30 Day Journal Challenge

There are a few things I’ve learned along this journey in finding what works and what does not. Please, use my experience, my trial and error to save yourself some heartache.

1. These tips won’t work every time but the more consistently you use them the less you will need to use them. Accept your progress and give yourself credit. Never beat yourself up for falling down. Stand up, dust off, and begin again. Please do not be so hard on yourself you never get back up, and so light on yourself you don’t try hard enough.

2. There is a difference in positive thinking and accepting reality as it is. Do not just repeat useless affirmations or live by faith. You have to dig deep to find the root and change the behavior. If you aren’t willing to rip open past wounds forget about it.

3. You can only change one bad behavior or thought at a time. You will be tempted when you’re most motivated to take on more, but you will eventually become overwhelmed and fail them all.

4. No one but you can believe in you enough to make a difference. If someone spends hours speaking to you, motivating you, getting you to feel good use that as a spring board to continue that kind of talk when you talk to yourself. Otherwise, those hours of that person’s time are wasted on you. For your own thoughts and self-talk will demolish everything they said. It’s why you’ll never find validation from anywhere but self.

With the journaling I’ve done in the past I had no specific way to journal. What I would do is every time I felt a negative feeling, anger, jealousy, insecurity, fear; I would write a journal entry.

If I finished writing the journal entry and still felt the negative emotion I would head to the bathroom, face myself in the mirror, and tell myself what I needed to overcome what the thought was. Whether I was being too prideful, holding someone accountable for things they didn’t do, and even if I was right why it was unhealthy to let the wrong emotions take over.

Over time this helped me stop having that particular thought. It was not positive thinking, so much as accepting truth and reality as it is.

If writing it down made me feel better I would dissect what I wrote. I would dig deep to understand why I felt that way, if it was fair to feel the way I did, if I was over reacting, if I was using the past as an excuse, etc.

I clung tight to the fact that I could most certainly use my past as an excuse for the way I was, but it was now my responsibility as an adult and mother to never allow it to remain an excuse to stay that way.

The first thing I chose to work on was accusing my husband of being with other women. Due to the past I carried pain into my relationship with him that he should never have had to deal with. I was carrying that pain from person to person. Holding my husband accountable for the actions of men before him was not fair. When faced with losing him over it I had no choice but to figure out how to stop.

I tried religion and most anyone who will be reading this already knows that only made our life worse, and that not one thing it can teach you will make it better. When I came out of religion I tried to figure out how I had felt the presence of a god I no longer believed in. Through that study I discovered the power of the brain and human psychology.

In the beginning I tried to ignore negative thoughts all together, and spew positive affirmations consistently. This does not work because when we ignore our problems by shouting over them they’re still there. They’re left alone to grow and fester, and we never heal from them or solve anything.

Positive thinking can be extremely detrimental because no matter how positive you speak you are not dealing with the problem or emotions. You are leaving the root in tact.  

I had to accept the fact that life just is what it is. Accept the horrors in myself that brought me so much shame I turned red in the face just to think them. There really was no other way. So this began my journey to accepting what is and using that to change who I am.

Every single time the insecure thoughts came, rather than start a fight, go through his wallet, or clean the computer looking for signs I would write, or go in the bathroom and tell myself he loves me, he would never cheat on me, remind myself I can’t blame him for what past lovers have done, etc. Over the course of time the thoughts of him cheating came less and less.

There were times throughout the process where I still went to him and started a fight, or I shuffled through his wallet, etc. Rather than let those moments be used as an excuse to give up I would remind myself that it had been so long since I’d done it. Why allow one bad choice to lead to a million other bad choices? So I would journal or pep talk myself, accepting the shame of the fall, and then I’d pick myself up and start again.

So many people told me not to do that to myself. Not to let the insecurity ruin my relationship, but I never listened. No matter how much I believed them as they spoke, or how motivated and good I felt after speaking to them, I would inevitably ruin it all with my own self talk and thoughts. Rather than choosing to change those thoughts on purpose I allowed them to consume me and propel me to almost lose the man I love.

The most recent example I have to offer is a deep search of something I didn’t understand. With the insecurity of other women and jealousy I at least knew the root of it, and was able to carefully, over time, pluck it and be healed.

My parents had cheated on each other often, many of my boyfriends had done the same to me, and everyone I’d ever met had been burned in that way. I had to dissect the pasts of those people, to learn that they had been through their own struggles and pain, and that them cheating on me was not my fault. It was not that I was never enough, but that something was going on inside of them they refused to heal and face. I stopped taking the cheating they had done so personal.

After the insecurity was taken care of I found myself steadily begging my husband for more than he gives. One day he got really frustrated and asked me why it wasn’t enough that he worked hard every day, took me out, bought me the things I needed, and much of what I wanted. Didn’t that prove he loved me?

