Welcome to a powerful blog series to help you understand the Brave Story Medicine™ method and how we use it to help our authors publish stories that change the world. I developed the method over a 40-year career dedicated to understanding the mind-body-soul healing journey and how best to empower others on that journey.
The method is 5 steps:
- Journal
- Read your words out loud to yourself
- Read your words to a trusted friend or small group
- Publish your words
- Grab the microphone and speak your words to an audience
I started with step one at the age of 15 and began writing in my journals for so many different reasons. Mostly, I wrote about school, boys, and dreams for my life. I saw a lot of venting on those pages. They were my trusted place to move my thoughts and shift my energy. Only back then, I didn’t think of it like that. Now I know how important it was, that it was an awareness and healing process. Later in my life, journaling became a survival tool. The life events, traumas, and tragedies (we all experience) could be expressed privately in my journal, and that helped me process them.
Journaling isn’t just writing thoughts into a notebook, though. It’s a powerful act of turning the inside world into a story that you can see, reflect on, and work with. In the Brave Story Medicine™ approach, journaling is the very first step toward self-awareness, emotional healing, and personal transformation.
In this post, we’ll explore:
- Why journaling is more than just “diary-keeping”
- The research behind writing as a healing tool
- How narrative shapes our sense of self
- Practical journaling approaches to begin your healing story
What Makes Journaling a Healing Practice?
At its heart, healing begins with awareness — the moment you see what’s happening inside you instead of just feeling it. Journaling brings your inner experience into the light. Through words, you give shape to emotions, clarify patterns, and start to understand yourself more deeply.
This isn’t about writing perfect sentences — it’s about stories that give voice to your experience.
Clinical researchers describe therapeutic journaling and expressive writing as tools that help individuals externalize internal experiences so they can understand and reorganize them. When feelings are stuck in your mind, they can feel overwhelming and chaotic. Writing turns that emotional noise into a narrative that can be observed and worked with.
There are times I’ve written about life events, looked down to read what I wrote, and thought: Do I believe that? The awareness is a gift. With awareness we get a choice.
The Science Behind Writing and Healing
Studies show that writing about your experiences — especially emotional or meaningful ones — can have measurable effects on both mental and physical well-being.
Writing Promotes Meaning-Making
Research published in the Journal of Medical Humanities reviewed decades of interdisciplinary evidence showing that autobiographical and expressive writing can be beneficial to both psychological and physical health. Participants who engage in structured writing practices often report reduced stress, better emotional regulation, and clearer meaning in life events.
Narrative therapy — the idea that our identities are shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves — helps explain why this works. Writing helps us see the stories we have been living inside and gives us a chance to rewrite them with new insights.
I’ve been using this idea in my new book, Write Your Dream Life, to help people understand that writing is a way to manifest what you want!
Clinical Evidence for Expressive Writing
A systematic review and meta-analysis of journaling interventions found that expressive writing can lead to reductions in anxiety, PTSD symptoms, and general distress, compared to control groups. The effect sizes were small to moderate, but consistent across studies.
This kind of research underscores that journaling isn’t just subjective advice — it’s a psychosocial tool validated by science.
The Narrative Power of Journaling
What makes journaling particularly potent is that it engages the brain in narrative construction — and narrative is central to how humans think.
We don’t just experience life randomly. We organize lived experience into stories: about who we are, what we value, what hurts, and what gives hope.
Narrative and Identity
Narrative therapy is a clinical approach that recognizes your story as central to your sense of self. Rather than diagnosing or pathologizing, narrative therapy helps you:
- Separate yourself from your problems
- See patterns in your experiences
- Identify times when you were resilient or resourceful
- Create new, more empowering stories about your life
Traditional therapeutic writing uses these principles: by writing about events and feelings, you get to observe patterns and themes in your life story rather than being lost inside them.
In this way, journaling isn’t just reflection — it’s a form of self-authored narrative therapy.
Journaling as Emotional Processing
One big reason people feel better after journaling isn’t just that they record events — it’s that they process emotions.
Emotions become less overwhelming when they are seen clearly. Writing helps you reduce the intensity of swirling, unstructured feelings by putting them into words. Once they are written, those feelings become:
- Easier to understand
- Less mysterious
- Less reactive
- More manageable
You can see patterns in your moods, triggers for stress, and recurring themes that keep you stuck. Once you see those patterns, you’re no longer in them — you’re observing them.
Clinical research supports this: studies show that people who write about emotional experiences often report improvements in emotional regulation, reduced depressive symptoms, and increased self-awareness.
One of my favorite ways to use journaling is to process the emotions that come up after using certain healing modalities, like breathwork or sound healing. The writing is the integration and it’s key to feeling a more complete healing experience.
Journaling and Physical Health
Writing for healing isn’t only about emotions — research has even linked expressive writing to physical health outcomes.
