After each of our sessions, immediately after we got home, Carmen would write in her therapy journal a summary of all the work we had done that day. She meticulously wrote down everything we had talked about, also the memories and difficult situations of his childhood that we had worked on in the session.
The young woman told me that, after her work in the session, she loved having that personal time to take her notebook and write her impressions of everything she had just experienced. For her, this was a moment of intimacy and introspection. It felt like it was a continuation of his therapy. And so it was.
In addition, between sessions, Carmen also wrote down in her diary all the dreams she had and could remember. Later, in the session, we worked on them and saw how their meaning was related to Carmen’s therapeutic work, both in the consultation and in her journal writings.
Why does writing help us so much?
Many people are unaware of the powerful healing power that writing has. Writing helps us open doors that have been closed for a long time in our unconscious. It also allows us to connect with our intuition, with our true self, with those forgotten memories that we need to remember and work on in order to move forward in our lives.
As was the case with Carmen, when writing about the session we had that day (in which we had worked on some traumatic scene from her past), other memories of his childhood surfaced. In this way, she was able to relate them to her therapeutic work in the consultation and realized the similarities they had with the memories worked on in her sessions. Perhaps, for example, they were situations where she was punished or where she felt alone because no one in her family cared for her.
Actually, the writing support of therapy happens just as Carmen described it. Keeping a therapy journal helps, first of all, to keep a record of everything we do and to perceive the progress in the achievement of the objectives and to deepen in self-knowledge. However, the importance of writing goes much further.
- Writing about the emotional world establishes a connection between head and heart, between the rational and the emotional world, between the exterior and the interior of the person. Writing helps us to better understand the reality that surrounds us and the obstacles that we encounter in our lives. Obstacles, many of them, originating from situations and circumstances that we have forgotten and that we need to remember in order to overcome them and move forward free of them in our lives.
- If you work on the habit of writing in a quiet environment, where you can be concentrated and without any external distraction, the mind enters a special state of consciousness, where you can connect very directly to memory. And not only with a memory of events, but also of emotions.
- If you’re writing specifically about a particular emotion (fear, anger, etc.), other earlier memories that were also suffused with that emotion may come to mind. Thus, we can go back in time until you reach truly ancient memories.
A simple therapeutic writing exercise
All the information that emerges with writing is very valuable for therapy. Each memory is like a piece of the puzzle of our lives. that we try to assemble throughout the sessions. The more we can understand our past, the more ability we will have to change our present.
Thanks to your writing exercise, Carmen was able to become aware of the repeated patterns in her life and, in this way, advance in her therapy in a much faster and more efficient way, since she could clean up, not just one scene, but all those related to that destructive pattern for her.
Also you can benefit in your life from the healing power of writing. In addition to starting some, you can do this simple exercise that I propose. We will carry out with him a small introspection in your life:
- For a week write down every day, before going to bed, five words that summarize your day.
- At the end of the week –with these 35 words that you have written throughout the seven days– write a text where the words appear in the same order in which you wrote them down (don’t worry too much about the wording and grammar). .
- Once you have written the text, read it and answer the following questions. What are the main concerns and obstacles in your life?
- Now that you have detected them, the time has come to overcome these obstacles. Writing can become a great ally for this task.