WHY JOURNALING HAS BECOME SO IMPORTANT IN MY LIFE ...
This post is about journaling as part of a recovery from gambling. Now, I don’t gamble but I still journal and see it as a big part of my life.
I first kept a diary when I was around 10 or 11 and recorded which friends I “played out with” or when I went anywhere (which was rare.) I then went through that familiar phase of buying a diary before Christmas and by the time my birthday was over (in early February) it was forgotten.
I started a “proper” journal around the same time as I was first trying to quit gambling. In those early days it was on lined paper (which, as I will point out later, is not ideal) and there I recorded some of my battles with my inner voices; where I had been the night before and on occasion (when I remembered), how much I had lost or, more rarely, won.
Later, I made a note of things that felt significant from GA meetings I had attended or co-counselling insights.
What really changed things for me was reading a book by Robert Kelsey, “What’s Stopping You?: Why Smart People Don’t Always Reach Their Potential and How You Can,” where he talks about a dialogue he had with his “higher self.” He wasn’t talking about this in a spiritual way – as the GA rooms sometimes do. He was simply meaning a person who has already reached the point that the “journalist” wanted to reach. For me, that person would be someone who is beyond gambling and has already found the means to stop – a sort of idealised future self. This struck a chord with me. I hadn’t managed to stop gambling yet, but I could talk to the guy (me in the future) who would pull it off and find out how he accomplished this.
So I started to dialogue with this “Higher self.” As I was still handwriting my journals (though by now they had gone into a plain white paper book – no lines) I was having to use different colours to differentiate between the different aspects of myself – which is why my “higher self” became known as Red.
Red was that part of me who had stopped gambling for some time and saw the world from the perspective of a non-gambler. He also became a “higher self” in another way, in as much as he was to be a voice of reason when my emotions were such that I was threatening to throw my toys out of the pram.
An interesting turn of phrase – because it soon became clear that Red was often not having a dialogue with Steev as an adult – but with Steev as an upset and very emotional child, who was not sure what was going on and often just needed calming down. Eventually I decided to dialogue directly with this child and almost had the same experience as Richard Bach talks about in one of his books, I think it was “Running from safety” where his child blasts him with a sub-machine gun when he first decides to meet … in his imagination.
My meeting wasn’t so bad, but my “childhood self” did make it very clear that he felt abandoned by me for many years and was not happy.
So now I have three voices in my journal. Mainly just plain old me – recording the events of the day, but sometimes I will be interrupted or asked questions by Red and sometimes a dialogue with Green, my inner child is called for.
So what goes into my journal?
In the early days, it was the sort of dialogue which went on in my head when I was considering gambling again after a period of sobriety.
“Why not? One hour or £10 won’t matter too much and then we come off whatever happens. Other people are out there gambling, why not me? You deserve it as you have had such a shit time. You deserve it as things are going so well – why not celebrate? I am bored to death, let’s do something to shake things up a bit.”
Often Red would serve as the voices I heard in the GA rooms or on the quit gambling websites – backing up my inner voice of reason which was saying that gambling again was a really bad idea. Sometimes Red would pull me in a different direction to make me face what was really going on – which was often an emotional reaction to events in my life. Sometimes I’d gamble. But not so much and for less time and with more limited damage.
Now Red appears much less regularly in my journal, but still pops up sometimes when I need an alternative point of view. Usually asking questions or doing a sort of “contradiction” intervention when I have written something particularly stupid.
I need to gamble. How about contradicting that? I DON’T need to gamble. It’s the last thing I need? It is the last thing I need – but I really want to. But what do you NEED focus on that!
Occasionally too, Green appears. Most recently when he heard I was writing this piece. I had a short dialogue in the journal on “privacy” and I went back to the lack of it, growing up and how that has affected me. It ended with the realisation that my time of being “like a father” to my inner child has ended and I was now more in the role of an “inner grandfather.” It also made me realise the compassion I felt to my mother who was doing the best she could from a place of being a wounded child herself.
As you can perhaps tell from this – my journal is sometimes being used as an adjunct to my co-counselling practice. Another way in which I do this is in the recording of New and Goods. In co-counselling this is sometimes used to get a client to think of things which are new and good in their life as a contradiction to all the “awfulness” of life. I can’t remember when I first started doing this but I recorded two ‘new and goods’ every day whilst I was travelling, until I read somewhere that doing three was more challenging – so now three a day it is, and yes, I do find the third one more challenging. Often my observations are more good than new rather than new, but I do try and go for both. I have also incorporated recording a Random Act of Kindness each day. Doing a random act of kindness is challenging enough – but knowing I will have to record it makes me more focused on doing at least one and recalling it can often make me smile.
Sadly, the other thing that has found its way into my journal is the recording of meals. This is because of my diverticular disease and the recommendation that I keep a food diary. Not wanting to clutter my life with something else to remember, it has been incorporated into my journal and – although it sometimes doesn’t fit with the mood of what is going on – it can be a nice break into the day-to-day stuff and helps to ground me when I need it.*
One of the strange things about my journal is that I have probably written tens of thousands of words – but I very rarely re-read them. That is not the point of a journal. The point is to put my thoughts on paper and nail them down. To make that inner dialogue real and in my case to put a colour to the voices so I know who is saying what. Journaling has been a really important part of my recovery journey and I hope that in sharing this it can be part of yours as well.
*2021 update … I have since felt that my food journey is in danger of taking over my journal so have separated it out.
