Day 8 TMS recovery

@bdg and @Jackowska - take an honest look at your inner dialogue when you try to journal. Are you by any chance subconsciously hearing your brain tell you "oh, no - don't write about THAT - that's too (embarassing, shameful, silly, unimportant, boring, etc etc etc.....)???? It's called "editing" and we all do it. And it is what keeps most people from experiencing the freedom of journaling.

It's important to note up front that even though it's called journaling, the professional proponents of therapeutic journaling tell us to throw it out right away (Nicole Sachs, and Dr. David Hanscom, for example). Dr. Hanscom calls it "expressive writing" rather than journaling, perhaps for this reason. I scribble (quite illegibly) on both sides of old notebook paper and toss it when the paper is full.

This is what our negative fearful brains do - and they are really good at it. The SEP gives you multiple opportunities to just list a bunch of things that you might write about. If you take an honest listen to yourself, and you see that you're stopping yourself from listing certain things - or avoiding certain things on a list that you managed to make - well, guess what. Those are the things you need to write about. Even if they seem silly to you (and by the way, that's your fearful brain trying to convince you they are silly or unimportant), you might be surprised. If you force yourself to face and write about those things anyway, the result might be quite revealing.

And believe me, I am speaking 100% from personal experience with this. It turns out that nothing was earth-shattering (I did not uncover any hidden abuse or anything like that) but what my brain was avoiding was getting in touch with myself at a very young age. By doing so, I realized (6 decades later) that as a young child I felt very isolated and awkward. This was probably a result of having too many younger siblings along with pretty bad anxiety which I'm sure I got from my mother before I was born (as the first child of an older mother who had problems conceiving and carrying before finally producing me three+ years into her marriage). I was only able to experience this by remembering and examining some incidents that came up during the list-writing exercises. And by experiencing this, I was able to start mitigating the lifelong effects (ie: many years of various TMS symptoms and equivalents).

And remember: knowing that you do not have to, and in fact should not, save your writings might help you to stop editing yourself. It certainly makes a huge difference to me.