It has long been known that writing can be a tool for overcoming difficulties. But writing can be a tool specifically for self discovery too. The subconscious mind is full of information and wisdom that can be mined through a specific writing practice.
Let’s say there is an issue you are dealing with in your life. It could be depression or anxiety. It might be a crumbling relationship, a debt problem, a personal health issue, a troubled child you don’t know how to help. The problem can be anything at all. Give your problem a name. Then sit down with a pen and paper and write about it. Write until you run out of things to say about it. Then put what you have written aside and don’t reread it. The next day write about it again. Same method. Write until you run out of things to say about it. Continue with this process for about a week or longer. Or until you completed at least seven sittings and then pull out all the material you have written and begin looking for themes and clues about the underlying issues. The subconscious mind has all the information you need but it is disorganized and cluttered. This writing process will help you discover what you may have been only vaguely aware of before. Make a list of the themes that emerge from your writing. What did you discover that you didn’t know before?
Trying to remember and write down your dreams can be another tool that is used in this same way. Our dreams are reflections of what is going on in our inner world. Our fears, our insecurities, our stressors and our deep beliefs. Most of this remains below the surface, just beyond the reach of our conscious minds. This writing process can help you access that wisdom by freeing the mind to write out whatever it feels no matter how strange or disjointed it may seem. Writing down your dreams for a few weeks, even if at first there are only bits and pieces, you will begin remembering more and more. Soon a picture will emerge. This can be very useful especially when you connect the dream symbols to the discoveries you made when doing the seven day writing exercise about a specific problem. The subconscious mind is just a huge warehouse, disorganized but full of information. Writing can be a form of organizing at least a small corner of that warehouse making it useful to you.
Let me give you an example from my own life. Some years ago I began seriously working on my relationship to food. I called my problem, Food Issues. Then I wrote daily for awhile about this issue. I didn’t worry that sometimes I started out writing about food and then soon I was writing about other things. I knew that all of it was connected somehow and I trusted that my subconscious mind was at work. When I stepped back and observed the themes and consistent phrases that kept showing up I noticed that the words chains, bondage, cage, prison and other similar words and themes emerged from the writing about food. I also took notice of certain types of dreams I have always had, especially as an adult when my issues with food seemed to begin. The main dreams that had been consistent throughout my adulthood were hostage dreams. In my dreams I was always a part of a large group of people, sometimes people I knew, sometimes a group of strangers. And we were being held hostage. Sometimes I plotted my escape, sometimes I tried to ingratiate myself to my captors to trick them into letting me go, sometimes I attempted to get away and on a few occasions I came close to escaping but I always woke up before the hostage situation is resolved. When I looked at my writing and then I matched up the themes there with this hostage motif in my dreams I realized that they were connected to my food issues. When I approached my relationship with food, looking at it all through this new lens I could see that I was being held hostage by food. I had an eating addiction. It may have seemed obvious to others but to me I couldn’t see it until I did this process. Once I realized that escaping the addiction was not the answer I began finding ways to engage with food that was more productive. Instead of running from it, I moved in toward it by facing my fears about losing control and learning to befriend the addictive behavior, to understand it and manage it. My hostage dreams have changed too. I still have them but the nature of them has shifted reflecting the work I have done on this issue thus far. I would like to say that the problem is solved but it is ongoing. I am still working this one out but the writing was key in discovering exactly what I needed to really face this and start making meaningful changes in my life.
I hope that writing for discovery can help you with something that has you stuck and frustrated too.
