Something I believe in: accepting responsibility for healing the life we are handed. Expressive writing is a step in that direction. Writing in a journal helps delineate your personal experiences, explore the life you were handed at birth, serves to help you understand your personal wiring more clearly.
My book, "Learning to Love Differently., a healing pathway for families of addicts," focuses on strategies for navigating life if you love someone who is addicted. It's proven to be a helpful guide for many. Journaling is a tool that can guide you whether your lives are impacted by addiction or just plain emotionally complicated. Allowing yourself to stop and think about your interior life, using big bold handwriting to express anger, fear or just plain crabbiness. Filling pages full of confusion, resentments, and to explore more deeply how and who you love, gives all those emotions a place to stand. If emotions stay underground, stay unacknowledged or unexpressed or untended, toxicity can take hold and you can bet toxicity will find a way to tuck you into relationships that hurt self and others.
Toxicity finds voice through bullying others, personal illness, self-destructive behaviors, and a myriad of other dysfunctions. And it is so possible to weave those unhealed experiences into a new tapestry! Remembering we take ourselves with us wherever we go, so it is never too late to begin accepting the challenge of becoming a higher level you.
The above picture are pages from my journals. I decided to read them all a few years ago, (a bigger job than I anticipated as journals date back to age 14!) and to discard pages that included the three R's--rants, rage and raves. I have shredded those pages and are weaving them into creations to add to my collage work. Weaving the past into art form is, I believe, what we are each called to do, to create new experiences from past confusions or hurts.
Living life includes acknowledging our light and dark sides. Living life includes accepting personal accountability for our "issues," and healing what we can. We are all weavers.
Write your story. Write parts of your story. Appreciate the strips of your experiences and the opportunity to weave them into a new story. Yes you can!
One of my favorite quotes from Rumi: Out beyond the ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there." We begin our walk to that field by
taking a look inside our own hearts.
Hugs from this end.
Candace