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At 4:00 on Monday afternoon, the women arrive for writing group. Ruth, at 72, is the senior member both in chronology and experience. She has taught her own journal classes since her retirement and has participated in this group for nearly 4 years, during which time she has confronted her fears of dying, declared herself emancipated from the need to please others, discovered herself as a poet, and grown into her role as a wise elder.
Jean, 41, grieves the loss of a 23-year marriage and writes the stories of her hopes and dreams as a woman reborn at midlife. Eva, 63, is sheltered in the support of a caring community as she embraces retirement and heals from injury. Catherine, 49, plunges deeply into her own uncharted waters as she explores life after breast cancer. Susan, 57, seeks balance for the demands and pressures of corporate management.
For 2 hours on Monday afternoon, these women write their lives. With the glue of ink, guidance, permission, and witnessing, these women craft the images of their own emerging selves. In the silence of pages and the privacy of their own minds, they hear their internal voices.
"Something happens when I write that doesn't happen when I only think or feel or talk," says Ruth. "I come home to myself. I listen to myself with the same care and attention I would give a loved one."
The simple, yet powerfully effective practice of writing thoughts and feelings in a notebook or on a computer-keeping a journal-is a potent agent for change, growth, and healing. Journal writing offers a nonmedicated, client-centered, holistic, self-regulated approach to life management. The act of self-charting leads to the skill of self-reflection. This skill, when carefully applied, leads to the process of integration and ultimately to the art of graceful change. Healing happens.
But as a client once wrote, "A new pen and notebook do not a journal make." In this article I will discuss ways that we, as clinicians, can offer journal writing as a purposeful and intentional psychospiritual process-a therapeutic act in and of itself.
JOURNAL WRITING IS...
I frequently open clinical training in journal therapy by asking participants (who typically have experiential knowledge but no formal training in this work) to...
