Journaling for Healing and Transformation - Pt 2 Ep 132 | Guest: Kathleen Adams

 In the second part of Julia Marie's conversation with Kathleen Adams on the podcast Evolving Humans, they discuss the benefits of journaling. 

Adams explains that journaling doesn't have to be complicated and can be used to improve one's life. She suggests that it doesn't matter if you write every day and that the journal is a safe space for your thoughts. 

You'll learn more about the process such as: 

1. What kind of medium to use.
2. The power of structure, containment and pacing.
3. The dolphin dives practice.
4. The disclosure practice.

She also recommends reflecting on your writing as a good closing step. Adams offers a free online class and ebook with journal prompts to help beginners get started. She also discusses how to handle periods of silence in journaling.

RESOURCES:

Kathleen's Website
Kathleen's FREE Offer

Thank you for listening to Evolving Humans!

For consultations or classes, please visit my website: www.JuliaMarie.us

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Transcript

This transcript was generated using ai, and therefore may contain errors.
Julia Marie (00:00):
And now part two of my conversation on journaling with Kathleen Adams. Stay tuned. She has a special offer for evolving humans. Listeners, welcome to Evolving Humans, the podcast for Awakening Souls.
I'm your host, Julia Marie. Settle in and get ready for another spirited conversation. We've primarily been speaking about a spiritual journal, but what are some of the other ways I can use journal writing to improve my life?
Kathleen Adams (00:54):
Well, problem solving, there's something very organizing about telling a cohesive, coherent story about something that is not going well or that is going well. And just Dr. Penn, James Pennebaker is a research psychologist who's responsible for almost all of the, well, he's not responsible for almost all of the
research. His research has inspired almost all of the other people who are doing research in the field because he has this very simple model that is surprisingly effective. And the model is a four part, right?
Usually written over sequential days, but it doesn't have to be. It can be written over the space of a week or 10 days or something. After about 10 days, it's not as effective. But four consecutive days is not a hard and fast rule, even though that's what the research almost always is comprised of because that's how
researchers like to do things.
(02:00):
They like to get something structured going on and then move on. So the four-part study, the first right is on something in his initial research, and this is a predominant thing, still was about trauma. It was about the most stressful or difficult or traumatic event of your life that you have a hard time talking about. So
initially he was looking at disclosure. It's like something that you keep inside as a secret is more likely to make you sick than something that you can talk about openly with someone who cares or is compassionate or listening. So the first day of this four part ride is to just tell the story of the thing that
has been a secret for you, just the story as you know it. On the second day, you sort of add some depth. You look if the first day is you taking a snapshot of the problem. The second day is about looking outside the boundaries of the snapshot to see what else was happening. So you're looking at, was there something
going on in my family when this was going on? Is there something in the political environment? Covid would have been an example of everybody's panicked about the same thing.
(03:42):
Are there details that I, particularly when we are telling ourselves or someone else a story about a problem that is really on our hearts and minds and souls, we tend to tell it in the same way pretty consistently. That's the story that we know, that we know the story behind the story adds in layers and details. It's like, what else was going on that I forget to remember about this story? So that's what he's
going for In the second day's write in the third day, the third piece of the writing, we shift toward meaning. What has it meant to you to have lived this story? How has it caused you to move toward or away from things? How has it impacted your relationships? What has it had any benefit or value? Or has it really caused you to not live your life as fully as you would like?
(04:49):
And then the last ride is kind of synthesizing everything. And now that you've explored the story for three days, what can you move toward? And is there anything you can release? Is there something that you would set as a goal or an intention for yourself to do differently? And that's it. People they wrote in
proctored rooms, in the original research studies, these were all done with college students. They would go into rooms that were proctored by his graduate students and teaching assistants, and they would write for a specified period of time between 15 to 20 minutes, they would drop their writing in a Dropbox on
the way out. They never saw it again. They never processed it with anybody. And they got better health wise. After had a six week follow up, they were determined to have had increases in T lymphocyte cell functioning. The T-cell improvement lasted from the last day of the writing up to for six weeks, their T- cell functioning stayed increased, and for six months, the group that was writing about their in this pattern had fewer visits to the campus health center for stress related illnesses.
