In a conversation with a client recently, I shared that I had been regularly journaling for the past 15 years. He asked me what I found valuable about writing out my thoughts. I told him that for me, a lot of the value lay in the ability to go back months or years, and spy on what younger D. was working on mentally and emotionally. His next question was what I had learned by going back and looking through those journals. "I learned that I keep working on the same shit over and over." And that's the truth. What a decade and a half of journaling has shown me is that there are patterns that just keep repeating. I have the same negative … [Read more...]