Journaling | Intuition Development | Emotional Wellness
Tune In To Your Inner Voice
Access the healing powers of your inner guidance through journaling exercises, daily journal prompts, tools for building intuition, shadow work, dream journaling, and resources for emotional wellness & emotional healing.
How To Feel Feelings: A Gentle Guide To Coming Home To Yourself
You might think, how could you not feel your feelings. Once upon a time, that’s what I thought. See, I thought I was feeling my feelings because I’d have thoughts like: “I’m sad,” “I’m annoyed,” or, “This is enjoyable.” What else could feeling your feelings involve?
It turns out that feeling your feelings actually involves physical sensations in your body. This was news to me! Suddenly all of those literary turns of phrase like, “His chest swelled with emotion,” “Her stomach knotted up,” and, “It hit him like a punch in the gut,” made a lot more sense. I talked to a few friends about this, and they too were surprised to learn that emotions come with physical sensations.
Feeling your feelings means that you can feel the physical sensations in your body that come with emotions, name the associated emotion with your mind, and allow the emotion to show up and then fall away naturally. This is called emotional regulation, and when people talk about feeling your feelings, most of the time they’re talking about this process.
What does it mean to regulate your emotions? How is emotional regulation different from controlling your emotions?
So, emotional regulation – or feeling your feelings – is the process of noticing your feelings and then working with them to allow them to move through your body. Regulating your emotions this way allows you to consciously respond to the world with the information that you got from your emotions and from your intellectual thoughts.
I commonly hear people talk about the importance of “controlling” your emotions, and I really don’t like that phrase.
Reading Lists for Emotional Wellness: Books for Healing Childhood Trauma
I put together this list of books about healing childhood trauma based on my own experiences with healing from my childhood. The books on this reading list cover the science of trauma, how it impacts the brain, body, nervous system, and our relationship with ourselves and others. These books also provide various roadmaps and supports for healing childhood trauma. The insights in these books have formed important stepping stones on my own healing journey, and I hope that you find them helpful as well.
#1 Book for Healing Childhood Trauma - Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory by Deb Dana, LCSW
If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my own childhood trauma healing journey, it’s that healing really is about the nervous system. This understanding has given me patience with the healing process and with myself because I understand that I can’t just force myself to think the “right” thoughts; I have to give my nervous system time and care to heal like I would give time and care to a broken bone.
Anchored is a practical guide to understanding how your nervous system works, how you can learn to tune in to what your nervous system is doing, and how you can work with your nervous system to regulate your emotions.
Gentle Journal Prompts For Healing
Journaling has been an important part of my own healing journey. For me, it’s a great way to set aside quality time to connect with myself. Journaling has helped me learn to listen to myself so that I’m better able to understand what I need. Caring for myself in this way has built an internal sense of trust that’s changed how I approach myself and the world around me.
Journal prompts for healing
I’ve written these journal prompts for healing to help you connect with yourself on your own healing journey.
Do I have ideas about what it is I need to heal from? If yes, write about what you need to heal from. If no, write down anything you know about why you feel like you need to heal.
What does it mean to heal? What would it look like if I was healed? (In other words, how would you know when you experienced healing?)
What do the culture and sub-cultures I live in tell me about healing and what it means to heal? Do I agree with these messages? What about these messages is helpful to me?
What about these messages is harmful to me?
What ideas do my friends and family have about healing? What messages do they directly or indirectly send me about healing? How do these messages impact me?
When I think about healing, what stories comes to mind? (These could be stories you’ve heard, stories from your own life, books, movies, etc.) What do these stories tell me about healing? What sounds accurate about these stories? What sounds inaccurate?
What frustrates me most about healing?
Find Freedom With These 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.