(06:14):
Then the control group who were writing about neutral things from that initial data. Dr. Penebaker theorized that when we are able, first of all that inhibition, the holding in of difficult material gives us only the opportunity to ruminate in the privacy of our own minds about this thing that we can't talk about.
What he called the inhibition of holding it in is resolved when it is told, when the story is told even to yourself, even if you don't keep it and read it over again, even if you never see it again, you still get the benefit. And he later identified that the capacity to tell a coherent, consistent narrative is organizing for
the brain and for the psyche. And there are health benefits as well as spiritual benefits to writing about problems. And it doesn't have to be in this structured form. I mean, that's a good way to do it, but you can just sit down and unload for five minutes about somebody that just made you mad or a problem that you
can't solve. It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be easy and fun and outcome oriented.
Julia Marie (07:45):
How does someone who's never written a journal even get started?
Kathleen Adams (07:51):
That's a great question. The first choice is always what kind of a medium do you want to use? A lot of people are afraid of those pretty blank books because they don't want to mess them up. And that's fine. I personally have no pride whatsoever about messing up a beautiful book because it's my journal. But I
love to write in books that are attractive to me. I'm also very partial to those black and white modeled covered mead notebooks With the black tape on the side, you can get those go shopping at your grocery store starting at about mid-July, and they'll have the school supplies out. And sometime between mid-July
and mid August, you'll be able to pick up these meat notebooks or spiral notebooks for pennies on the dollar. Practically, you can get a whole bunch of notebooks for spiral notebooks for 75 cents each, or a dollar each or something.
(09:05):
So I just sweep through and get a dozen notebooks of different colors and a dozen of the meat notebooks, and then I bring 'em home and I write in them all year long. Your medium matters. It matters actually. It does. Whether you like narrow lined paper, wide lined paper or no lines or the little quad things where
you can make bullet journals out of, or if you write on a computer, it's perfectly fine to write on an electronic device. It does not mess up any of your results. I participated with a colleague of mine in a research study I think we published in 2015 that was on digital journaling. It was a very large population,
so I asked if we could do some research just because we had such a big audience to choose from. And about 35% of the participants in this 30 day digital journaling challenge were men.
(10:11):
And we almost never get that many men in a study. So we asked a whole bunch of questions, got a whole bunch of interesting information. But one of the things that was the most interesting is that when asked what kind of results do you get writing in a digital journal? And then we asked the same set of questions
about a handwritten journal. And the things were clarity, confidence, problem solving, catharsis meditation, habit forming, all kinds of things. And there was no significant difference between men or women in the results that they got. Everybody reported approximately equal amounts of satisfaction, very
satisfied and satisfied for all of these. There was no significant difference. The only significant difference really was that digital journaling men were two points above women. I think it was 91 to 89 comfortable or very comfortable. But when it came to writing by hand, there was a 19 point gap between women's
comfort level and men's comfort level writing by hand.
(11:24):
So that tells me just right there, if the only thing I ever say to a man about journaling is it's okay to write on a device. You can do it on your phone, you can do it on an app, you can do it Word document. You can do it however you want to do it. Writing digitally is a perfectly fine way to write a journal. And so
there's no barrier really. So decide how you want to, do you want to write? What kind of a medium do you want to use after you've decided that, I always like to open a new journal and I recommend this to clients who are just starting out with a little you letter to the journal saying, here's my hopes and dreams
and here's what I want to partner with you on to resolve. And a lot of times people have a specific intention when they, they say, it's really time for me to start a journal.
(12:23):
They have something in mind that they want to achieve. They want to deepen their spiritual practice. They want to pour out the hurt and grief they're experiencing in a complicated relationship. They're mourning the loss of someone. They're trying to figure out what to do with their career. They're really wanting to meet a partner or a new baby. They want to have a child. So a lot of times people have ideas
about what they want to write about. So I would frame the letter to the journal specifically about that. I'm hoping that I can pour out my deepest thoughts and feelings. I'm hoping it doesn't take a whole lot of time. I'm hoping I can be consistent, and I'm hoping that you'll help me with all this. And that establishes
