Table of Contents
How do you journal for childhood trauma?
Journal Prompts For Past Trauma Write about the ways you still have healing to do. List 5 things, people, or places that make you feel safer. Write about the ways you’ve persevered despite the trauma you’ve experienced. Write about your fears as a child, teenager, and adult and how you coped with them. Research suggests writing about trauma can be beneficial because it helps people re-evaluate their experiences by looking at them from different perspectives. Studies suggest writing about traumatic events can help ease the emotional pressure of negative experiences. Expressing suppressed emotions or acknowledging and understanding a traumatic experience – natural outcomes of journaling – can be cathartic through releasing energy that is otherwise blocked. Journaling For PTSD From a psychological perspective, expressive writing appears to improve people’s coping ability with the symptoms of PTSD, such as anxiety and anger. Regarding physical changes, journaling can help reduce body tension and improve focus. Writing about thoughts and feelings that arise from a traumatic or stressful life experience — called expressive writing — may help some people cope with the emotional fallout of such events. The most important thing to understand in writing a character with a traumatic backstory is representing them accurately. Even if you have no experience with the issue, you can learn from real life. Research how people react to traumatic events, particularly the type of trauma you include. Is there a common reaction?
Does journaling past trauma help?
The expressive writing protocol consists of asking someone to write about a stressful, traumatic or emotional experience for three to five sessions, over four consecutive days, for 15-20 minutes per session. Research has found it to be useful as a stand-alone tool or as an adjunct to traditional psychotherapies. The Therapeutic Writing Protocol Therapeutic journaling can be done by keeping a regular journal to write about events that bring up anger, grief, anxiety, or joy that occur in daily life. It can also be used more therapeutically to deal with specific upsetting, stressful, or traumatic life events. The simple act of expressing thoughts and feelings on paper about challenging and upsetting events can allow us to move forward by expressing and letting go of the feelings involved. Expressive writing also provides an opportunity to construct a meaningful personal narrative about what happened. Expressing suppressed emotions or acknowledging and understanding a traumatic experience – natural outcomes of journaling – can be cathartic through releasing energy that is otherwise blocked.
Should I write about my childhood trauma?
Research suggests writing about trauma can be beneficial because it helps people re-evaluate their experiences by looking at them from different perspectives. Studies suggest writing about traumatic events can help ease the emotional pressure of negative experiences. Potentially traumatic events include: Psychological, physical, or sexual abuse. Community or school violence. Witnessing or experiencing domestic violence. When individuals talk about painful experiences with a safe, supportive, and attuned human; they learn that the trauma can be dealt with and difficult emotions can be tolerated. Memories can be organized in a healthy way rather than developing problematic beliefs and self-blame (e.g., “this is all my fault.”). Ever since people’s responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response. Recurrent, unwanted distressing memories of the traumatic event. Reliving the traumatic event as if it were happening again (flashbacks) Upsetting dreams or nightmares about the traumatic event. Severe emotional distress or physical reactions to something that reminds you of the traumatic event. Triggers can include sights, sounds, smells, or thoughts that remind you of the traumatic event in some way. Some PTSD triggers are obvious, such as seeing a news report of an assault. Others are less clear. For example, if you were attacked on a sunny day, seeing a bright blue sky might make you upset.