Writers First Aid

Writing and Emotional Balance

March 9, 2011

Into each life some rain must fall…as the saying goes.

And when the difficulties pour on for days on end, our emotions get on overload, making it difficult to write. Sometimes it’s a chronic issue that disrupts the writing schedule. Sometimes the event comes out of the blue.

It can knock you for a loop.

Back in Balance

If your emotions are doing the roller-coaster thing on you today, and inner turmoil keeps you from writing, I recommend both the Writing for Emotional Balance book and website. The exercises and explanations in the book (by Beth Jacobs) were so helpful to me years ago and several times since then. According to her website:

These are the kinds of experiences that “Writing for Emotional Balance” addresses and helps you manage:

~ You are flooded with feeling to the point of being paralyzed, confused or unable to speak.

~ You understand where your feelings come from but don’t seem to be able to alter the emotional patterns you experience.

~ No matter what happens, your thoughts eventually lead into the same negative statements about yourself.

~ You want to express yourself, but you have no idea of where to start or how to articulate your feelings.

~ You are easily caught off guard emotionally and surprised by the quality or intensity of your own emotional reactions to people.

~ Your feelings seem random, erratic or hopelessly complicated.

~ Emotions stew inside of you and never seem to resolve.

~ You get obsessed with people or situations that you think should be insignificant.

~ You decide how to act in a situation and when it occurs, you do exactly the opposite of your intention.

~ You get frustrated with your emotions or you just hate to feel them.

Backing Off and Calming Down

I do believe that “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” and this book’s writing techniques help you distance yourself from the stuff churning in your heart so you can actually address the thoughts feeding those overwhelming emotions. I’ve journaled through a lot of writing blocks over the last thirty years, and this book helps give direction to the journaling.

Have you found journaling helpful in processing emotions that get in the way of your writing? If so, can you share a bit?

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Posted in: emotional balance,journaling,thinking | | Comments (4)

4 Comments »

Oh yes, Kristi, journaling saves me from self-destruction! I call it freewriting, as Julia Cameron teaches, and it really does free up the anxieties of being a writer/publisher, the self-loathing, the glum of not being successful yet.

I freewrite ideas down as well. And whenever I feel stuck in a story, I write to ‘chat’ with self, or characters, and there will always be progress. And when I need encouragements, I read back on my entries to ‘see’ how far I’ve come.

Freewrite or journal every day. That’s what has saved me.

Comment by Claudine Gueh — March 10, 2011 @ 1:34 am
The other night I had a dream that I was in an elementary school class and we were editing sentences– there was more to this but I can’t remember it now– and it was one of those “I’m in school but I can’t remember what we’ve been doing in school lately and if I have any assignments due and what my schedule is and can’t remember also that the REASON for this is that I actually haven’t been in school for decades” dreams– BUT in this case, I realized that the reasons I’d missed the previous classes of this project was that I’d kept getting pulled out of class for appointments with the guidance counselor. I actually interpreted this dream to mean that emotional/psychological issues are to blame for me not getting much writing done!

I have been journaling in a general way– mostly freewriting– a lot recently, but I’m not sure I don’t use it as an excuse not to work on Actual Writing, because it’s the first thing I dive into at writing time and it usually takes up the whole time. And I’m having a hard time caring about the stories I’m working on, and the things I DO feel like writing about are all very journal-y and not story fodder at all. I am not sure if this book will help me or just further justify my diving deeper into journaling instead of any other kind of writing!

Comment by rockinlibrarian — March 10, 2011 @ 5:34 pm
Yes, Claudine, over the years, journaling has saved me from both self-destruction and other-destruction!

Rockinlibrarian, I hear you! There were many times I preferred journaling and “dumping” feelings to actually writing my fiction. Sometimes I had to set a time limit on the journaling so I would move on. But I was dealing with some major issues at the time, and all that dumping really helped me see some patterns and know how to fix a couple of situations that were very damaging to my whole life, including my writing life. Everything in balance, I guess!

Comment by Kristi Holl — March 11, 2011 @ 9:36 am
I got serious about my writing during a rather long, drawn-out divorce. The emotions I felt were often so overwhelming and time-consuming that I had to incorporate them into my writing somehow–probably for catharsis. So I invented fictional characters that were very similar to me and my former spouse, and other people important in my life at the time, and I wrote their stories. My feelings about myself poured out on the page in the creation of the protagonist…but convincing myself she was fictional allowed me to develop her character into the type of person I hoped to become. By defining her, I began to write a new definition for myself.

Comment by Shannon Ryan — March 16, 2011 @ 7:10 am