the beginning of a relationship. The journal may want to write back and say, got you, got your back.
Doesn't matter if you write every day. I'm here waiting for you. I'm not going to tell your secrets to anybody else. I'm here to support you and I can't wait to get to know you. And again, that might sound a little fake, but it isn't. When you're actually doing it, it feels real and it feels, most people think it feels
good.
Julia Marie (13:40):
Is there anything I need to avoid? When it comes to journal writing,
Kathleen Adams (13:47):
If what you are working on is a very difficult time and maybe a trauma that you don't talk about very much, the penebaker work is very valid for that. But another way of approaching it is to bring some structure and containment and pacing into the journal. And I'll talk about those three things separately.
Structure, pacing, and containment. I worked in a program that was trauma centric. It was everybody there was there because they had unresolved childhood trauma, mostly childhood. And there was a lot of really nasty stuff that happens to little kids when they have no way to protect themselves. So most of the
people that came into this program when I did intake interviews with them, were very attached to their journals. They loved writing journals. They loved that there was a therapist in this treatment program and they got to write journals for therapy.
(14:55):
But when I asked them if they experienced any obstacles, they consistently told me that sometimes when they were writing, they kind of retraumatized themselves. They called it falling off the cliff. But in the effort to write about the trauma and resolve the trauma, they retraumatized themselves because they
brought up all these nasty memories that, anyway, so they described it as falling into the abyss, falling off the pit. The consistent description was a dark place that they didn't know how to get out of by themselves.
And I said, well, how do you get out of it? And they drank. They had fights with their family, they missed work. They were miserable. They had very unwelcome flashbacks. And I'm like, how does it function for you that you are having these very challenging experiences and yet you still remain attached to the
journal? And they said, because that's only part of the time.
(15:53):
The rest of the time, it's really helping me. So I thought, okay. And I said, if I could help you find a way to resolve what's wrong, would that be useful for you? And they went, yeah. So I started asking them about how they wrote, and they all went, what do you mean? How do I write? I pick up the notebook and
a pen, and I go like this. I start writing. They were describing free writing or stream of consciousness writing, which is where almost everybody starts without a different idea, which is fine. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. It's the default choice for many writers who never do anything else. But when
you're working with difficult material, and it doesn't have to be traumatic, but specifically traumatic, but just challenging stuff, it can get free. Writing is free from any kind of structure or pacing or containment.
(16:44):
That's why we call it free writing. What they needed was some boundaries. Like we were talking about in setting a boundary with the permissions, they needed ways to write that would not tip them over the edge.
So I took all of the writing techniques that I practiced and that I taught, and I put them all on three by five cards, just the names of them. And I gave them a separate structure piecing and containment factor on those three scales. And then I rearranged them from the bottom to the top with the top being free writing,
which has none. It turns out that the lowest rung, I call this the journal ladder. It's a progression of techniques from bottom to top. And the first rung of the journal ladder, the most structured, paced, contained technique that I know of is sentence stamps. Right now, I feel today I want the most important thing to do those kinds of things.
(17:41):
Just finish the sentence and bam, you're done. Oh, that doesn't sound like very much, but it can be really significant if you write the sentence stem and then maybe write two sentences about it. I mean, you can construct templates for yourself that are a collection of sentence stems. I have dozens of those that I used
with clients. When you say, is there anything I should avoid? You might not want to avoid writing about really difficult material, but you might want to write about it in a way that gives you enough guardrails so that you don't fall off the cliff and you can stay within your own zone of tolerable functioning there. And
one more thing that I want to add here. We talk about structure, pacing, and containment as three vital journal tools and pacing is like how deep you go and how you come up for air.
(18:40):
Because my trauma patients were diving deep, but they weren't surfacing. So we used to practice in journal group. We used to practice what we call dolphin dives, which is dive deep and then surface, take some air, get a drink, walk around, do a stretch, come back, keep writing, dive deep, come back up to the
