WRITE NOW THERAPY!

Are you struggling with getting over a break-up, the loss of a job, a death, or just simply greiving and finding it hard to move on? Well, get over it! Snap out of it! Is that what people tell you or how it seems they are treating you? People hate people who are greiving or depressed or withdrawn. It seems a natural instict for people to lighten the mood with a joke or try and get you to smile over something trival when all you want to do is be sad, grieve, or wallow in whatever is hurting you.

Loss, depression, and heartache are as much a trial as physical illness. People don’t seem as quick to tell you to get over your cold, or the flu, of God forbid, cancer. People understand that physical illnesses take their time to heal, although, people being people will still make all sorts of recommendations for your physical illnesses; what you need is chicken noodle soup, tea, toast, vitamins, a perscription, etc.. They won’t simply tell you to get over it like they seem to do when our mental health is what is keeping us down.

Sometimes the hurt is so deep it seems we will never get over it. That life as it was has suddenly stopped existing and we will never be the same or be able to pull ourselves out of our despair.

The truth is you can get over anything that is holding you back mentally. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, there are ways to work through it and get better. The way you get over something like grief or a devistating loss is to push through it. There is no way around it. You have to go through the pain of the situation and find your own way to recovery.

Traditionally, people seek advice and the counsel of therapists and psychologists and through their own treatment plans they can guide people through the process of grief. It is a very helpful and reliable practice if you find the right person to get you through it.

LET’S WORK THROUGH WHAT IS HOLDING YOU BACK.

More recent discoveries in the world of physical, behavioral, and mental sciences have studied and proven that writing as therapy, also called narrative therapy, or simply journaling has had serious positive effects on all types of patients who have used writing therapy in conjunction with other forms of treatment (depending on the severity of the illness). Cancer patients, sexual abuse victims, victims of PTSD, and those suffering through the lose of a family member or loved one all showed signs of improvement and benefited from writing therapy. In fact, medical studies showed patients who wrote or journaled also demonstrated physical health improvements and not just improvements in their mental well-being.

Journaling seems simple but have you ever sat down and tried to force yourself to write? Certainly there are some young teenage girls who can wax poetic the victories and tribulations of their daily life in their diary, but for most of us, the idea of sitting down staring at a blank piece of paper or a computer screen can be daunting. It is enough to raise your blood pressure let alone help you get any better.

Guided Journals are easily found everywhere you look online. Amazon has probably 500,000 different ones listed online. You can even find countless blog posts will bullet point lists of guided journal questions to get your started. There are plenty of great resources available. The variety of such can be daunting without the right guidance.

You’re probably thinking writing as therapy works for some people but I don’t know how to write; I’m a terrible speller, I hated English, I don’t even know the proper structure of a sentence. I’m here to tell you that doesn’t matter. You’re not looking to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. You’re just here to help yourself get over something that has been difficult to get over on your own.

TRUST ME, YOU CAN DO THIS.

You may think you could never do this on your own. You need the help of a professional, a guiding force, a therapist, clergy person, teacher or mentor. You very well may think that. If you do, you can consult and get help from anyone you’d like. It should be encouraged. However, I am going to tell you that you have everything you need to help yourself through common ailments like dealing with a break-up or loss of a loved one without the help of anyone but yourself. It is possible. You have all the tools you need; your brain, a pen or pencil and any piece fo paper will do.

I have taught people professionally how they can get over whatever is holding them back in life by writing. Write about it. All about it. Write about it from every angle you can think of. Write about it sad or angry or guilty or fearfully. Write about it from all emotional sides. You just need to write and write and write until you can no longer write another thing about it. It’s perfectly normal if your writing takes you down rabbit holes and on tangents and every which way it can. The mind is funny when you turn on the flow of writing, all at once, it wants to get a bunch a stuff off it’s mind (haha). Your only job is to let it. Let your mind take you wherever it wants to as it relates to what you are grieving over.

It may take you awhile to get started. You may even have to get some unnecessary writing out of your way in order to get what you need to. Your mind may want you to write down a to-do list, a grocery list, a couple of reminders, etc… before you can get rolling. Do it! Have a tablet or postits or scrap paper around so you can write down all the stuff you need to clear your head of; the list, reminders, etc. When your mind is finally free of everything it can possibly think of to interupt and prevent you from doing what you have sat down to do, you can start writing about your problem.

You will need to write without end. You may stop and have to come back to it. The goal is to get every thought, feeling or idea down on paper about the problem you can’t seem to get over. You write until your mind tells you there is literally nothing left to say on the subject. When you are done, you will put all that you have written away. You’re not even going to read it or look at it. Don’t! You are to take everything you have written and put it away in a drawer and not think about it.

You may have just finished writing what you think is poetic genious or a revoluntionary story but you’re not going to read it and your are not going to tell anyone else read it. You are going to put it away and not look at it for several days. If you keep thinking about new stuff to write about it, it means you haven’t fully cleared out every possible thought or idea out of your head yet. You write that and add it to the papers you have hidden away and you aren’t going to look at them.

