The Power of Journaling Objectively

I’ve been telling participants that writing objectively can be useful when you don’t have a lot of time to write and you just want to record the facts. However, I’ve been thinking recently about the psychological benefits of writing this way. When you record an emotionally charged event in a dispassionate manner, absent feeling or association, it can allow you to see the event for what it is. It reminds me of my experiences with EMDR which allowed me to shift gears as I revisited a traumatic event and to remember it more objectively, seeing it as one of the things that happened in my life that I survived and that my psyche no longer has to obsessively to go back and try to fix. Using a journal to write about and process feelings can be useful, but in the workshop, I’m planning to spend a little more time discussing the benefits of writing objectively when it feels right to do so.