I have enjoyed various blogs done by Lynnell and thought this would be a good one to share. At the bottom, check out her web site and bio.
Grief journaling is a technique I created to help me deal with the death of someone that I loved deeply. I did not seem to be able to cry or to talk about my loss and I was sliding into misery and despair.
About this same time I heard the psychiatrist Norman Rosenthal interviewed on the subject of dealing with trauma. He said that trauma victims have the need to tell their story, not just once, but over and over again. And that they need to tell it in a different way each time.
So I decided to write about my loss, using this idea of telling the story repeatedly, but differently each time. I found that it worked extremely well. It was a gentle, effective way to release sorrow and lift depression.
This is how I practiced grief journaling:
1) I chose a sad or traumatic experience.
2) I got an inexpensive, spiral bound notebook and start writing about the experience.
3) I did not allow myself to write more than one sentence per day. More than that was too painful, but I could manage one sentence.
4) After several days, I had written a short paragraph. That was when I stopped and started over on another page. I wrote about the same events, but used different words.
5) After several more days I finished that paragraph too.
6) I returned to the first page and started writing again, continuing to tell about the tragedy that had I had experienced. But always, just one sentence per day. And at the end of each paragraph I stopped, moved to the second page and described the same events over again—using different words.
7) I continued in this manner until I had described the tragedy completely at least two times.
8) I didn’t go back and read over what I wrote. In fact, I may decide to discard it. It was the writing process that seemed to be important, not the finished product.
Because this is such a slow process, it took me over a year to describe the trauma that I was feeling. But I experienced immediate relief—from the first day that I wrote the first sentence. My depression started to lift and I began to feel that I could cope with my grief.
From time to time, the depression would return. Every time this happened, I realized that I had forgotten to write each paragraph two times. Apparently, repetition is an extremely important part of the process. When I went back and started rewriting the experience, my depression would again lift.
I am not a therapist or a psychologist, so I do not feel I can prescribe grief journaling for anyone else. But it has been so helpful to me, that I thought I should share it. You can decide for yourself if it is something that you would like to try.
Bio: http://notyetagoddess.blogspot.com/
(BY THE NUMBERS)
0 smart phones 1 husband
2 children 3 musical instruments
4 holy books 5 book clubs
6 tomato plants (this year) 7 children in my family of origin
8 writers in my writing group 14 months since I started blogging
26 nativity scenes 37 years of marriage
40 years of Lyme Disease 55 nieces and nephews
56 years since God and my mother gave me human life
