The Benefits of a Grief Journal
When we’re grieving, we must have some form of support—people we trust, that we can lean on and talk to. But although an emotional support is important, some of the most difficult parts of the grieving process are best dealt with in private. This is why it’s healthy to talk about the loss—every facet of it, every emotion that it wrings out of us—by writing.
And yet despite the (sometimes life-saving) value in journaling through the grieving process, most of us don’t readily choose to include it in our journey through a painful time. Here are four reasons why keeping a grief journal helps get us through:
- A journal helps us overcome our avoidance tendencies.
Grief can overwhelm, and for a person grieving, it can get quite easy to resort to
experiential avoidance (i.e., the avoidance of thoughts, feelings, memories, physical sensations, and other internal experiences, despite the harm it causes in the long run). Certainly, some degree of avoidance during the grieving process is understandable; a person can only take so much in a given day in a long stretch of days filled with grief-related triggers.
When we journal, we engage in expressive writing to talk about the person who is gone, or any tragic loss for that matter—to relieve our experiences around them and describe the new ones without them; to express our wishes, our frustrations, and, yes, our anger and resentment toward them or other people, if indeed it’s part of our grief, though we may refuse to acknowledge it to friends and family.
- A journal helps mitigate the effects of grief on our physical and mental health.
Distraction-free journaling facilitates mindfulness, which is a vital component in the healing process. It allows us to identify emotions that we may have been avoiding, most likely because they are linked to certain unhappy, unpleasant, or even traumatic aspects of our life with the person we lost. But repressed emotions are harmful, as Freud himself reminds us.
Journaling offers an outlet for uncensored expression, and the resulting catharsis can alleviate the interrelated physical and mental health issues brought on by grief. For one, the acceptance that inevitably follows a cathartic expression/experience is a factor in reducing our anxiety and depression, restoring our natural sleep pattern, and lowering our risk for heart disease.
- A journal can open the door into creative writing or other creative pursuits.
Creative writing is a logical outlet for grief. Some of us may not be able to engage in it so soon after a loss; but for others, it can be a lifeline, desperately needed right then, so they can tell a story in its rawest version that they can’t really tell those close to them. Either way, creative writing can serve as an extension of our catharsis, as well as signal a new chapter in our life.
- A journal can channel the transformative power of grief toward a positive place.
Grief transforms us. Things may return to normal after we have gone through the “official” grieving process, but nothing will really ever be the same again. And our healthy response to this reality will be acceptance and moving on. Here again, we take note that the mindfulness we cultivate when we journal works with our grief to transform us into a version of ourselves who has accepted the loss, who has been healed, and who has cleared a space in our lives for what life has yet to give, rather than someone stuck in denial or merely resigned and trudging along.
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Journaling helps us process our grief instead of bottling it up. And because we need to have as much quiet and as little distraction as possible, pen-and-paper journaling is a great option, to ensure that we achieve that level of mindfulness necessary to undertake the difficult task of reflecting and self-healing.
Explore how Journalz can help you get started on a grief journal to help you on your way to healing.
Should you shield the valleys from windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their canyons.
—Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
| Read more on grief and the importance of mindfully living through it in our series of articles on grief journaling. |
You might be interested in these resources:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (Steven Hayes, Kirk D. Strosahl, & Kelly G. Wilson)
Opening Up by Writing It Down (James W. Pennebaker & Joshua M. Smyth)
