Therapeutic Journal Writing

An Introduction for Professionals

Kate Thompson

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857004932
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

Writing a journal is not just about keeping a record of daily events - journal writing provides a unique therapeutic opportunity for facilitating healing and growth.

The author of this book guides the reader through developing journal writing to use as a therapeutic tool. Keeping a journal can help the writer to develop a better understanding of themselves, their relationships and the world around them, as well as improve skills of problem-solving, decision-making and planning. As such, journal writing can be a powerful complement to verbal therapy, offering an effective and affordable way of extending support to troubled clients. The book includes advice on working with individuals, facilitating a therapeutic writing group, proposed clinical applications, practical techniques, useful journal prompts, exercises and case vignettes.

This clear guide to the basics of journaling and its development as a therapeutic medium will be a valuable handbook for therapists, health and social care practitioners, teachers, life coaches, writing facilitators and any professional seeking personal development in themselves or their clients.

PART ONE

Understanding the Basics

Introduction

From journals to therapeutic journals

The first journals are thought to be cave paintings, 5500 years ago. These cave paintings may have told the story of a community, depicting its hunting, its homes and its people. Cave paintings also, it is thought, carried metaphorical and mythological meanings and developed layers of meaning and sophisticated narratives whose stories are still being unlocked.

The need to express history and tell stories of existence in whatever medium a society has available can be seen to be a highly primitive human urge. Journals are a way of finding the narrative, of depicting experience and relationships in people’s lives. Narrative is a way of making sense of experience:

In striving to make sense of life, persons face the task of arranging their experiences of events in sequences across time in such a way as to arrive at a coherent account of themselves and the world around them. (White and Epston 1990)

From evidence that archaeologists have uncovered, it seems narrative has always been part of human existence. In pre-literate societies drawing, painting, making things was a way of recording the stories. Constructing a narrative, or ‘storying’, is a highly therapeutic act for individuals or societies (White and Epston 1990; Etherington 2003; White 2007) and journal writing is one of the most available ways to engage in it today.

In more recent times, women would sew their stories in embroidery and quilts. As literacy developed in the upper and middle classes over the centuries, journals could be recorded through the written word. Women would typically write diaries of how to run an efficient house, making their experience visible or legible, but as their lives expanded so did the scope of their journals. The women who joined the Western settlers in the new world of the Americas were often isolated and they had to adapt to new ways of life (e.g. Snow 2000; Bird 1996). They kept individual journals in which they recorded their feelings and the rigours of their lives. These helped to ameliorate the loneliness and helped them to understand the lives being lived, so they were in a sense ‘therapeutic’ journals.

Men generally told larger stories in their journals and diaries because they appeared on a larger stage and would record their heroism, their adventures and their triumphs or defeats. Their journals were written to stand as monuments to their heroic masculinity.

Writing personal diaries and journals, the kind consisting of a mixture of description and reflection, or external observation and interior exploration, is an activity designed to increase understanding and insight for the writer. The move from descriptive journals to reflective and therefore inherently therapeutic journals began in the nineteenth century and went much further in the twentieth century. The development of therapeutic journal writing as an explicit and intentional form coincided with the growth of other therapeutic methods and activities throughout the twentieth century and continues today.

Then came books about writing journals; books which developed journal writing as a tool or methodology for growth and then as a therapeutic medium. These books started to appear in the twentieth century, and gave readers guidance and instruction on how to write journals. There are six groundbreaking authors who developed the field and best represent the move from the writing of journals and diaries as a way of recording individual lives to journal writing as a therapeutic medium. Their work spans the period from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century:

1.Marion Milner was a pioneer of introspective journal writing as a way of examining her own thoughts and feelings. She originally published her work on this, An Experiment in Leisure, in the 1930s under the pseudonym Joanna Field; Virago re-published it in the 1980s under her own name. She used her journal writing as a method of understanding her own life and the nature of happiness (Milner 1986). After training as a psychoanalyst, much influenced by Jungian ideas, she used the technique as a form of supervision.

2.Ira Progoff was a New York psychologist who studied with Jung in Zurich and wrote the next book of the new genre. His work uses depth psychology and analytic ideas to inform his work with journal writing. At a Journal Workshop (Progoff 1975) describes The Intensive Journal™, a very particular method of keeping a journal for self-understanding and growth in which the writer or client creates sections for working with different techniques or time frames. Progoff developed this way of working in the 1960s to use with his clients as a therapeutic tool; initially he called the writings ‘psychological notebooks’.

3.Christina Baldwin came from a humanist and feminist perspective and her work has embraced a spiritual dimension. She combines political consciousness with spiritual awareness through the medium of journal writing as self-actualization (to live to the fullest degree). One to One (Baldwin 1977) was her first book.

4.Tristine Rainer was inspired by diarist Anaïs Nin and looked at the techniques she employed. The New Diary (Rainer 1977) is a synthesis and development of diary writing techniques for personal growth. (Baldwin and Rainer were writing contemporaneously, but without knowledge of each other or the activity each was engaged in. They met when their first books were almost finished and Christina Baldwin now recalls thinking ‘can there be room for two books on this very minority interest topic?’).

5.Kathleen Adams, a psychotherapist working in Denver, Colorado, wrote Journal to the Self: Twenty-two Paths to Personal Growth (Adams 1990) which is a guide for individuals. Her work offers a bridge from general journal writing to therapeutic journal writing techniques, which can be used in self-directed programmes or within the context of other therapeutic work. She also takes it further and develops programmes of Journal Therapy where the journal is the primary intentional modality rather than an adjunct to other forms of therapeutic work. Many of the techniques described in this book are adapted from her work.

6.James Pennebaker, a research psychologist in Austin, Texas, was the first person to conduct clinical trials on the health benefits of personal writing as a tool for healing and recovery and the physical effects of expressive writing. His work applies scientific method to analyse the effects of expressive writing on physical and psychological health. His many studies provide us with the most reliable data in this field. He has also developed a method of using expressive writing to heal trauma (Pennebaker 1990). His research looks at why and how writing works and documents the healing power of expressing emotion in language, in particular in written language. His work is fundamental in establishing a body of evidence to support what many of us know from our own experience.

Progoff, Milner, Baldwin, Rainer and Adams were all looking at how personal journal writing could be a tool to understand the self in greater detail and depth, how it could be used as a tool for healing and growth and how it could help us to understand the world of our own experience in order to make our lives, and those of our clients, students, supervisees, as rich and as fulfilling as possible. For these authors it was a conviction which arose from their own experience of the medium over long periods of time; their journals were a constant presence in their own lives.

As a research scientist Pennebaker’s interest was rather different. Pennebaker is one of those who only keep a journal in extremis and in times of stress, but he has experienced personal benefit in doing so:

In writing about upsetting events, for example, I often came to a new understanding of the emotional events themselves. Problems that had seemed overwhelming became more circumscribed and manageable after I saw them on paper. In some way, writing about my haunting experiences helped to resolve them. Once the issues were resolved, I no longer thought about them. (Pennebaker 1990, p.89)

These authors are in no doubt about the therapeutic potential of journal writing and they have amply demonstrated this for themselves and others. Their work has established a strong tradition. Because of them, everyone can benefit both professionally and personally from therapeutic journal writing techniques tried and tested from the middle of the twentieth century onwards.

This then was the beginning of therapeutic journal writing as a particular form, as distinct from description or appointment keeping; it marks the change from the unconscious therapeutic benefits of journal keeping experienced by many journal-keepers over the centuries to journal writing as an explicit therapeutic tool.

Diary or journal?

The word journal has its etymological roots in the French word journée – a day. In the seventeenth century, journée also meant the distance travelled in a day, a highly appropriate metaphor for the process we are talking about here. It was also a record of the day’s events (from which the term ‘journalism’ developed). Keeping a journal is a journey into the self and with the self; it is also a record of the life lived.

Diary comes from the Latin dies (day) so also has that temporal sense of a continuing existence, from day to ...