The Therapeutic Power of Journaling for Self-Reflection

Journaling can be especially useful for clients who need help observing themselves calmly in order to spot what they may need to change.

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”

– Ray Bradbury

I recall visiting Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. The tiny space in which she and her family had to hide from the Nazis was pitiful and terrifying. Her diary, discovered after her murder in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the age of 15, showed the world her spirit, vivacity, courage, humour, and intelligence.

Nelson Mandela wrote his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, during his imprisonment on Robben Island, South Africa. Mandela was incarcerated for 27 years, from 1962 to 1990, as a result of his anti-apartheid activities. He wrote his book clandestinely, using whatever materials he could. It would have been confiscated had it been discovered.

In Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, the fictional titular character (possibly based on the very real Alexander Selkirk) keeps a journal of his life marooned on his desert island. In fact, the whole novel is in the form of a journal.

The question is, why did these individuals feel the need to put their thoughts to paper?

To communicate? To pass the time? To ‘collect’ their thoughts? To keep their sanity? To name their feelings and therefore feel some control over them?

Maybe all of the above, and more.

Far beyond being a simple record-keeping practice, journaling serves as a gateway to the depths of self-reflection and insight.

I’ve occasionally integrated journaling into treatment for my clients. It’s not for everyone, but I’ve found it especially useful with clients who need help observing themselves calmly in order to spot what they may need to change in the way of thoughts and behaviours.

Here I want to give you a sense of the potential of journaling and how practitioners can integrate it into their sessions.

But first, I want to delve into the many benefits this practice can offer.

The science behind journaling

Research consistently highlights the benefits of expressive writing.¹ The act of putting thoughts and emotions into words has been shown to have a cathartic effect, reducing the intensity of negative feelings and promoting emotional wellbeing.

In a landmark study conducted by Pennebaker and Beall in 1986, participants who engaged in expressive writing about traumatic experiences reported improved mood and reduced distress compared to those who did not.² The cathartic benefits of ‘writing it out’ recur a lot throughout the research.

Releasing the pressure valve and improving health

Journaling can release pent up emotional pressure, helping people feel relieved and therefore less stressed.

Supporting this notion, a study involving patients, families, and healthcare practitioners from a children’s hospital revealed a significant reduction in stress levels following a specific journaling exercise.³ Participants were instructed to:

• Write down three things they’re grateful for,
• Summarize the story of their life in six words, and
• List three wishes they have.

In a follow-up study conducted 12 to 18 months later, 85 percent of the participants said they had found the writing exercise helpful, with 59 percent continuing to utilize writing as a coping mechanism for stress.⁴

And journaling may even benefit physical health, too. One study, carried out over a four-month period, found that those who engaged in expressive writing had lower blood pressure and even better liver function!⁵

FREE Reframing Book! Just subscribe to my therapy techniques newsletter below.

Download my book on reframing, "New Ways of Seeing", when you subscribe for free email updates

Click to subscribe free now

We are story-making creatures

It’s important when surveying any therapeutic method to consider what primal emotional needs the technique may provide for our clients.

Life can seem chaotic and meaningless. We like to bring meaning,and therefore shape, to life by creating stories, be it gossip, news stories, fiction, or any other kind of narrative. We all create narratives around events in our own lives, with some of us casting ourselves as the hero or even the villain or victim.

I suspect the benefits of expressive writing accrue in part because it gives people a way of encapsulating, and therefore limiting, troublesome thoughts and feelings, thereby meeting the need for a sense of control. This can make people feel safer and more secure, and also more hopeful.

So, if you feel a bit of journaling may help your client, how can you usefully get them started?

Step one: Sell the idea

You could talk to your clients about the proven benefits of writing out our thoughts, fears, hopes, and even plans.

You could also simply describe how self-observation helps us gain a healthy distance from our own troublesome feelings so we can start to observe them more mindfully and thereby gain greater perspective and control over them.

But before going in with our literary guns blazing, we would do well to pay heed to the next tip.

Step two: Start small

Not every client feels confident to write expressively at great length. One guy expressed doubts that he could “whip up War and Peace!” I laughed with him and suggested he certainly didn’t need to do that!

