mind, I encourage you to reevaluate your notions of journaling.

For most of my life, I always heard that it was good to keep a journal, primarily from people who never kept a journal. As an English major in college, a few professors required journaling as a part of the curriculum and factored these forced logs into our final grades.

Needless to say, I did not find the musing of required classical readings helpful. As a writer, a mentor encouraged me to keep a journal because you need a place to jot your random ideas. Ok, this made a little more sense to me. But only until I turned to the pages of a journal to help me deal with my past issues and trauma, did I see a direct and pertinent need for a journal.

Let’s face it, we all need an outlet. Some people confide in their friends, some people pay a therapist, I used the pages of a journal. A journal appealed to me in ways that confiding in another human being could not, mainly because I never had to worry about my journal judging me or divulging my most intimate thoughts.

The physical act of writing my thoughts was similar to the release I felt jogging three miles on a treadmill. The emotional release of writing lifted years of pinned up frustration. The words I revealed on my journal pages allowed me to see clearly and sort out all of the confusion that swirled about in my mind.

But let’s get one thing clear, it’s hard to get started. When I first started journaling, I would often arrive at the page without a clue what to write about, which was extremely frustrating. So to help you avoid the same frustration, I have listed below a few journaling techniques that can help your get started on improving your emotional life.

Automatic Writing

This works well when you don’t have anything to write about, but just need to write. Simply place your pen to the page and begin writing. You can even write “I don’t know what to write about” repeatedly, until another topic flows from your pen. For many people, it doesn’t take long before a topic springs to mind. Also, be forewarned, it is common for people practicing this exercise for the first time to cry because your subconscious mind seizes this opportunity to release festering issues.

One-word Association

Arrive at the page with one word in mind and write as much as you possibly can about the topic. It can be anything: a person, place or thing. Some topics that have proven very helpful for me are: mother, father, uncle, home, love, death, goals, motive, etc. I personally learned a lot about myself and my feelings about a particular topic during this exercise.

Who am I?

Oh, the quintessential defining question. No, but seriously, who are you? Describe your life as it is today. Consider the various facets of your life, such as work, relationships, family, spirituality, etc. Describe exactly how you see yourself today. Writing this description will inevitably lead you to evaluate not only your present, but your past and future.

Self Help Tactics To Reduce Depression

shimon — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:37:13 +0000

This is a guest post by Ashley Jennings. Ashley writes about depression help and self help techniques for a variety of mental health conditions.

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. — Jalal ad-Din Rumi

If you ever feel exhausted, worthless, helpless, or hopeless, there is a possibility you are suffering from depression. Several steps can be taken to treat this condition.

If you are interested in self-help, there are resources available that can help you get on the right track to feeling more confident and better about yourself.

Self-help consists of several methods that can be performed daily in the comfort of your own home, and these methods are designed to help reduce the effects of depression.

Depending on the severity of your condition, you should seek medical help, but depression help tactics are a great way to start the healing process.

The following tips describe a few methods for reducing stress and building confidence. These methods can also assist in the reduction of your depression symptoms:

• Setting goals are a great way to build confidence especially if you can meet them quickly.
• Split your tasks into smaller sections. This allows you to complete your projects in a timely manner.
• Spend time with those close to you and participate in activities that you enjoy such as going out for a meal, seeing a movie or going to visit some friends. These can both help you feel better.
• Change your physical state: stand straight, smile, hold your head high. Do it in front of the mirror and remember a time you felt great.
• Exercise. It’s scientifically proven that exercise makes you feel better.

This video gives some more ideas on how to reduce depression.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCINURSEg2Y

part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MCN22iPTrU

If you choose to see a therapist to treat your depression, you may be treated with Cognitive Behavior Therapy or CBT. CBT can be considered a form of self-help because of the approach used in treating your depression symptoms. Your therapist may guide this process before allowing you to continue the therapy on your own.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy may consist of keeping a log or diary of your thoughts or facing the problems that may be causing your depression. This method of therapy also helps you to face the problems that may be causing your negative feelings.

Determining the causes of your depression is an excellent first step towards determining the best course of action. In some cases depression suddenly appear in one’s life without an easily distinguishable cause. When this happens, it may be best to see a therapist while continuing your self-help tactics.