Fear and Journaling, What Am I Afraid Of?

We can break down the fear of journaling into two separate segments, fear of the process and fear of the result of writing. Let’s begin with the result.  Often a core fear stemming from the results or outcomes of writing is the fear of feeling vulnerable. Vulnerable can be defined as, “susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm”. Often when we open ourselves to writing or journaling, we become aware of and/or a witness to our own thoughts and ideas on paper, we see the concreteness there on the paper. We may wonder where these words and ideas are coming from and if they are even ours. This uncertainty and fear can trigger our vulnerability where we become easily affected by our own judgments and the judgments of others. We sometimes fear that others will see our writing and criticize us harshly, laugh at us, or be insensitive.  Often though, we are our own worst critics and perhaps we are most afraid of how we will respond to ourselves. However, like most things in life, it takes some practice allowing vulnerable moments to occur where we can practice seeing ourselves differently and respond compassionately to our vulnerability.

It’s also important to consider that vulnerability does have an upside. Well known vulnerability expert, Bene′ Brown PhD, LCSW, has this perspective to offer us "we associate vulnerability with emotions we want to avoid such as fear, shame, and uncertainty. Yet we too often lose sight of the fact that vulnerability is also the birthplace of joy, belonging, creativity, authenticity, and love." It is okay to fear feeling vulnerable and perhaps understanding the positive aspects of vulnerability encourages us to practice it more often. Journaling can open the door to creativity, authenticity and help us explore our vulnerability. For more insights into vulnerability check out Bene′ Brown’s TED Talk and RSA Short. While allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to the resulting words from journaling can be the most fearful aspect of writing, there are other fears to explore as well, such as our fears about the process of writing.

The process of writing is the actual sitting down and allowing words to flow from our hearts and minds onto the page. Some of our fears about the process of writing may be associated with time, structure, writing ability and making mistakes. Perhaps fear of time sounds like this, “If I write, I won’t get the dishes, laundry or other work completed.” and fear of our writing ability could sound like, “ I’m a terrible writer, my handwriting is not legible, my grammar is atrocious, and my spelling sucks.”. Until we are able to slow down and sit with these possibilities it can be difficult to discern our fears and learn to work through them. However, a really great benefit of journaling is that none of these fears really matter. Journals are as private as we’d like them to be. It isn’t necessary to be strict about our skills, time, and structure, and it isn’t necessary for us to judge and critique our writing skills or ourselves in the process. We can simply write.

What are your fears...wait, before delving into fears about writing and breaking them down into tolerable pieces of discomfort, we’ve created a tool to help! Click here to download your FREE PDF entitled, “What am I afraid of? 8 thought-provoking questions to help conquer your fear of journaling”