Keeping a Journal
Why Keep a Journal?
There are many different reasons why you might want to keep a journal, including:
- For interest to record your observations or daily thoughts
- To help you express difficult issues in a 'safe' way
- To analyse and find solutions for difficulties
- As a form of meditative practice or self-discipline.
Keeping a Self-Esteem Journal
This webpage focuses on the kind of journal that might help you to understand low self-esteem if you experience it and to build your self-esteem. The principal idea behind it is to note down negative or self-critical thoughts in your journal and to challenge them in realistic ways so that they lose some of their hold on you.
1. Use a record keeping system that feels good and personal to you - that might be a notebook that you like or sheets of paper bound together or something else. Whatever system you use try to use one which you personally like or can take pride in.
2. Write something in your journal everyday. At first write all the different things that you are feeling and thinking about daily events and how your life is going and how you are acting. Note down your thoughts and feelings, anxieties, wishes, hopes, successes, frustrations and what happens on a daily basis. For a few days or a week do this without analysing.
3. After a few days or a week (whatever time is sufficient for you to have collected a reasonable amount of material) look back at the journal you have kept so far and observe out the negative or self-critical comments that you have made. Ask yourself:
- What patterns keep coming up in the negative or self-critical thoughts?
- Is there a particular voice associated with the negative or self-critical thoughts? - A male or female voice? Someone from your past or present? Can you identify who might first have made these kind of comments about you or triggered you into associating them with yourself?
4. Next, commit to challenging and replacing the negative voices and self-critical statements that you identified above. To do this, each time that you find yourself writing a negative or self-critical thought in your journal:
- Imagine what you would tell a friend of yours who expresses a thought like that about themself or their situation and write that down in your journal next to the self-critical thought or
- If you recognise a particular voice or identity behind the self-critical thought linked to someone you know, then ask yourself what issues they may have which prompted them to speak like that, because the negative comments may reveal something about them rather than you. Write that down in your journal.
- Also record in your journal any reasons that someone you respect who knows you well and values you might give for suggesting that the negative voices are too extreme in their criticism of you or inaccurate.
5. As well as challenging the negative voices in the ways indicated above:
- Think of someone from your past or present who is positive towards you in a genuine and helpful way. Someone who supports you and respects you. Imagine them being with you and write down in the journal the positive comments that they might make about you in response to your negative self-critical voices and/or
- Imagine yourself taking the role of a supportive and loving parent to yourself and write down from the perspective of that supportive role what you would say in response to the negative self-critical comments.
If this process for keeping a journal to address negative inner voices helps to build your self-esteem in a reasonable way then keep it up for as long as you find it helpful.
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