Instead, I said, he could simply write down on a sheet of paper each day how anxious he’d felt on a scale of 1 to 10 (on average, across the whole day) and why he thought that day was worse or better than a day that he’d scored higher or lower.

His journal entries, to begin with, sounded something like this:

Wednesday: 4/10. Today was better than yesterday because I didn’t have so much time to worry, as it was busy at work and I spoke on the phone to an old pal of mine.

It was hardly War and Peace, but it wasn’t supposed to be. And, he admitted, it did feel good to do it. Eventually this client did start to expand his expressive writing.

So simply scaling or grading some aspect of the client’s feelings or life can be a useful and simple way of helping them write down something. And it can give them, and us, valuable insights into what’s going on and what helps or hinders their progress.

But rather than just asking our clients to write down their feelings during the week, which can be quite a vague goal, we can provide them with more specific ideas.

Step three: Provide ideas for structure

If our clients are new to journaling, we can provide prompts that encourage deep reflection. For example:

• “Describe a moment this week when you felt a strong emotion and explore why.”
• “List three things you are grateful for today and reflect on why they matter to you.”

Asking clients to notice three things a day they can feel grateful for can be powerfully therapeutic. Looking out for ‘small mercies’ breaks the negatively biased trance state of depression and, like journaling itself, the cultivation of gratitude has been found to confer all kinds of mental and physical benefits⁶ as well as improve relationships.⁷

We might also suggest clients use their journals to identify patterns in their thoughts and behaviours. This could include noting triggers for certain emotions or recognizing cycles of negative self-talk.

So we can suggest a structure for clients to follow. But if they are a little more confident around writing, we can go further.

Step four: Let it all flow

One client, Sandy, had many problems in her life. She had found structured journaling really useful and it had garnered much material for us to focus on in therapy, but she still felt herself stuck in some ways.

One day I suggested a new approach.

“Sandy, I have an idea. Why don’t you, tomorrow morning, get up and just write anything that comes to mind? Don’t even think about it. It might be interesting what manifests.”

I suggested she aim for around three minutes of writing a day in this sort of stream-of-consciousness way. I asked her to, once her fingers had just typed intuitively, leave it and not read it until the evening, at which point she could revisit it to see if it meant anything to her.

It was a revelation.

She found that, when she revisited her morning writings in the evening, sometimes it was “just nonsense” but at other times they contained real wisdom, and even solutions to dilemmas she’d been dealing with.

“It’s as though some wise part of me was telling the everyday me what I need to hear and do!” she told me excitedly.

We can suggest to our clients that they can journal in whatever way is easiest for them, from the humble pen and paper to making notes on their smartphone. Given the choice, you might encourage them to put pen to paper, as research suggests that this improves memory and engages more areas of the brain⁸ – but of course, they’ll benefit either way.

Finally, we need to respect our clients’ autonomy and remind them that they can share as much, as little, or indeed none of the contents of their journaling with us. Make sure they know that it’s theirs; it belongs only to them.

Journaling can aid in the development of emotional intelligence, helping clients name their feelings and understand their interactions through reflecting on them. Journaling can help us develop insight and perspective – and perhaps understand others better, too, if we reflect not just on the self but also on other people’s possible motivations and perspectives.

The accounts of people such as Anne Frank and Nelson Mandela show how writing can provide meaning and purpose as well as emotional succour even in the most dire of circumstances. And so too, many of our clients can be helped to greater equilibrium though the art of the pen.

Watch Mark Perform Therapy with Real Clients

Our ‘Netflix for Therapists’, Uncommon Practitioners’ TV, doesn’t just contain more than 100 films of live therapy sessions, but many other useful resources to help make your life as a practitioner easier and more rewarding. To find out how UPTV can make your CPD so much more fun, read more here.

FREE Reframing Book! Just subscribe to my therapy techniques newsletter below.

Download my book on reframing, "New Ways of Seeing", when you subscribe for free email updates

Click to subscribe free now

About Mark Tyrrell

Psychology is my passion. I've been a psychotherapist trainer since 1998, specializing in brief, solution focused approaches. I now teach practitioners all over the world via our online courses.

You can get my book FREE when you subscribe to my therapy techniques newsletter. Click here to subscribe free now.

You can also get my articles on YouTube, find me on Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook.

Notes: