Do You Censor Your Journal?

[EveHarrington]

I'm paranoid that my "stuff" will be held against me and used to hurt me. That's why I say nothing but "I am a CSA survivor".

 

[Sideways]

Any hints on how to start one if its hard to write stuff down?

Anything from a doodle upwards can qualify as a journal entry. Not needing to achieve an 'end point' in any given entry makes it a lot easier for me. When I'm over it, I just put it down.

I journal a lot more if I carry it with me. If I'm waiting for my doc's appointment or having a coffee, if my journal is within reach, I'll just start making notes. Sometimes I have something I urgently need to write down. But a lot of the time my best thoughts evolve from entries that started with nothing more than "Decaf coffee was the worst invention ever...".

Journalling is just thoughts, and different ways of recording your thoughts are going to help you process in different ways, some more effective for you than others. If you do a lot of art, maybe have your journal bookmarked with a pencil and doodle over breakfast. How do I feel about facing today? Or my shitty sleep last night? Cue doodling brick wall for me to bang my head against!

 

[Silver.]

You ever see in movies, how if something happens, and the police need to go through a persons stuff, every little detail in the journal is picked apart, analyzed, and what not? This is how I felt for years about my journal. I don't want people to display my life out there. I don't want them to find some hidden meaning in something I am writing that just means what I am writing. Paranoid much? Yes, definitely. Now that I have a daughter though, I think even more, I don't want her to ever have to find this crap, but I try not to censure myself so much as to just kind of keep my journal where only I will find it.

 

[Oicu812]

I started a journal about 6 months ago, I am not afraid of anyone being upset, angry, or have any fear of reprisal in any shape or form. I have been fighting this PTSD monster for 45 years, yeah 45 years so I'm past any worry if I offend anyone, first of all by me writing what I went through in a mental hospital that I didn't belong in the first place for a little over two years gives me a feeling of freedom, and this feels so good, my family for some reason thought I was a drug addict because I had taken LSD about a dozen times and smoked weed, I was 15 years old at the time and the year was 1968, that's what everyone was doing at the time so there was no drug treatment hospitals at the time and boom I wound up there. I was attacked and abused and no one helped this 15 year old, at 17 I was released back into the world to be a normal man with a monster in me head, after 45 years I will never worry about who may or may not see or read about my experiences or hurting someone who was involved in sending me to that horrid place.

 

[Wendy]

I vent it all out in my journal. I sometimes worry what my kids will think of me someday when I die and they read through all my journals (from 4th grade to present, and I am now 47 years old). I can only hope it will give a more complete picture of me to my kids. They will know how much they meant to me and how hard I struggled to be there for them, in spite of a lot of things I keep hidden from them now for their protection. I will say that in my marriage, I went on a trip once to visit family and while I was gone my ex read all of my diaries and took photos of the entries. He was already plotting to divorce me but I didn't know it. That was very, very painful and I still cringe when I think about it (it feels like violation, almost rape-like). Of course, he twisted a whole bunch of things I wrote and turned them against me. But regardless I find that journaling 100% honestly is helpful to me. I can certainly understand those who aren't comfortable with it though. My kids have been asked to journal by their therapist and they refuse. I get that.

 

[Deleted member 34328]

My Therapist first encouraged me to start a journal when the flashbacks started. It was used as a way to validate what I was experiencing in the moment, but then to close it and put it in an undisclosed place. The journal had a lock on it, so I never censored anything I wrote. I wrote with paper and pencil. I actually found it to be a good coping tool. At the time, it had a specific purpose. I was encouraged to write out exactly what was happening in the flashback.

Now, I use it as a form of release. I type on my tablet which has a lock and password on it. My journals are saved in a secure location that only I can access. I have chosen to show part of an entry with my therapist from time to time, but it's all personal and not written with the intent of showing it to anyone. it's an outlet for frustration, confusion over something or even extremely emotional...but only for my eyes to see.

So overall, no, I don’t censor my journaling at all.

 

[Sideways]

Anne Frank kept a journal. And it was pretty uncensored. If the journal had been found first, her entire family would have been sent to the death camps. Yet, she wrote it all down, kept it, knowing that what her and her family were doing was against the law, and punishable effectively by death.

We look back on her journal, her honesty in her journal, as one of the best examples of courage, and the human face of the trauma being inflicted and suffered, from the Holocaust.

Food for thought maybe, when we're fear how people will interpret our ramblings about our suffering...

 

[Tinyflame]

Yes I censor.