(Originally published at Degrees of Maternity on January 19, 2023.)

Write it like you mean it!

That’s how I’m going to start this discussion. Because when it comes to writing to yourself, you owe it to yourself to be honest with yourself. (How many times can I say “yourself?”)

Really, what I’m trying to say is that you might as well be honest with yourself (hee hee) in the writing that you do for your benefit.

Honestly, it would be a big waste of our time to engage in therapeutic writing that doesn’t deliver — writing that covers up, cuts off, disrupts, falsifies, and limits our true thoughts, feelings, and emotions. And quite simply, hampers our healing process when it comes to self.

Now, we’re all unique in our personalities, outlook, perspectives, cultural upbringings, mores, life experiences, internal and external circumstances, situational influences, goals and ambitions, talents and abilities, hang-ups and triumphs.

So, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to therapeutic writing.

Only you know what you need in terms of writing communication for healing. And so, I’m just here to help facilitate that. (As I’ve previously stated, we’re in this journey together, so I plan on getting my own healing processes flowing right along with you as you do your thang.)

And today, I’d just like to impress upon you that therapeutic writing exercises are not meant to make you feel worse. They’re meant to help remedy the hurts that run deep — deep so much so that they hide in the subconscious, even.

Just know that I’m not suggesting that writing about your woes is the cure-all for them. There are other coping mechanisms that must come into play in your overall holistic healing. But, writing to self is a great start.

If you can’t be honest with yourself, who can you be honest with? I mean . . . seriously?

And do you know why “Write to Communicate to Others” will be one of the upcoming topics of discussion for Degrees of Maternity? Well, it’s because we tend to be dishonest with ourselves on how much healing of self we truly need, which ends up spilling over to our relationships with others.

Then, writing therapy for our relationships comes into play, because we occasionally need a jump start to help honest communication with others to flow naturally.

But, if we’re not honest in our therapeutic writing when interacting with others, then the root problem oftentimes starts with the fact that writing therapy isn’t honestly engaged in at the individual level when dealing with ourselves.

See how the vicious cycle of dysfunctional communication with self can hamper true healing that flows into how we interact with others?

I think you get where I’m coming from, so no need to beat the point to a pulp.

Let’s just agree that writing therapy for self is a foundational piece to other areas of healing in our lives.

The saying, “be true to yourself,” is what I want you to build up in your mental framework for what we’ll be doing in the start of our writing therapy journey.

And being truthful with what you write is the only way to truly heal in this writing therapy process. I promise.

Another saying — “the truth will set you free” — is so relevant here, as well. It’s only when you deal in truths that you can lead to paths of sustainable healing and freedom from hurtful situations in your life.

Believe me. I know from personal experience. And I’m currently working through some HARD truths in my own life. So yes, I’m qualified to speak on the matter. Personal experience does that, you know? It puts you in a place to speak on real life occurrences that are, oftentimes, better teachers than reading something in a book or learning by observing the experiences of others could ever hope to be.

Although when it comes to personal hurts that need to be healed, I would have preferred to have learned from others’ problematic/traumatic situations that they already went through than to repeat a similar hurtful experience in my own life.

But, life brings HARD THINGS to each and every one of us. None of us leave this earth unscathed when it comes to difficulties in life.

After all, BAD THINGS happen to GOOD PEOPLE . . . ALL THE TIME!

And really, we just need to be comfortable in knowing that the process of living life will bring some bad things our way, at times. We can’t be afraid to live life to our best, though. We live life fully, blessedly, and optimistically. We do good things and reflect good to ourselves and those around us. And we proactively prepare for how we heal from those hard things that will more than likely come our way at some point in our timeline.

Writing therapy can be one of those proactive tools you have at your disposal to dispel the built-up hurt that you let linger, unresolved in your life.

Don’t do that, by the way. Yeah, don’t let the hurt build. Head it off at the outset and deal with it at its foundation. After all, if you know anything about foundations, you know that they’re the beginnings of the matter. If we let our life foundations consist of a bunch of unresolved hurt, then everything in our lives that builds on our hurtful foundations will be unfruitful and unstable. Consequently, we’re going to fall. . . HARD!!

But if your foundation is in need of some tearing down so it can be built up therapeutically the healthy and stable way, then let’s utilize a power source we have control over — our ability to write. And as long as we have access to something we can write with, write on, type on, or audio record on and as long as we intend to be honest in our self discussions, then we’re in an optimal position to start HEALING OUR BEGINNINGS and build up ourselves on strong personal foundations.

And if you think this is all mumbo jumbo that I just broke down for you, then I dare you to try it out for yourself. Here’s what I’m suggesting for our first assignment. You get to choose our JUST START by clicking on the poll below. I’d like for you to determine which topic we’ll begin with in writing to communicate to ourselves.

Tell me what you think.

https://poll.fm/11304453