Use the Journal for Recovery

An amazing way you can use journaling is for recovery. This can be recovery for anything in your life that you are working through, whether it is from a mental illness, physical injury, or substance abuse recovery.

It also might be more simple than that, where you are recovering from a breakup or something that was affecting your mental state for a while.

Perhaps you were struggling financially, and just now coming around to getting your life back.

Whatever it is you feel that you are recovering from, writing in a journal can help tremendously.

What Type of Recovery?

Don’t stress too much about the type of recovery. Everyone has something they are trying to work through.

The journal is really going to help you get to that next step, but also have a place to vent and discuss what you are going through in private, in the meantime.

Ways to Use the Journal for Recovery

There are many ways you can utilize a journal to help with the recover process. Here are just a few options available to you:

Keep a Daily Journal – The simplest way is to write in your journal every day, whether it is about your recover or not. Chances are, aspects of the recovery are going to come up.

This is a good way to stay on track and also look back at choices you made to figure out how you ended up where you are.

Make Sketches and Drawings – A journal does not just have to be words on a page. Many people benefit greatly from sketches, doodles, or drawings.

The entire journal entry one day can be nothing but drawings and art, while other days it might be in the margins.

Art reflects so much of how you feel, even it if you don’t realize it.

Document the Process – Similar to a daily journal, you can instead make the entire journal about your recovery.

This is when you are documenting the recovery process each day, talking about the ups and downs, struggles and triumphs, successes and failures, and everything in between.

Try a Gratitude Journal – Another way to approach a recovery journal is to start a gratitude journal.

Instead of dwelling on how hard the recovery process is or constantly talking about the challenges, you instead shift your mindset to what you are most grateful for each day.

Set Goals – It is a great idea to add your goals, both short and long-term, to your recovery journal.

A short goal might be following your diet if you are recovering from an eating disorder, while a long-term goal could be going back to school when you are done with substance abuse or another type of recovery.

Expose Your Inner Demons

You will hear a lot about how journaling can help you find clarity, learn more about yourself, and gain some perspective into your life.

This is all true, but there is something else it can do for you – help you to get rid of all that resistance you have been holding onto, the things you tell yourself to feel better temporarily, but really what you are doing is hiding all of your inner demons.

These demons aren’t necessarily bad, or as serious as they might seem. Sometimes, there are just certain aspects of your life or personality that are being held back by worries, fears, regrets, or other concerns.

With journaling, you are going to learn a lot about yourself, your mind, and how you think and feel, to the point where you eventually are able to identify and overcome what has been holding you back for so long.

What You Will Learn in this Article

In the following pages, you are going to learn more about how journaling can help you understand more about yourself, gain clarity, and really embrace every part of you – not just the good.

Are you having trouble understanding your own motivations?
Do you feel like your fears or anxiety keep you from succeeding?
Are you looking for another way to find joy and happiness?
You will get all of this and more just by writing in your journal every day.

Overcoming Resistance
The first part of journaling has to do with overcoming resistance. This is when you start by the simple act of writing in your journal every day, then through those fun little lightbulbs that go off, you learn a lot more about yourself.

Why is this important?
Because you aren’t just focusing on only the good or only the bad – but a wonderful combination of both. Journaling can help you figure out what is holding you back. And trust us, something is holding back most people in one way or another.

What do you mean by overcoming resistance?

Another common trait in many people is that they know what needs to be done to improve their life, whether personally or professionally, but they resist.

The problem is that everyone resists for a different reason, so it is hard to get advice from others on exactly how to stop this bad habit.

What journaling does is provide you with more clarity, so that you can actually identify what those inner demons are, allowing you to overcome whatever is causing your resistance.

Remember this can be any facet of your life, such as:

Asking for a promotion or moving up the ladder at work.
Changing career direction or starting a business.
Making adjustments to your personal life.
Finding what will truly bring you joy and contentment.

There are so many ways you can hold yourself back in life, including in relationships, as a parent or friend, personal life, home life, finances, and just about everything else you encounter on a daily basis.

Gaining More Clarity

You will hear this a lot when you begin reading about and learning about journaling.

Clarity is so important to improve your life, but it is something that isn’t always easy to find.

People often get caught up in their day-to-day life activities, that they don’t take a step back, analyze their own mind and thoughts and feelings, and figure out where their motivations are coming from.

Do you want to understand yourself? Are you having trouble figuring out why you make certain decisions? Do you know that you hold yourself back, but no idea why?
This is the power of gaining clarity.

You learn more about yourself in ways you never thought possible without seeing a mental health professional.

You can actually look into your own thoughts and actions, and understand where you were coming from.

With a journal, you are writing down your thoughts and feelings regularly, and when you read it back, it often brings a lot of self-awareness.

You begin seeing patterns in your behaviors, understand what causes your anxiety or depressive episodes, and have a better understanding at where your mind is at during different phases of your life.

Everyone can benefit from gaining more clarity through journaling.

Embrace the Good and Bad

Part of finding and exposing your inner demons in order to move forward with your life in a happy and productive way, you need to embrace both the good and the bad.

This is true of everyone – you have strengths and weaknesses. Qualities that make you stand out, and qualities that might need some improving.

There is nothing wrong with things you might view as “faults”, however. There are some things that just make certain aspects of your life a little more challenging, maybe just a little different.

Other “bad” things have more to do with your thought processes or feelings about situations, whether sparked by anxiety or regrets in the past that have you a little fearful for making the same mistakes in the future.

Working on Embracing Both

As you begin writing in your journal more often, you will gain that beautiful clarity, and start to see these patterns emerge.

You learn in what ways you are making great strides to be a happier, more fulfilled person, but also some choices that you might keep making over and over again that are halting your progress.

Appreciate both!

Let the good enlighten you, and the bad challenge you. Become a better version of yourself. A happier person.

Utilizing Your Journal Entries
Your journal is going to become your new best friend in so many ways. Before too long, it is no longer something you schedule in to your day or feel forced to do, but actually look forward to doing.

This is partly habit, but mostly because of everything you gain.

Who knew just writing down your thoughts or your day on paper could make such a drastic difference in your life?!

The Next Steps
Once you have journaling down and you have started exploring who you are and what you want to do next, utilize your older journal entries. Don’t just write things down, put it away, and never look at it again. Use them!

You can keep looking back on older journal entries as often as you need to in order to understand where you were at a certain point in your life.

This comes up a lot more often than you might think.

Maybe you are struggling with something that happened about a year ago, and you want to see if you wrote anything about what you were going through.

Last week you might have ended up with severe panic attacks, and want to see if something triggered it.

Or maybe it is a little lighter than that, and you simply want to remember what your goals originally were, compared to what they are now.

Save your journals and read through them often to refresh your mind.

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