Healing journal prompts help you process your emotions, direct your thoughts, and with time heal.
Healing journaling is a practice of creating space for all your thoughts and emotions to be expressed.
Through healing journal prompts you’re guided to identify, analyze, express, and release thoughts and emotions connected to the cause of your pain.
What is a self-healing journal?
A self-healing journal is a practice of expressing your thoughts and feelings through writing. Depending on the type of pain you’re healing from you can use appropriate journaling prompts to direct your self-healing journey.
Journal prompts for healing give your thoughts direction to help you gain clarity and perspective that will help you in the healing process.
Some people enjoy free writing, but most find it overwhelming. Grief, anger, sadness, and guilt can be overpowering. To deal with them you need structure, and boundaries made of the softest pillows, that’s what a self-healing journal gives you.
Does journaling help you heal?
Emotions must be expressed, if emotions are repressed they stay with you far too long, and the longer they’re pushed down the more difficult they become. A healing journal can be your safe place where you can allow yourself to freely express all your emotions and thoughts.
Once you start writing soon you’ll notice that when you allow yourself to be completely honest words start pouring out from you. Questions and answers come out from the depths of your soul. Raw truth that comes out may at first frighten you and make you feel worse but it will eventually help you heal.
Journaling to heal takes time and patience but if you keep to it daily and trust the process you’ll discover, like many others before you, the healing power of writing.
What should I write in my healing journal?
Allowing yourself to express your emotions is the first step to healing. In a healing journal, you should honestly write about all your thoughts and feelings. Pour out your soul into the pages of your journal. Write in detail how you feel and why you feel that way. Write all thoughts that come to you, without judgment, let them all come out.
You can also write about your hopes for the future. Keeping a positive outlook will help you look forward which is essential for healing. Suffering from something that happened keeps you in the past, shifting your attention to an optimistic version of the future will help you find the motivation for action in the present.
Make plans for healing. Write about activities that make you feel good and write plans for incorporating them into your daily schedule.
Healing journal prompts
Why do you want to heal?
This may be the most important question you’ll answer on your healing journey. Take your time and give an elaborate answer. “To feel better” is a superficial answer, you can do better than that. Dig deep and find the reason for moving forward. If you’re struggling to find why, consider your values and purpose in life and try to find your answer there.
Are you committed to healing?
Are you ready to stay with uncomfortable emotions? You can write a sort of declaration for yourself where you express your intention to heal and do whatever it takes to get out of the victim role and get into the hero role.
Write about what happened to you and how it made you feel.
One of the powerful techniques for dealing with difficult emotions is recounting what caused those emotions over and over again until the story stops causing strong emotional reactions. What you’re doing is you’re normalizing your emotional reactions so your brain will stop catastrophizing them. This might not be always easy and for certain traumatic experiences, you should do it with the guidance of a therapist.
How has your suffering affected your daily life?
How are you’re days now different than they used to be?
Write your lowest points
You can write this one at the moment you feel overcome with emotions. Write everything that comes up, how you feel, and what you think. Or if you can’t write in those moments, write about them after they pass.
What do you need to heal?
It’s surprising how many answers we can find in ourselves if we only dare to ask a question and patiently wait for an answer. Ask yourself “What do I need to heal?” or “What do I need to feel better in this moment?” and then quiet your thoughts, don’t try to answer the question with your mind, just ask and wait for an answer. If you resist the urge to answer your question, the answer will come to you suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere.
Try to come up with worse scenarios than what happened.
This is not to minimize the severity of what happened to you, but simply to shift perspective. Staying in the same circles of thought keeps you stuck, sometimes to break out you need to shake things up. This prompt may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for some, it helps to think about different outcomes that could have been much worse.
Which emotions are at the core of your suffering?
What do you think is the meaning of those emotions? How are you expressing those emotions?
When you’re suffering you rarely feel only one emotion, there’s usually a mix of a few emotions like fear, regret, and guilt. Separate those emotions and deal with them individually. We know the brain can focus only on one thing at a time, that’s why we feel overwhelmed when there’s more than one thought fighting for its place in the focus.
Describe how your emotions feel.
To do this, the next time you feel sadness, anger, anxiety, fear, or other emotions related to your suffering, stop the train of thought and just feel the emotion. Identify the exact places in your body where you feel it and describe the sensations you feel like pain, tightening, heaviness, emptiness, nausea, dizziness, pit in the stomach, stone in throat…
Which thoughts keep you in a state of suffering?
Ruminating thoughts are slowing down the healing process. Identify them and be aware of what they are and what they do to you. Choose which thought you’ll think about instead.
Are you engaging in negative coping responses?
Sometimes emotions can be too much to handle, for such moments arm yourself with healthy coping strategies. Make a list of helpful activities you could engage with when you want a break from feelings.
What brought you joy before that now no longer does?
How do you feel about that? Do you wish to enjoy those things/activities again? What is stopping you from enjoying them? In which circumstances could you enjoy them again?
What were you taking for granted before but now you appreciate?
How are you showing your appreciation? How could you create more space for it in your life? Sometimes life’s difficulties show us what truly matters in life.
Which thoughts help you feel better?
Write about opinions, memories, and beliefs that make you feel better, maybe hopeful, and help you make sense of the suffering you’re experiencing.
What is your purpose in life?
How could you use your purpose to express your pain?
In what ways could you express your pain?
Are there some activities you could engage in that will help you release and express your emotions?
Are you allowing yourself to feel all emotions connected to your suffering?
Write about your experience with those emotions. If you’re not allowing yourself to feel those emotions, how are you suppressing them?
How did what happened to you impact your loved ones?
Thinking of loved ones in difficult times and how they might also be hurting for the same reasons as you or because you’re hurting can be helpful because you remind yourself you’re not alone.
What does “healed” look like to you?
Write about thoughts and emotions you want to have and feel once you’re healed.
You can’t change the past, but you can create a future that is fulfilling and joyful.
Imagine such a future for yourself, what does it look like? How do you feel? What do you do? What brings you joy?
What could be a silver lining in your situation?
It’s ok if you can’t find any. Try anyway. The act of searching for the good in a bad situation builds up resilience, and resilience helps heal faster.
Who do you need to forgive?
Forgiveness is an important part of healing. What would it take for you to forgive?
In what ways could you use your experience to help others?
Can you draw some lessons from what happened to you? Can you think of some avenues to share your experience with others?
