Psych-Mat

How to change a negative maladaptive life story to a positive adaptive one.

Before I went to sleep last night, I was reading Christine Baldwin’s “Storycatcher” in which she proposes that we create the “story” of our life by selecting certain memories and then linking them together to form a coherent narrative.  The latter is what I will call the “life story”.  A life story plays a fundamental role in our lives because as Baldwin states  (p. 124) “We all need a story to stand on: a core belief that affirms who we are, which we won’t relinquish no matter what.”  A life story that is affirming and supportive is a positive and adaptive one; one that is undermining and critical of the self is negative and maladaptive.  According to the cognitive therapy approach, life stories of the latter kind could contribute to clinical depression.

Although we cannot change one iota of what happened to us throughout our lives, we can change our story by the kinds of memories we choose to link into our self- narrative.  Baldwin writes “When we link evidence of inadequacy, our lives take on psychological pallor; when we link evidence of worth, our lives take on psychological vitality.”  ....  “We create these links, and we can unlink them: we call this changing our mind.”

Fortunately it is possible to change our mind and rewrite out life story at any time in our lives.  I will give a personal example of how I was lead to a radical re-write today of my life story after reading the passages quoted above in Baldwin’s book.  In our elder years of life we tend to reflect on our life story and to use it to evaluate our lives and start the job of putting psychological closure on it (if that indeed ever comes completely).  In my semi-retirement, I have been reflecting on my own career as a scientist and have felt some feelings of disappointment.

Journaling: The why and how of daily journaling

The Why: Advantages and purposes of journaling

• Journaling is a way to improve your understanding of yourself. It provides a platform on which you can stand so that you can observe yourself. Self-knowledge, including discovering your strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes is essential for making life decisions and for self-fulfilment. It can help you build up a more positive relationship with your own self as well as others.

• Journaling can be an effective form of self-help therapy which costs no money. For example there is plentiful research that journaling of one’s eating behaviour can be very useful in successful weight control. The same beneficial effect of monitoring one’s behaviour by journaling can be use to help with other undesired or addictive behaviours such as gambling or sex addiction. A journal of your financial transactions can be an important way of budgeting and can suggest ways to improve your spending patterns.

• Journaling can help you make decisions. The act of writing helps you concentrate and recognize and organize your thoughts and feelings so that decision making become easier and more considered and reasonable.

• In a similar way journaling helps you problem solve and also to prioritize your values and plans/goals for the future.

• Journaling can help one discern dysfunctional patterns in your relationships with others and hence suggest ways to change your behaviour to improve the relationship.

• Journaling can be used as a tool to help you recover from childhood abuse or neglect or trauma.

• Journaling help you recover memories from your past and improve your understanding of why you behave the way you do and hence how to change to more adaptive behaviours.

• Journaling can be used as a way to summarize and make sense of your accumulated knowledge of the world and hence to understand the world you live in better and make you better able to fulfill your needs and wants.

• Journaling can be an important tool in one’s spiritual journey.