Follow Your Myth

As a Jungian and Depth psychotherapist, one area I am interested in is finding new strategies to support us in mental health care.  We all have coping mechanisms in our lives, and often our coping mechanisms are unhealthy or simply nonexistent.  I use the word mechanisms because these are more like automatic ways we attempt to regulate ourselves.   If a mechanism or habit is unhealthy, then a strategy is something purposeful we bring into our lives to seek not just regulation but also insight and self-awareness.

Some of us binge television or drink excessively, or smoke pot as mechanisms for self-regulation. Whatever ways we are coping and trying to let go at the end of the day may not be contributing to a better life though, which I think we are all hoping to achieve. Can we deal with our pains and regret?  Can we wrestle with neglect and abuse?  How do we channel loss?  

Can we cultivate self-awareness and insight?

Among the healthy habits that psychotherapists encourage is journaling.  Journaling is a way to dive deeper into our self-work when we are not sitting in front of a psychotherapist.  It is a time when we track our experiences or behavior.  It is a time to integrate and reflect.   

Journaling is a wide net to cast though, and understandably clients will often get nervous about journaling.  

Here are some tips for journaling, and how to approach this in a way that allows for growth, becoming unstuck in our lives, and integrating the things we are working on or wish to invite into our lives.

#1 Set An Intention  

At the beginning of a journal something I’ve begun to do is set an intention for a journal.  An example may be, In this Journal I am Reflecting on my relationship with my Dad, or maybe it’s a celebration journal.  Trying to separate out different thought processes can be helpful.  If you want to have a journal where you are cultivating self-awareness and working on things you are wrestling with in therapy, then make that a separate journal from your daily journal.

#2 Don’t compare your journaling to Others:   

Reading journals by others can be helpful and also intimidating. When you read a memoir for instance, remember this is a book by a writer (or a ghostwriter) that takes a lot of time, editing, and perhaps a lifetime of work.   Don’t compare your journaling and self-reflection to the memoirs of Oprah, Obama, or Stephen King!  In particular, when we are working on self-reflection and cultivating self-awareness, we are trying to find our authentic thoughts and feelings, not present something to an outside audience. This is for yourself.

#3 Don’t wait to write.   

People often think that they must have some epiphany they wish to write, some deep insight that they must write, but only when they are ready!  The truth is that in journaling we are looking to track things in our lives. We want to track, process and integrate what we may be working on in ourselves, some of which comes out in therapy. Other times it comes out in other ways that we use to look inward (like meditation, reflection, contemplation), but it takes practice. Journaling is meant to be a practice, not perfection. 

Here’s an example of tracking:

Feb 7, 2016

Today I went for a walked Central Park entering at Strawberry Fields, and felt ok even though I used to walk this with my ex.  I made my way through the park and felt pangs of loneliness or maybe jealousy when couples holding hands passed, but by the time I got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I felt different. I think it’s the first time since we split that I felt lighter again, not completely light, but better.  It felt like something had shifted in me, and that felt good.

Here’s another example of tracking and processing:

June 7, 2020,

I found myself sleeping late today, and instead of going to the gym to exercise, I binged The Tiger King all day. It’s so dumb. I wasted all day and couldn’t get going. Afterward, I felt ashamed that I wasted another day.  My therapist says I should track what happens on days like this.  I don’t know what happened, but she says I should track that too. I suppose it’s what we talked about, I just felt a sigh of, “neverminds” again, and gave up.  I don’t know where that phrase came from “nevermind” and why when I feel it, I feel compelled to give in, to nevermind whatever I had planned.  It’s like I suddenly feel deflated, unmotivated and I hear this small voice in the back of my head say, nevermind.

#4 It’s a Practice NOT Precious.

A beautiful physical journal may feel too precious to write in unless one feels they have the perfect thing they wish to express.  Remember this is not meant to be precious but a practice.  

To support this better I recommend keeping separate journals!  

One journal may simply be an insight journal where you write about those things you may be working on in your life.  You may have a leather journal though that you use to mark events and special things and write reflectively on different occasions.  

Remember, you can have more than one journal.  

You may have a travel journal, and I invite you to keep a travel journal – but this doesn’t have to be that journal you write in about the things you are working on.  That is not, strictly speaking, your insight journal.  

In a travel journal, you can write whatever you want, but you’re trying to track the basics.  I was here on this date and did this. You track your exploration of the world, and it doesn’t have to be interrupted by your insight journal, although again there can always be overlap you can always express yourself here too.