Well, okay, I’d heard about love languages and perhaps that made sense. I feel most loved when you tell me you love me. When you tell me the house looks good, I am beautiful, or compliment in some way; words of affirmation. But surely the actions he was speaking of should scream far louder than those words, right?

Surely I would rather have him prove his love by working every day and taking care of us, taking me out to dinner, buying me things I want, rather than mere words?

Maybe his love language is gift giving, and the only way he can show me he loves me is giving me things. So how could I accept his language, learn it, and let it be enough? How could I allow his actions to speak louder than the words I was begging for?

What was it about gift giving that I loathed? I did loathe it.

So I began to journal again. This time whenever I felt like going to my husband, rather than doing so, I would sit and write. I made myself write about childhood and think of gifts I have received and how that affects me today.

I love my daddy and mean no harm in what I am about to say. He has come a long way and I don’t know what I would do without him, but he ended up being a large part of why gifts don’t show me love. The love language of giving gifts doesn’t speak love to me; it speaks guilt.

When I was growing up my daddy was an alcoholic. I remember a few times when he was mean that he would buy things to try and make up for it. One time in particular stood in my mind. I asked him earlier in the day if he had money for my yearbook, and he told me no, he was broke.

Later that day he and I got into it. I locked the bathroom door and told him no you won’t when he threatened to whoop me. He kicked the door down and my mother intervened. I went to school with her that night.  

When we got back to the house I took a bath. Afterward, my mother tricked me into the bathroom saying I left a mess. Only my dad was standing there and he asked me how much I needed for my yearbook. So not only had he lied and had the money to get the yearbook, but he was only buying it for me because he felt guilty about his earlier behavior. If the argument had never happened I never would have gotten the yearbook. I immediately forgave my dad without even mentioning it to him because I know what alcoholics are capable of, and that it was the alcohol and not my dad that made those choices.

This happened more than once and with more than just my dad. So I traced my lack of ability to hear Dan’s love language back to the root, and over time have been able to disassociate gift giving with guilt, and learn to accept love the way he speaks it.

I had to do the same thing for awhile that I did with the insecurity with other women. If I felt neglected, like he wasn’t giving me validation, the words were not there, etc. I would journal or pep talk myself. I would remind myself that not everyone is the same. That if I want him to accept my love language the way he does, than I have to accept his. I reminded myself that I can’t hold him accountable for the past. Nor can I seek in my husband the validation and love I can only offer myself.

You see unless we accept and love ourselves we can’t hear the love and acceptance others offer us. We are too busy looking for them to validate us in the way we validate others, and often miss the validation they do give. It isn’t up to other people to validate us. If we leave it up to others we will never heal or grow.

I also learned that by wanting him to offer me the words of affirmation I was really trying to seek my validation in him. It wasn’t about him not loving me, so much as me needing to be told I was loved. For that love to be validated by him speaking it out loud to me.

In most cases I would tell you that over thinking is an awful thing, and it can ruin you. However, in a case like this over thinking through journaling and trying to find the root of an issue can heal you and help you in ways you can’t imagine. You might over think now, even, but the problem is not so much over thinking as it is what you’re thinking about.

For this thirty day challenge I hope you choose one negative emotion, thought, or flaw in yourself and accept it. Accept that you have this flaw, and use the journaling as a reflective way to find out where it comes from. Rather than blame the person or thing you trace it back to forgive and accept reality as it is. Don’t allow the shame you feel to stop you, either.

Feel the shame and remind yourself that we’ve all been ashamed at some point. Do you want to feel that way over and over again as you continue to repeat the behavior? If not, the only way to stop feeling the shame is to stop the behavior.

If you have to forgive someone like a parent, ex spouse, friend, do that. It is for you and not for them that you must set them free. If you know about the person’s past be honest about how awful your own has been in playing a part in who you are. Accept that their past is most likely why they hurt you, and stop taking that hurt personal. Let it go.

Then keep journaling or giving yourself pep talks. When enough time has passed you can move on to the next thing. I used examples from my marriage, but we have all used these techniques in this home, and all healed and been helped tremendously from them. Sure this takes times, but what else do you have but time?

I hope you leave me a comment or message me letting know if you're going to do this. I will be there for anyone who wants to take on this challenge. If you're serious about it I will be there to help you in any way that I can, encourage you, remind you to get up when you fall. I love to help people, but you first have to be willing to help yourself. 

Hell I had a bad week last week, so know that this is not perfect, and you will still have struggles, but you can overcome them, one at a time. I don't have all the answers and I won't pretend to. I just continue searching, educating myself, and accepting things as they are. It's all we can do.