Writing to Heal
Writing as a Therapeutic Tool.
Writing to Heal
Writing is a wonderful survival, coping and self-recovery tool.
The benefits multiply when you develop a trusting relationship with a writing mentor. As your mentor, I can assist you in meeting challenges such as healing from traumatic experiences, in managing grief, in recovering from or managing mental illness, and in adjusting to major life changes.
Using narrative skills, I can help you transform painful experiences into a manageable perspective that liberates you to live more fully in the moment.
Writing tasks help you to develop self-awareness and problem-solving skills. These in turn help you to strengthen your self-esteem, build self-compassion, and pursue a purposeful and fulfilling life.
It does not matter whether you are a writer, a diarist, or a complete novice. The main thing is that you want to improve your life quality and be the navigator of your life.
To enrol for this private, one-to-one narrative support, reach out to me today.
Diary Writing
as a Therapeutic Tool
Insight and healing don’t always flow automatically from pencil to page. Diary-writing, or journaling, for instance, is a genuine dialogue with our self and sometimes our thoughts and feelings might go around in circles instead of straight ahead.
To be beneficial, diary writing requires self-help strategies, deep thought and concentration, and the ability to cope with frustration when a hoped-for insight does not come easily. In this way, my diary slowly evolved short daily observations as a 12-year-old to an intimate, free-flowing conversation with self 60 years later. Along the way, my diary moved from serving as a survival tool, and a coping tool for a severe mental illness, to a method for re-building, strengthening, and liberating my healthy self.
A private diary is like a best friend. A trusted friend. Besides communicating with self, private writing has helped me, and can help you, to communicate with others. For instance, we can select significant extracts and reshape them to share with trusted others.
We can help ourselves out of deep psychological holes through writing in our diary. Problems like traumatic stress disorder or a mental health challenge can seem impossible barriers. However, the combination of pencil and paper, regular diary writing, and a commitment to self-exploration with a trusted mentor can turn despair into hope.
Life Writing
and Narrative Mentoring
Life writing can be a useful tool to ‘speak’ on our behalf when verbalizing our feelings seems too difficult. Finding safe ways to share our private world in a narrative way can enable our experiences to be emotionally processed, validated, debated, and/or challenged. It can help us to gauge helpful responses when sharing snippets of our private world with others.
Be in the driver’s seat of your life!
The process of sharing writing, if not fully, perhaps in summary form or letter, as a basis for discussion and reflection in a safe, supportive environment, can help to ease deep-seated feelings of shame and stigma that may be the cause of resistance to engaging more positively in mainstream and realizing life dreams. Traumatic and hurtful experiences cannot be undone. However, narrative mentoring can enable painful emotions and related inhibitions to be addressed, re-packaged and placed in the context of life, in a healing way, allowing us freedom to move on, over time.
Dear Diary
Articles
The diary, a book in which a daily record of events and personal experiences can be kept, offers a window into life in the past.
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