Travel Journal

Dec 24, 2015

Today we went to the Eiffel Tower and explored Paris.  My favorite thing to do was to stroll along the Seine and try different foods at restaurants down cute little side streets.  The last time I was in Paris I had been married, but this time I had more fun because I was with friends who cared about me. It’s interesting how a trip can feel more alive, and full of color even in the winter, depending on who you are with.  

This journal is a little reflective, with some insight but it is not meant to be a process journal where your deepest darkest thoughts and feelings may be.

#5 Don’t overthink it. This is not Facebook or Instagram

Unless this is a journal where you are writing to your spouse on special occasions then don’t overthink what you are writing.  You’ve had a hard week, some things have happened.  You lost your temper in traffic, you felt triggered by the news, and you got a flat tire. You realize you’ve felt off all week.  You want to get to the writing, a stream-of-consciousness exercise on something that is bothering you, something you worked on to see what you arrive at.  Here’s an example:

Dec 20, 2020

I felt down all week. I didn’t even know what to talk about in therapy, I just felt mired in feeling down, and I guess I complained the whole time.  The traffic, the stupid people at work over and over I was complaining.   My therapist told me it looked like I was having trouble breathing when I spoke, so I tried to calm myself.   I thought about that all day, the feeling was that I was suffocating, I couldn’t breathe from the pressure of the job and my bills, and I realized it wasn’t the first time I felt like I was suffocating from pressure.  At that moment when she told me I was having trouble breathing, I realized I could smell smoke, my dad’s cigar smoke – and it’s been 20 years since I smelled that.  I realize now that I hated that smell, I hated the pressure he put me under.  I also realize I didn’t tell my therapist this, I froze up and she helped me breathe easier – but I didn’t tell her about smelling my dad’s cigar smoke and I don’t know why.

#6 Dialoguing

Think of the characters in the Disney film, Inside Out.  You have these parts of yourself like sadness, anger, joy or anxiety.  We can dialogue with parts of ourselves and wait to hear a response from that part of ourselves.  

We can take this further in a Jungian way and talk to more archetypal parts of ourselves.   Carl G. Jung spoke to various archetypal figures within himself one of which he referred to as Philemon.  Philemon, a wise old man appeared in a dream, but Jung created what we now think of as “active imagination” where we can go toward an image, whether it is something we imagine, or a dream.  Jung wrote; 

“Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought.”

-Jung On Active Imagination pg. 29

When we dialogue with a figure within, we can talk to them, and wait for a response such as Jung did.  This too becomes a stream-of-consciousness exercise, that allows for things to be expressed from a place within.   

We don’t need an archetypal figure to dialogue though, we can talk to our angry part, and ask what it wants to tell us for instance. We can talk to our inner child and give space for this child part of us to share something.   This may feel difficult at first, but like all these things, it is a practice. We are giving space for something to come up that needs to express itself, and we can dialogue with this part. The goal again, is to find insight, and self-awareness that may have eluded us before this.

#7 Dream Journal

This one takes practice because so often we don’t remember our dreams. Some will say they don’t dream, but we ALL dream, we must dream – remembering dreams is more difficult.   Others will say that dreams are nonsense, but to a Depth psychotherapist dreams offer up information from the unconscious.

A trick to remember dreams, is to set an alarm on my watch to wake me gently at 3 am.  I’ve tested this though to see when I’m most likely to wake from dreams, which for me meant setting an alarm each hour to see what I remembered.

When I wake from dreams after an alarm, I pull out my phone, and with the dream journal already open, I jot down a few notes. Sometimes it’s just a few words, “Rosebud, sled, Buddy, Elf.”

Sometimes the keywords are enough to remember when I wake in the morning. I’m like, oh yeah, I was sledding with Buddy the Elf on Rosebud.

As a Jungian I believe that we are often working on things in dreams, processing at different levels.  Now I don’t think it’s all valuable, we slip into that liminal dream space, and sometimes here the gears begin to move in a way that we do have epiphanies, and insights although sometimes they are cloaked in the language of the unconscious, like as a sled.

For myself I have an experience at times of dialoguing in dreams and discussing things. I refer to this person I dialogue with “the other” and although I have never seen this person, I am aware of when she is present. When I wake from a dream where I am talking to the “other” I pull out my phone and don’t ignore what little bits of conversation I may remember.

Okay, that is all my journaling advice for today.  What I’m getting at with all of this is to hone ways to look inward, to refocus our journey so that we can reflect, and find different ways to do this.  None of this is required but understanding that there are different ways to journal is one part of this journey.