How Journaling Helped Save me from going back
When I was a teenager, my diary was my place to express myself, and feel like I had a space that was just mine. I was grateful when God reminded me to start writing when my marriage was dying.
One way to deal with overwhelming emotions is to find a healthy way to express yourself. This makes a journal a helpful tool in managing your mental health. Journaling can help you:
Manage anxiety
Reduce stress
Cope with depression
Process life events
Document your personal progress
When you have a problem and you’re stressed, keeping a journal can help you identify what’s causing that stress or anxiety. Once you’ve identified your stressors, you can develop a plan to address the issues and reduce your stress.
Being someone’s narcissistic supply is a heavy weight to carry for many reasons. The longer the system stays in place, the more it seems like they can’t survive without you and therefore must control you. So, privacy? Yeah, that becomes a thing of the past. For me, it was my friends and my money that he refused to leave alone. So, to give myself space from him and everything else, I started journaling again. In my journal, I could win the argument, tell the truth about what happened to me with no recourse, and, most importantly, avoid conflict with a man who thrived on arguments. My journals started turning into prayers, talking directly to God about what was going on and how I was feeling. But more importantly, they were creating a chain of truth that would come back to my reality later, at just the right time.
Just like so many other narcissistic abuse victims, I checked myself over and over when things fell apart at the end of my marriage. Asking myself if I made the right decision, or if it was really as bad as I remembered it. Then I heard God say, “Why don’t you read your journal?” and that broke me. I read my own words, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, tear-stained pages that would not let me see anything but the realization that things really did happen the way I remembered….in fact, it was worse.
“I feel I’m not good enough as a wife because he complains about our sex. I’m not good enough as a mom because he picks on my methods of mothering. He really doesn’t seem to care that I’m breaking under his scrutiny,” - August 10, 2019. This was 2 months after having twins at 38.
“I cry every day now because of something he has said or done. I can’t talk to him about it; he doesn’t care about how I feel.”
“I don’t feel any type of confidence anymore. I suck at everything. I can’t breastfeed my babies right, I can’t satisfy my husband, I can’t do my job……”
Guys, it went on for pages like this… across the span of years. The particular journal I have here is the one I started after my late-in-life twin pregnancy, where I was in the most delicate of conditions. Many of the entries talk about how I wished he would be more sensitive to me, try to understand how hard the whole ordeal was for me physically, and how that didn’t mean I didn’t love my babies. My journal reminded me that the birth of my twins led me to the truth, which led me to freedom.
How Journaling has helped in the aftermath.
Journaling about my life after freedom has been monumental in my recovery. It has helped me to take a proper inventory of my progress, which can be hard when you’ve been through trauma. It has also helped with understanding the details of what I am dealing with, specifically behind certain events. While it definitely helps to have a therapist analyze your situation, reading your own words can give you true clarity on how you need to work through your own healing. My journal has become my record of how I’ve grown, giving me insight into my own internal changes. This is something you likely won’t detect unless an outsider tells you about it. And finally, the most important reward from my journal is the ability to see that my decision to leave my abuser was the right thing. It feels good when someone compliments your hard work on yourself, but it feels amazing when you can see that work for yourself.
So I encourage you to find a way to journal yourself through this change in your life. Your experiences today are more valuable to future you than you could ever imagine.
If you are experiencing domestic violence or emotional abuse, please remember that seeking safety is not a failure of faith — it is an act of courage and wisdom. You can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), text START to 88788, or chat at thehotline.org. If you are in immediate danger, please call 911. God does not call you to remain in harm. Support and protection are available.