Journaling Power: How To Create the Happy, Healthy, Life You Want to Live

By Mari L. McCarthy

2018 COVR Visionary Health and Healing Award Winner

“Journaling Power is a candid, beautifully-written self-help book, filled with warmth, wit and wisdom.” ~ Dennis Palumbo, psychotherapist and author, Writing From the Inside Out

“Remarkable, riveting and t

• Language: English
• Publisher: CreateWriteNow
• Release date: Sep 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780578401034

Mari L. McCarthy

Mari L. McCarthy is the Founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of CreateWriteNow.com. She is the author/creator of multiple eWorkbooks and Journaling Challenge programs that teach people throughout the world how to heal, grow, and transform their lives through the power of journal writing therapy.

Book preview

Introduction

I hear and I forget, I see and I remember,

I write and I understand.

– Chinese Proverb

Back in 1998 I did not have the strength to cook a meal without dropping my saucepans (and sometimes my dinner) on the kitchen floor, and I had very little function in the right side of my body. I had been floored, quite literally, by an ongoing health crisis.

As a successful consultant advising Fortune 1000 companies, I had previously owned my own business, but I’d been forced to sell it due to my disability. I wasn’t even able to write my name properly, as I’d lost the use of my right hand. A few years earlier, I’d regularly walked for miles just for fun and fitness; I’d been quite athletic as a young person, a good sprinter and basketball player. Now I could no longer walk down the street in a straight line; in the eyes of people who didn’t know me, I looked exactly like the town drunk. Things couldn’t get much worse for the girl who had once solved everyone else’s problems.

In a desperate bid to recover my health I was following conventional medical advice, and taking a cocktail of prescription drugs every day as I dutifully went from one specialist to another. But my condition was getting worse instead of better. It took a mammoth effort every day to coordinate my legs and walk from the bedroom to the bathroom. I felt diminished by my chronic illness.

I needed a radical transformation, and it came when a friend introduced me to writing therapy (also known as therapeutic journaling or expressive writing). At first I viewed journaling as a means to an end (I wanted to learn to write with my left hand) but I soon noticed how it eased my bodily symptoms, especially when I wrote about them in depth. Before I started journaling about the lack of function in my right side, for example, I’d been suffering a lot with numbness and tingling in the affected areas. My right arm was colder and redder in appearance than my left arm, but over a period of time the blood flow improved and my affected arm began to look normal. Gradually the generalized numbness and tingling I felt on my right side diminished too. I also noticed improvements in my digestion after writing about my rushed approach to mealtimes and implementing some changes in my eating habits.

As I continued to explore my physical and emotional distress through journaling, I realized I’d been abusing my body for years and ignoring its cries for help. I’d driven it recklessly like an automobile, yet it was actually a living organism in need of care and attention. I started to take a holistic approach to my health and introduced some lifestyle changes.

Right from day one, journaling revealed my issues and helped me find solutions. I was forced to recognize my negative self-image and to discover that I hadn’t dealt with the pain of my childhood. With my journal as a catalyst, I began a metamorphosis, a dynamic process of physical, emotional, and spiritual change. After a year or two of regular writing therapy I found I didn’t need the masses of prescription drugs I’d been taking, so I stopped buying insurance and saved myself thousands of dollars a year. (I’m not saying everyone should do this, but it worked for me.)

However, the biggest surprise of all was this: through journaling I had found a door into my soul.

I began to discover who the real Mari L. McCarthy was: an individual with unfulfilled dreams that had somehow been forgotten and buried; a person with innate talents that had not been recognized or developed. My journal entries revealed what mattered to the real me, and the path I needed to take. As I got in touch with my deepest thoughts, feelings, and desires, I began to change my whole way of life. I learned to think with my heart and not just my head.

Before I started journaling, I was dominated by my left brain. I was always practical, logical, and rational, and I thought that showing emotion was a sign of weakness. This had a lot to do with how I’d been raised. I’d been taught to keep a stiff upper lip and did so 24/7 (I never even cried over the death of my mother, whom I loved dearly). But through reflective writing I began to understand that my feelings were important and must be heard. I realized I could engage with the business world and yet be creative in my approach, maintaining a healthy, balanced lifestyle that allowed me to be myself.

This transformation in attitude and behavior was not an overnight miracle; it involved hard work and soul-searching on my part, but it brought measurable results and success in the external world. Soon, I had a future that excited me: I seized my life back, regained significant function in the right side of my body, started an online journaling community, and then I really surprised myself – I learned to sing and became a recording artist! These were major achievements that combined to give me the life I longed for; journaling was a very specific and effective toolkit to facilitate them.

