Healthy Living

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Brené Brown, the noted American scholar, author, public speaker, and a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, once said, “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” We all have many stories to tell and every one of those stories is precious, some of them come with deep emotional scars, while others come with deep shame and guilt. No matter the emotional baggage that comes with them, each of them are gifts to be opened, explored, and treasure for they are key to mastering and overcoming our fears, our grief, our depression, and anything else that’s holding us back from becoming all that we can be, from becoming all that God intended us to be. Owning our stories leads to healing, owning our stories enable us to change our present, and our future.

You have a Story to Tell and Your Story Matters

Many of you reading this had a relatively happy childhood, while other, like myself, may have had a very traumatic childhood. I was born half blind and half cripple and was the favorite target of all the schoolyard bullies for many years to come. I had undergone several operations on my eyes and muscles by the time I was eight years old, but it wasn’t until I was in my early teens that I learned to fight and turned the tables on the bullies and I became the bully of the bullies. If being born half blind and half crippled wasn’t enough, I was born to a mother who didn’t want me and beat me with everything from melon crate slats to 2 X 4’s and would have killed me if it hadn’t been for my grandmother, her mother, who drove her off me with a baseball bat. I survived my childhood but I didn’t survive it unscathed, I grew up suppressing all my feelings of anger, hate, and inferiority. All those feelings affected me in all areas of my life for many years to come, in fact they led up to me committing a whole string of bank robberies and other armed robberies that led up to spending a third of my life behind prison bars. Perhaps if I had talked about my feelings or if I had wrote about them in a personal journal, my life would have taken a different path.

Writing, Keeping a Diary or Journal Leads to Emotional and Physical Healing

Writing is a form of self-help, other therapy that anyone can do, it doesn’t require any special training, and it’s affordable to all. Anyone can keep a diary or journal, and writing out your feelings in a diary or journal isn’t as threatening as telling those same feelings to a psychotherapist or even to a minister or priest, but it really does work. Dr. James W. Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters during an interview on personal essaying, “As the number of studies increased, it became clear that writing was a far more powerful tool for healing than anyone had ever imagined.” Graham Greene, the world acclaimed novelist, put it this way, “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the pain and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

Parts 2 and 3
In parts 2 and 3 of this series we’ll take a closer look at how writing in a diary or journal helps us heal emotionally.

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