September 3, 2013
Michael Rank, PhD, an associate professor and co-director of the International Traumatology Institute at the University of South Florida in Tampa has said that journaling is the "most effective and cheapest" form of self-help. He said, "If you do it in earnest, and you work through your resistance, you will improve." If you don't like writing you can also record your thoughts on a mini-cassette recorder, says Dr. Rank.
Although I was not aware of these views when I experienced my bouts with depression, I found writing to be the answer to feeling desponded and hopelessly depressed. If you read my book you will notice that it is full of personal suggestions on how to deal with clinical depression. Often you may feel that I write as if I was counseling the person reading the book. However, it is really a description of my own self-help approach when I was feeling depressed. When I wrote my essays my intention was actually to counsel myself. I wrote them from the perspective of the conscious part of my brain counseling the subconscious. After being treated by so many social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists I felt that I knew all I needed to know about how to do a counseling session.
However, in my case I felt that I could do a better job with myself because it is hard for psychotherapists to hit the nail in the head when trying to understand what is going on with you. This can happen because a patient may feel reluctant to fully disclose his or her feelings on very personal issues and, thus, the mental health professional never gets a good picture of what the person’s emotional issues really are. If the psychotherapist actually begins to understand them some external situation may happen like the patient may change schools and go to another part of the country to pursue the studies, change jobs and the new job is in another state, or the patient decides to move to another part of the country to start anew to hopefully turn his or her life around. However, that patient’s baggage of emotional issues will follow him or her to wherever they go and, thus, may again decide to start seeing a new psychotherapist, who will have to start to know the patient from scratch.
In my case, I found that many of my emotional issues came from my subconscious and felt that the conscious part of my brain was better suited to help my subconscious understand where all the hurt was coming from. Thus, I began to write about emotional issues as I experienced them. If someone said something that brought me down and made me feel unhappy I would start writing to dissect my feelings by asking myself why, how, and when. I would ask myself why the words that were said were so hurtful to me if the person’s intent was not to hurt me. I then would ask how those feelings came about and when I first began to experience them early on in my life. I would write the essays and later on that day or the next day I would read them and would find that I had written a lot of nonsense. So I would then rewrite them to make more sense and kept rewriting them until I had clear understanding of what the real issue was. I would then write about how to let go of such feelings and why it was important to do that. When I found that letting go of such feelings was a challenge for me I wrote essays about understanding the process of letting go and how to actually succeed at it.
In addition to those essays I wrote about failures because although by all accounts I could be considered to be a success story I felt like I had failed in life. Thus, in my essays I again began to dissect my feelings about that and rewrote my essays until I felt I had understood why I felt the way I did about my accomplishments and why it wasn’t helpful to do that.
Through that process of understanding my subconscious I found that my belief system was deeply conflicted because what I had been taught to value in life was not what I was living. Thus, I wrote about the importance of reconciling my belief system with what I had achieved in my life and continued to rewrite about it until I felt at peace with it.
I rewrote every essay numerous times and eventually found how and why all the issues that I wrote about contributed to the state of mind that I was experiencing. By writing essays dissecting just about every issue that had affected my sense of sanity I began to feel in control of my life and experienced a sense of emotional peace.
Thus, my advice to anyone that may be feeling desponded and hopelessly depressed, is to write exhaustively until you can achieve the level of emotional peace that you may have been searching for.