Today I am happy and fulfilled. I feel healthy and sleep soundly. I work from my beachfront home near Boston, running my second successful business, enjoying a quality of life I once thought impossible. It has been such an amazing journey that I feel compelled to share it with you. This is a book that HAD to be written. It would have been wrong to keep my story all to myself.

So in these pages I want to share my experience of writing therapy (or Journaling Power as I like to call it), the self-help therapy that changed my life. I will give you all of the knowledge and tools you need to start a journal-writing practice of your own. If you use them daily, you can expect to see big changes in your life.

The benefits of journaling are multi-faceted, and vary between individuals. If you have a chronic illness, you may find that the symptoms become less troublesome. Expressive writing has helped people suffering with asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, IBS, and lupus – even cancer and AIDS. It helps many people with different longterm illnesses, because it boosts the immune system. This book evaluates and presents the medical evidence for journaling, which has been steadily growing over the past thirty years.

If your life is highly pressured, journaling is an excellent stress-management tool. Stress is a huge factor in many physical and mental health problems and compromises the immune system. Therapeutic writing appears to have a protective effect against stress and possibly acts as a release valve.

One of the pioneers of writing therapy, research psychologist Dr. James Pennebaker from the University of Texas, has carried out numerous scientific studies. He found that a few sessions of expressive writing can have a beneficial effect for months, resulting in fewer visits to the doctor. Many other academics have developed and expanded his work with positive outcomes.

A review published in the British Journal of General Practice in 2012 concluded writing therapy can potentially help thirty percent of patients who visit the doctor in primary care settings and could be used potentially very widely indeed. In a separate review in the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, UK clinical psychiatrist Kay Wilhelm concludes that for some people expressive writing is extremely helpful and has quickly resolved issues that have been mulled over – sometimes for years – with no resolution (Baikie & Wilhelm, 2005). Many other U.S. studies support these conclusions, which you can read about in Chapter 7 of this book.

Journaling helps you manage your life and avoid burnout. If you have many responsibilities at work and at home, and have to juggle the needs of children or elderly parents with a demanding career, you can easily become weary. Paradoxically, therapeutic writing will help you avoid exhaustion by learning to prioritize tasks and care for your own needs holistically. You will learn to live life proactively and mindfully so that you are not just responding to each and every crisis with a knee-jerk reaction.

If you’ve recently experienced a specific trauma, such as a bereavement, divorce, or loss of your job, there is solid scientific evidence that expressive writing helps in recovery. In one social psychology experiment, researchers studied a group of middle-aged men who were angry about losing their jobs. They found that the men who were selected to take part in writing exercises to express their emotions were much more likely to find a new job than those who had not taken part in the writing tasks (Spera, Buhrfeind, & Pennebaker 1994).

Journaling increases our working-memory capacity (that’s the short-term memory we use for problem solving and carrying out complex tasks). It can therefore make us more productive in our jobs as well as boost academic performance, as measured by exam grades. Expressive writing has been shown to lift moods and reduce depression, improve social relationships, and even enhance performance on the sports field!

The benefits of expressive writing are now well established in the scientific community. Dr. Pennebaker has commented, As the number of studies increased, it became clear that writing was far more powerful than anyone ever dreamed.

So if journaling is a powerful therapy, why haven’t we heard more about it? If it were a drug, it would have been marketed extensively by now and we would all know someone taking it. But the truth is, journaling is so simple and straightforward, it cannot be trademarked or patented. Large corporations can’t find a way of making money out of it, so it’s been largely ignored.

Writing by hand, with a pen and notebook, is also quite retro. Like meditation, it requires a reflective state of being, rather than doing. We have to step away from our highly stimulating modern environment with the distractions of social media, television, and mobile phones, back to something much more ancient and wise. Journaling is a form of in-depth narrative, and uses our capacity to tell stories. This storytelling is as old as the human race and runs counter to our sound-bite culture. So we have to make a special effort to engage in it initially.

After you’ve been doing it for a few weeks and reaping the benefits it will become a habit you won’t want to break. And you’ll learn to live differently, taking note of the still, small voice within that knows what you really want and need. There is an inner wisdom that we all have access to and a strength we can draw upon if we give ourselves the time to find this sacred space. The further you go on the journaling journey, the greater the harmony you will experience. Things fall into place and you will discover synchronization in your inner and outer life.

It’s easy to start journaling once you’ve made up your mind; you only need a pen and a notebook, the information in this book, and the determination to write a little every day. Your journal will teach you the rest once you get started. You’ll discover that it’s the best therapist you could ever hope for – and it doesn’t charge you a cent.

But don’t let the simplicity of Journaling Power fool you. This is a powerful therapy. So powerful that I believe it’s only a matter of time before writing therapy is recognized as a holistic therapy in its own right. Some doctors and mental health professionals already use it with their patients, because it’s cost-effective, convenient, and as powerful as many of the medications commonly