surface. That's the pacing piece. And containment is write for one page and quit or write for 10 minutes and quit or some sort of boundary that you impose on it. And the structure is the structure of how much structure is inherently in here. And unsent letter is actually about rung eight of a 14 rung ladder. But the
container is that everybody knows how to write a letter. And so that's a pretty safe space. Container can be time for 10 minutes for five minutes, and then see if you want to write more.
(19:41):
So structure, pacing, and containment. We've talked about permission. Permission to write in whatever voice you want in whatever form you want in whatever medium you want. And the fifth kind of wheel on this five wheel thing is balance. So another thing to avoid is always writing about one part of your life and
never writing about another part of your life, or always writing about trauma and never writing about joy.
And it just doesn't have to be a 50 50 balance, a little bit of joy. It can offset a whole lot of problems if you just write captured moments of beauty. This is one of my favorite things. Captured moment is a sensory based technique where you write from your senses about in the present tense to make it really
lively and alive. And I usually tell people I start out with, find something that you think is beautiful, observe it, participate in it, and then write in the present tense about the experience of beauty.
(20:48):
Because not everybody agrees on what is beautiful, but everyone pretty much agrees that they recognize beauty when they see it. And for some, I had a client who found beauty in architecture, and specifically he loved the curve of the on-ramp to the highway that he could see from his office window. And I really
coached him when he got frustrated or scared or depressed or sad at work to just walk over to his window and contemplate the on-ramp, which seems like such a silly thing, but to him, it was a beautiful, graceful piece of sculpture and it calmed him down to see the harmony in an on-ramp. So there you go. Balance is
another key part of the journal so that all of yourself eventually is being revealed and integrated and synthesized. And one other thing that I think really makes a difference is what we call the reflection.
(21:57):
That is a process of going back through what you've just read. I'm sorry, what you've just written, reading it back to yourself and then dropping down a couple of lines or angling it on the page if you are writing by hand so that you can find it easily again, and just write a little bit of feedback to yourself. As I read this, I
notice, or as I read this, I'm aware of or I'm surprised by, or anything like that. Giving yourself a synthesis, a reflection, a way of integrating what has happened into the context of what happens next. I am convinced that the reflection right is the fastest route to capturing insight, clarity, and action orientation. As I read this, I realize I want to stop what I'm doing right now and write that email to the
person I've been avoiding writing to because it's going to take me 10 minutes and I know I'll feel better after I do it, and then do it.
(23:09):
I mean, with that kind of a feedback statement to yourself, it's very easy to close the book and write the 10 minute email and complete a circuit and get something checked off your list. Maybe that's been bugging you for a while. There's so many things that can happen in the reflection, right? And I recommend that as
a very good closing step to a writing process. As I read this, I realize I rambled and didn't get around to much. Oh, well, it can be anything, but it's almost always a useful addition to the end of a writing session.
Julia Marie (23:47):
Well, this has been both helpful and inspiring.
Kathleen Adams (23:55):
Oh, thank you.
Julia Marie (23:56):
And so I want to thank you for that. But before we close, please tell the listeners how they can find you.
Kathleen Adams (24:05):
Oh, thank you. My website is journal therapy.com, just like it sounds, J-O-U-R-N-A-L therapy.com. And my email address is KA y@journaltherapy.com. I have a little gift that I would like to offer your listeners and maybe you Wonderful. Put that in the show notes. I sure will. It's a little online class called J is for journal, and I also have it as a print ebook ERE report. It's not really a book. It's not that long. I think it's
about 15 pages. There are something like 68 journal prompts in there that are calibrated to getting started and how to get started and what to do if silence descends. In the end, in journal is for nothing. What to happen when the writing stops, and how that happens, why it happens, and how to treat the silence when
it happens.
Julia Marie (25:02):
I want to thank you again for the conversation and all of the actionable advice you gave us today.
Kathleen Adams (25:09):
Well, thank you so much for the opportunity. It's been a privilege to share this time with you.
Julia Marie (25:18):
Well, that's our time for today. I'm grateful to each and every one of you for continuing to support this podcast with your downloads and subscriptions. If you found value in this episode, please share the link with someone in your circle who would also benefit from it. You can now leave a text message for the
show by clicking on the link at the top of the show notes page. And now here's a quote for you to ponder as you go about your day. Journal writing gives us insights into who we are, who we were, and who we can become. Sandra Marinella