A Slice of Life – With Jonathan Brower PHD #jonathanbrowerphd

Journal / Diary Keeping

Keeping a diary is something that only young girls do, right? Wrong. Diary or journal (I use the terms interchangeably) writing is a method of self-exploration that is used by adults in many walks of life. Let me suggest how you might use a journal for you best interests. The process and the results of keeping a journal are exciting and rewarding.

The first thing to remember is that there are no hard and rigid rules on how to keep a journal. You don’t have to fill up a page, or write on lined paper, write neatly, or be grammatically correct. Actually, you cannot do it incorrectly! All you have to do is what you want when you want. Journal writing encourages total freedom of expression and enables one the chance to see how their feelings and thoughts flow and ebb with their ever-changing life situations.

Approach your writing in a spontaneous and uninhibited manner. #familyandmarriagecounseling Write quickly so you don’t censor what you’re thinking or feeling. Go with the flow of the unexpected, the unchartered. Let your social roles and well-practice facades fade as your truer, inner thoughts. Write for yourself, for nobody else. What is of importance to you should go into your diary.

Contradictions will abound in your journal if you write as you feel in the present moment. Treat these ”inconsistencies” as welcome evidence that your ambivalent feelings are coming to the fore. It is our ambivalences, after all, that are the key to the understanding of our mixed feelings about important people and events in our life.

One particularly self-revealing journal writing technique is that of free association. In a sense, you let your hand and pen go where they will. Whatever comes is put on paper. Nothing is to be censored because it is silly, “doesn’t make sense” or is embarrassing. Later, maybe in a day, a month, a year, or a decade when you look over what you’ve written it may make sense to you and offer you valuable insights you hadn’t had before.

Not all journal entries need to be written. Drawings, doodling, and other pictorial representations of one’s interpersonal and intra personal processes can be amazingly revealing to one perspective can be amazingly revealing to one receptive for such self-knowledge. Pictures, doodles, and the like are often done during the course of the day in many contexts such as waiting on the telephone while on hold or during a tedious business meeting. Putting such creative items in your diary (glue, staples, or tape can be used to secure them on diary pages) and noting the time and context in which they were done can provide valuable self-insight when later reviewing your diary.

The journal offers one the ability to specifically work on relationships with other significant people, even if the significant others are no longer alive. Unsent letters and imaginary dialogues between two or more people often enable the writer to explore and express feelings that in “real life” are too threatening or scary.

Dreams, the royal road to the unconscious, can be effectively dealt with journal keeping. Merely describing the events of the dream, as best you can remember, and attempting to record your feelings during the dream will be invaluable in slf-exploration. With many dreams expressed on your diary, you will have wealth of information about your important conflicts, desires, and unconscious drives. Dreams have various levels of meaning and importance; with practice various depths can be recognized and appreciated.  Humans, after all, are highly complicated creatures and in their dreams they arduously work with important, and uncomfortable, material.

There are some excellent books about keeping a journal/diary. Should you want a list of titles, please contact me by email at jbrowerphd@yahoo.com. And I’ll send you a bibliography. However, it is important to remember that you don’t have to read books about it to do it. You merely need to begin and go where your intuition and preferences take you. I wish you well on an exciting and rewarding journey