Clinical studies — beginning with pioneering work by psychologist James Pennebaker — found that individuals who wrote about significant emotional experiences showed improvements in immune function and reductions in stress-related health problems over time.
This suggests what many people intuitively know: emotional health and physical health are deeply connected. When we process emotional pain — and not suppress it — the whole body stabilizes.
How to Journal for Healing: Practical Approaches
Healing through journaling isn’t automatic — you have to approach it with intention. Here are some tried-and-true ways to begin:
1. Free Expressive Journaling
This is where you write whatever comes to mind, without editing.
- Set a time (10–20 minutes)
- Write nonstop
- Don’t worry about grammar
- Let thoughts flow without judgment
This practice helps you get what’s inside you onto the page.
2. Emotional Event Journaling
Pick a strong emotion or recent experience — joy, grief, anxiety, anger — and explore it deeply.
Ask yourself:
- What happened?
- What did I feel?
- What meaning did I make of this experience?
- How has this shaped my story?
3. Reflective Prompt Journaling
Try writing with prompts like:
- “What am I feeling right now and why?”
- “What belief about myself came up today?”
- “What story am I telling myself about this challenge?”
- “What do I need to hear today?”
These questions help you turn raw experience into narrative insight.
4. Pattern Recognition Journaling
After a few days or weeks, read back through your entries. Look for:
- Recurring thoughts
- Emotional triggers
- Themes that tie the entries together
This reflection is the step where awareness gains power.
Common Myths About Journaling and Healing
“Journaling is just venting.”
It feels like it sometimes — but healing writing does more than vent. It organizes emotions into language, which allows your brain to integrate experiences instead of getting overwhelmed by them. I allow myself to move what’s inside onto the page with a lot of self-acceptance and compassion. Then, with an up-leveled awareness, I have a choice to use my journaling pages as a manifesting tool. I know that venting is a lower vibe. I begin to ask myself: What do you want? And then my journaling transforms into a high-vibe playground for making my dreams a reality. In my book, Write Your Dream Life (publishing in February 2026), I created a detailed journey for awareness, discernment, and using journaling in this way.
“Journaling is only for emotional people.”
Not true. Journaling can help anyone who wants to understand themselves more deeply, make better decisions, or live with greater clarity. It was my go-to for goal setting from the beginning of my career. And it’s a place I can organize thoughts, not just things going wrong or right. I use journaling for my networking conversations, during workshops, and in the morning when I want to “meditate.”
“You have to write every day.”
Frequency matters, but quality matters more than quantity. Even occasional deep, reflective journaling can shift perspective and awareness. I do suggest getting into the habit of it, though. And writing every day was the start of being able to write pretty much anything on the spot, including the content, blogs, and books I share with the world.
When to Use Journaling as Part of a Therapeutic Journey
Journaling is a powerful tool, but it isn’t a replacement for professional therapy — especially for those with severe trauma, ongoing crises, or complex mental health conditions.
Instead, journaling works best as:
- A complement to therapy
- A daily self-care practice
- A reflective space for processing thoughts
- A way to track growth and change over time
Many clinicians recommend journaling as an adjunct to professional care because it strengthens self-awareness and can make therapy more effective.
How Journaling Leads to Awareness — And Then Healing
At its best, journaling does three things:
It makes the invisible visible.
Thoughts and feelings living inside your mind — chaotic and abstract — become something you can look at and work with.
It separates you from your experience.
You go from being overwhelmed by emotion to observing it on the page, which gives you space and perspective.
It creates a narrative you can revise.
Once you see your story written down, you can begin to understand it, choose what stays, and begin to rewrite limiting or painful narratives.
Healing doesn’t always mean forgetting what hurts. Sometimes healing means understanding it well enough to live beyond it.
That’s the kind of transformation that journaling — done with intention — can begin.
Takeaway Practicals
- Start small. Even 5-10 minutes of expressive journaling is enough to begin.
- Write with intention. Ask questions, probe feelings, name emotions.
- Don’t judge your writing. The page is for discovery, not perfection.
- Return often. Healing is cumulative — and your transformations show up over time.
- Reflect back. Re-reading your journal over weeks or months helps you see growth patterns.
Conclusion: Journaling Is Your First Act of Healing
The Brave Story Medicine™ method begins with one act: turning inward experience into words on a page.
Through journaling, you begin to see your story more clearly. You separate thought from reaction. You recognize patterns and open space for change.
Journaling is not just a step — it’s the doorway into narrative awareness. And once awareness is present, healing becomes possible.
Whether your story is still painful, confusing, joyful, or unfinished — journaling gives you a safe space to explore it, understand it, and begin to shape it with intention and care.
References
- Valtonen J. The Health Benefits of Autobiographical Writing: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. J Med Humanit. 2020. (Discusses empirical evidence connecting writing interventions to psychological and physical health outcomes.)
- Efficacy of journaling in the management of mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PMC. (Shows clinical evidence that expressive writing improves mental health measures including anxiety and PTSD symptoms.)