During the time you are not reading them, you are allowed to think about anything else you want. If you think about it and have more to say on the subject you need to continue writing. You haven’t exhausted the brain of all its thoughts on the subject. You write it and put it away.

DON’T JUST REPLAY THE SAME TRAGIC EVENTS OVER & OVER

One important point: in your writing all of this, you should not be rewriting or retelling the same story over and over again. Retelling what had happened as if a reporter or newscaster is not the point here. You may tell the story once but from there you need to ensure you are connecting what has happened to how you feel. The telling of how you feel about what the event or situation was done to you is more important that telling just the story of what has happened. You need to be willing and able to connect what has happened with your emotions. All of the different emotions you feel; sad, angry, upset, lonely, frustrated, etc. You’re likely going to feel it all so write it from every emotional angle you can. Then you are going to put it away.

Once you have written everything you can think of and put it away, you are going to find a new freedom. You likely won’t be entirely over the issue but you will feel a sense of lightness or less burden from it. You will feel slightly better from writing it all down. The more you write, the better you will feel.

After several days have passed and nothing else on the subject has come up or can be written and you have had several days of no further activity in your head about it, you can move on to the next phase. In this phase you are going to write everything you can about the ideal life you see for yourself when you move forward.

WHAT WILL LIFE LOOK LIKE WHEN YOU ARE OVER IT?

With the bulk of the loss or the problem behind you, what will life look like to you? What do you see for yourself when you are happy and ready to live life again? What is the dream of living as you move forward with your life. Spend as much time as you can think and dream and write about what you want life to look like as you move forward. It is very likely that what you lost will not be in your life as you move forward. So what does life look like without that thing  you are greiving over in your new happier life?

You can write for hours on this ideal life you are building for yourself. There will be fantasies and dreams (possibly real and some imagined). That doesn’t matter at this stage. This is about you and brianstorming what you want life to look like moving forward.

You take this step and write until you can’t write anything else about your new life. You should find this easier then the first step. You have had the practice and the words and ideas will come quicker. When you are done with this phase, you will do the same thing. Put what you have written away for a while and don’t read it. Not yet anyway.

You will start to find soime distance between yourself now and your loss or problem from the past. You will feel more removed from it because, frankly, it is more in your past then it was before. You have taken the time to write about your future now and that has creatd some space between that and your past.

Depending on how you feel about your past and what the issue was will determine the next step. If you are able to move forward from your past, you can take out all that you have written about your future. This one you get to read again. The difference is this time you are going to make some decisions about what you have written.

As you read through all you have written you should find things that make sense and are realistic. With those things you are going to decide if they really are something you would like to see in your future. Or was the idea of it when you were writing it all down just a wild hair that doesn’t sound as compelling as it did when first writing it down. Put a star next to the things you like and seem like something you can do. Cross out the things that just don’t sound realistic anymore or maybe what you read and think it sounds completely out of character for you, unnecessary or “stupid.” Sometimes we write things in the moment and go back and read it and wonder what we were thinking when we wrote it? That is fine. It happens to everyone.

Between the stars and the things you crossed out you should find the fantasies or the unrealistic dreams you wrote about. These are things that don’t seem stupid or unnecessary. These are things you wish would be realistic (FYI – if one of those things is having who or what you lost in your life you may need to go back to step one again and rethink what else you need to add to the first part and no you can’t read what you wrote the first time around. That is still something you can’t and won’t read).

Between the  starred realistic things and the fantasy/dreamy stuff you should see a future that has things that are immediate or should be possible in the short-term. You should also see some things that are going to take you more time to accomplish or get to. You will then be left with the dreamy stuff. There is nothing wrong with positive dreamy stuff. You just need to recognize what is real and what is fantasy.

CREATE A LIST FOR REAL SHORT AND LONG TERM; DREAM, REALITY, AND FANTASY

From this point, you should see a world and future for you moving forward that makes sense to you. You should see some things that can be goals for you as you move forward. Steps in the process of moving forward give you something to focus on and work toward. This brings you hope for a future that you designed that has defined steps to get there.

Writing through your problems and troubles takes time. Even with your future plan ahead of you, this is just the beginning. This is life and there are going to be new problems or old problems not worked through yet. The good thing is you have some basic tools through writing to help you through what will come up next in your life. You can also build on those basic tools and find new ways to work through your next problems.

Through this basic writing process (notice I didn’t say easy…its not going to be easy) you will start to see what was holding you back melt away. It may melt like an ice cube on a sidewalk on a hot day or it may melt slow like a polar ice cap. Most will find it a slow melt. It may even be a slow process depending on how long you take with the first step. If you can’t seem to move on from step one for a long period of time, you may require some additional guidance that can be offered by a mental health professional, coach, or therapist. It is something I can help you with on a more indiviudal level if necessary.