Writing and Healing

Comment now » // March 17th, 2010

I’m a journaler. (I’m not sure that word is officially a noun but I’m hoping Webster will cult me some slack today.) Almost always have been. I began journaling as a pre-teen and continued sporadically throughout my teens and twenties, including the ten years I was with the cult I belonged to.

I say “sporadically” because during those years journaling was something I did every now and then. It was an amateur pursuit.

On January 1, 2000 I turned pro.

That was the day my membership in the cult first really came into question. My spiritual guru, whom I adored and idolized, had suddenly proclaimed that I was the worst kind of spiritual pariah and consequently had forced my boyfriend (also in the cult), whom I loved very much, to choose between “God” and me. He chose “God”. Thereafter my “friends” in the group shunned me and suddenly the world I had known for my entire adult life evaporated.

I had nowhere to turn but to the page.

Writing saved me. Writing in a journal gave me something to do during the days and hours and years I was desperately alone in the first part of the 21st century. Writing gave me a safe vessel in which to place my feeling and rebellious thoughts, which were definitely NOT accepted by the cult. Writing was my soft place to fall when I was not in therapy.

Writing taught me to tell the truth about how I really felt, because when I told the truth on the page no one judged me or told me I was wrong or tried to talk me out of how I felt or told me that “God” disagreed with what I was thinking/feeling/saying. My journal welcomed me no matter how messy and awful I felt and never once told me it had to go because it had another appointment.

Most important, for someone in cult recovery, my journal was a place where I could untangle the knots in my brain and my thinking. Cult mind control twists our thoughts and beliefs into a tangled mess even the most dedicated seamstress would have difficulty untangling. But writing gives us a safe place to bring those thoughts to the surface, to examine them and to decide, for ourselves, with no one else’s influence or input, if they are true.

For some, I know, writing in a journal seems like a chore. Another daily practice we need to feel guilty about not doing. For me, it was a saviour, a friend, a blessing. I recommend it most highly. But only if you feel better afterwards.