Self-reflective journaling is a tool to help you get to know yourself better. It has many benefits, including giving you space to process your thoughts and emotions, increasing mental wellbeing and reducing stress.
Self-reflective journaling has helped me on my healing path to understand my shame better and where it comes from. It helps me to spot the shame in the moment and practice techniques to process it, rather than acting on it in unhelpful ways. For me this goes hand-in-hand with self-compassion. I’ve also hugely benefitted from learning about shame and how it manifests in my life. I’ve come a long way in the past six-or-so years from not knowing I was experiencing shame and thinking I was just a bad person, to being able to recognise the many ways shame shows up in my life and overcome them. Understanding shame and understanding how and why it shows up in your life (also called critical awareness) are the first two steps in Brené Brown’s Shame Resillience Theory, based on extensive research.