Journaling. In some rooms I’ve been in, that word would instantly get hackles raised. It’s one of those things like yoga and mindfulness that get recommended to people all the time as if they are a magic cure. I practice each one of those strategies, I know they’re great, but so often they are offered in places where people really just need health care and a living wage. Or recommended as The Right Answer without any acknowledgement that they are inaccessible to a lot of people.
As a writer, clearly journaling is in my wheelhouse. But you know who it won’t work for? My teenage son with limited motor skills and a vision impairment. My teenage son with expressive language limitations. Anyone who has trauma around school work or family members who invaded privacy. Anyone who is living in an unsafe environment.
The thing that makes journaling work isn’t the journaling, it is the time spent thinking deeply about your life and reflecting on what you want to do about that. The embodied practice of writing longhand seems to have some effectiveness, but is there a reason that couldn’t also happen through the embodied practice of intuitive movement, or practicing contemplation during a long workout?
There are many ways to peel an orange. It doesn’t matter how you create the time and space and practice for yourself to reflect on your life, it just matters that you find a way to do it that fits into your particular circumstances.
Through a Reflection practice, we can improve emotional health and work towards self acceptance by becoming adept at regulating our feelings, finding solutions to support our limitations, and challenging outdated or incorrect beliefs.
Improving your emotional health is never going to happen by having fewer emotions. That is numbing and repression and denial. To improve your emotional health you actually need to get more fluent in your emotions. Emotions are reactions, and when you learn how to be in charge of the reaction, you have a lot more autonomy over your life.
Reflection is the regular practice intended to address your emotional health needs. It is anything that allows careful consideration of the values you hold, choices you make, feelings you process, and where change is needed in your life.
It could be different forms of therapy, meditation, group recovery meetings, time in nature, mentors, cultural practices, art, stories, talks with friends, enneagram or astrology, a gratitude practice, spirituality or religion, and of course…journaling. The goal is something that is achievable for you that creates the conditions for contemplation.
Actually looking at ourselves deeply – our choices, our behavior, our beliefs and feelings – can be incredibly confronting. It often feels much safer to stay in denial. But denial is a barrier to self care. As Alice Miller wrote, “No one can heal by maintaining or fostering illusion.”
Reflection allows you to be intentional about the life you are building for yourself. Instead of the powerlessness of avoidance and denial, reflection allows you to imagine solutions. Could the world be different than you were taught? Could a change in behavior change the outcome? Could you build a life that didn’t hurt to live?
The values instilled in us from the systems we are born to often don’t actually serve us. There are values you inherited from your family, your community, your faith or belief tradition, your society, that were formed for a different purpose than developing your personal wellbeing as an adult in a modern world. Maybe it is an outdated superstitious belief about who gets sick and why. Maybe it is a faith tradition that doesn’t work for you in your adult life. Maybe it is a way of relating that was only relevant in childhood and you’re still hanging on to it as an adult.
Maybe the inherited value causing you pain is a bias about what kind of person qualifies for dignity. Do you believe sick people deserve dignity? Fat people? Trans people? Immigrants? Do you believe you have to earn your place in humanity through your job? Do you believe that some kinds of people are better than other kinds of people?
Whatever you believe about the dignity of other people is going to impact how you see yourself. You will either hate yourself for any sign of similarities, or you will deal with the pain of cognitive dissonance for holding two sets of values. Ask yourself what you believe about who deserves care, and you’ll discover why you believe you don’t.
Through a regular reflection practice you can discover these beliefs and measure them against reality. You can set your own standards for what “success” means to you and rejoice when you meet that definition. You can decide what your measure of ENOUGH is and stop feeling like a failure for not doing more.
These stories and beliefs lurking away unnoticed, stories about who is worthy of care, what it means if you need help, what it takes to be “good” in a role – are why so many of us struggle to change our self care habits. Because somewhere in there is a belief that disqualifies us from deserving care.
Virginia Satir, a psychologist often credited with creating family systems therapy, wrote, “Maybe one of the kindest things we can do for ourselves at this moment is to take a look at everything we believe in and ask ourselves if it really fits or if it’s something that we were told should fit.”
We often pick the goals we pursue because we were taught they were the “right” things to do. From musical, athletic, or academic goals as kids, to career paths, children, and personal success as adults, many of the goals we choose aren’t because they were our own desire, but because of some other reward. Approval from family, status from society, some promise of health and happiness we get sold. But none of those people have to live with the consequences. You do.
Time spent in reflection can help you evaluate if the goals you are attached to are actually what’s best for you or getting you somewhere you enjoy. It can help you decide if that goal is actually contributing to your life, or if you are pursuing it for other people.
Thinking deeply as a way of reaching for self acceptance will help you uncover behavioral changes you can make to create different outcomes in your life. Through reflection I have often discovered ways that I was contributing to my own problems or repeating patterns that didn’t serve me. I could find the changes to make that were within my control.
Emotional health also means learning to process your emotions in a constructive way. I spent nearly all my life feeling paralyzed and powerless in the face of my emotions, and it had an enormous impact on my work life and relationships. Through regular practice I’ve learned to feel the feelings on my own terms. Not through denying them or numbing out, but by choosing a time and place when it was safe, and then feeling them in my body until they were finished.
When I felt overwhelmed by my emotions, I’d repeat to myself like a mantra: “I am not the feelings, I am the witness to my feelings. I am not the feelings, I am the witness to my feelings.” I would envision myself like a surfer, riding the waves. I am not the intense swells, I am the surfer on top, staying above and along for the ride for as long as it lasted.
Feeling your feelings can be overwhelming at first, so it took me practicing a little at a time. If my feelings were the ocean, then I regularly had 30 foot swells crashing against my shores. Feeling my feelings in those conditions would have drowned me. So, through a regular reflection practice, I got used to a little bit at a time. I went in to my toes until I got used to the feeling. I went up to my knees, then my waist, until I felt comfortable in these waters.
I stopped feeling shame over my big feelings once I learned tools to deal with them. I love the RAIN approach created by meditation expert Michelle McDonald. Recognition Acceptance Interest Non-Identification. Recognize the emotion present, Accept the experience without resistance, approach it with compassionate Interest, and then observe it from a place of Non-Identification.
I started talking about these bursts of emotion I experience like they were the weather. Because like the weather, it passes. I’m like that Mark Twain quote, “If you don’t like New England weather, wait a few minutes.” Sometimes I need to stop trying to keep it together and just fall apart for a second. I have a quick rainstorm of a cry session, or a rage filled lightning storm, then I pull myself back together and get on with my day. I don’t have to be ashamed or repress my emotions, but I can still choose where and how I process them.
As you make time to spend in reflection, you’ll be able to find solutions. Denial and shame keep us disempowered to solve the problems that plague us, but once you set those down you can use your creativity to find new approaches.
Maybe nighttime you is the most capable of focused intellectual work, so you learn to save those tasks for late at night. Maybe you can open up to the idea of using accessibility devices. Some of us discover neurodivergences that we can build accommodations for or behaviors we can learn to unmask. Sometimes it’s enough to just stop being ashamed for the ways you need help.
When you create a practice of reflection, however that fits in to your life, you will be finding ways to choose the life that you want to be living. You can find the beliefs that make sense in your life, and put those beliefs into action to discover empowerment.