Why keep a journal?

Most people who know me know I am an ardent advocate of journal keeping. I started my own journal 40 years ago. A friend of mine told me about her neighbors, two sisters in their 90’s who had been keeping journal since they were young women in their 20s. My husband and I were about to begin our efforts to become parents which led me to realize that I, and indeed most people I knew, really had no sense of our parents as people, as people with separate identities from being Mom or Dad, people with dreams and thoughts and wishes of their own. It occurred to me that if I kept a journal, at least when I died, my kids, whoever they might be, could read and learn about Cheryl who was more than Mom. That’s how it started anyway. In the spring of 1974, the year Nixon resigned, I began my journal. My mother-in-law, after learning I was planning to do this, sent me 5 beautiful red leather bound blank books, probably the nicest gift I ever received from here. And for the first three years or so, it really was a record of my life. Things like the effects of inflation on our lives, the experiences of my pregnancies and birth experiences, the ups and downs of married life. But sometime after my second child was born, my writing took a different turn and my journal became far more about my internal life. And by the time I started in therapy and then analysis several years later, it was all about my interior life. In fact reading my journal from most of the years since the mid-80s, t...
Source: Jung At Heart - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs