Journaling | Intuition Development | Emotional Healing
Access Your Inner Guidance
Access the healing powers of your inner guidance through journaling, intuition development, and resources for emotional healing & emotional wellness.
Journal Prompts For Perfectionism
I saw a Gloria Steinem quote that said, “Perfectionism is internalized oppression,” and I thought, “Ugh, that is, unfortunately, very true for me.” It took me many years to realize that my perfectionism stemmed from a traumatic childhood. In fact, it took me many years to even realize that my childhood was traumatic. (You can read a little more about that in my post on What I Wish I Knew Earlier about Healing Psychological Trauma if you’d like.) When I accepted and began to process the ways in which my childhood traumatized me, it was easier to see the ways that I continued to function by the rules of my childhood. In childhood “perfect” behavior was required from me in order to “earn” love and the right to have emotions, set boundaries, and be my own person. The rules were always unclear and ever-changing, and even if they had been clear, I would never have been able to live up to them. The end result was that I continued to endlessly strive to be more and more perfect in every facet of life to earn love and the right to simply be a human with my own emotions, body, and opinions. I’m very much still a recovering perfectionist, but I know that I have the tools now to continue to step away from perfectionistic tendencies and it’s something I’m actively working on.
These journal prompts are designed to help you explore what your perfectionism looks like and the “whys” behind your perfectionism. I hope they’re helpful to you on your journey to overcome perfectionism!
What I Wish I Knew Earlier About Healing Psychological Trauma
Your body intuitively knows how to provide you with deep emotional healing & your body wants to heal you.
I’ve read a lot of things about the process of emotional healing and healing psychological trauma that I agree with and that make sense to me. But I also know that these ideas resonated with me earlier in my life at a time when I was deeply confused about how to go about the process of healing psychological trauma and desperate to get it underway. None of the things I read actually told me anything I could connect with about how to emotionally heal or what it looked like. A lot of what I read felt more like a simultaneous truth and platitude to me.
Shadow Work Prompts for Childhood Trauma
What were you not allowed to talk about when you were growing up?
Families, like other social groups, have rules. Many of these rules are unwritten. Some of these unwritten rules tell us what we’re allowed to talk about and what we’re not allowed to talk about. If the family you grew up in was dysfunctional in some ways, there may have been many topics that couldn’t be discussed. Without self-reflection, we can unknowingly carry these same rules into our future friendships, romantic relationships, and our new families. Perhaps most detrimentally, we can also carry these rules into our relationship with ourselves.