This is Your Brain on Journaling

For years, my journal has functioned as more than just a collection of entries. It has served as a structured space where implicit, fragmented memories that feel at times fleeting and surreal can be captured, documented, preserved. Trauma can leave us feeling disconnected, silenced, or caught in wordless loops of emotion or sensation. With writing, I could capture these sensations and honor their truth. But not in the way you might think.

Beyond Narrative: The Linguistic Architecture of Poetry

Often, what emerges onto the page for me are poems. Fragments of language. Sensory images. There's a scientific basis for this pattern. Poetry engages different processing centers in the brain than prose, often activating right-hemisphere regions associated with introspection. When conventional language fails to capture the complexity of traumatic experience, poetic expression can access and articulate somatic states that narrative prose might flatten or miss entirely.

For me, poetry became a way to express the texture and sensory quality of my internal landscape when straightforward descriptions were inadequate. The rhythmic, imagistic nature of poetry mirrors the non-linear, sensory-based nature of traumatic memory itself, offering a more resonant pathway for expression and integration.

When I look back at my daily journals during some of my most difficult periods, there's nothing notable about them. They follow my day, frustrations at work, goals for the days and weeks ahead. My poetry during the same period tells a different story.¹ The prose disguises while the poetry reveals. Where my journal entries maintained a facade of normalcy, my poems spoke of disconnection, boundaries crossed, and a body struggling to feel safe.

Future-Orientation

Where narrative prose has fallen short for me when writing about past experiences, it's become a powerful tool for thinking about the future. Sometimes, I write about what my ideal next day would entail. The emotional states I want to cultivate. The sensory experiences I want to notice. The boundaries I intend to maintain. Other times, I project further, writing about a life phase years ahead.

This isn't merely wishful thinking. It's a structured exercise in identifying my own value systems and orienting me toward my goals. By articulating desired future states, I often uncover what's missing in my present experience. This process transforms abstract longing into concrete, actionable steps, creating a self-generated cognitive behavioral intervention that guides present behavior toward future wellbeing.

Evidence-Based Structured Approaches

While free-form journaling offers significant benefits, structured protocols provide specific therapeutic frameworks. One resource I particularly value is The Healing Sexual Trauma Guided Journal by therapist Erika Shershun.

What distinguishes this journal is its integration of somatic awareness with cognitive processing. Many trauma resources fail to adequately address how sexual trauma is encoded in the body. This journal's design reflects current understanding of polyvagal theory and bottom-up processing models in trauma treatment.

Its exercises facilitate gentle reconnection with interoceptive awareness without demanding explicit narrative recall, respecting that traumatic memory isn't always stored as declarative content accessible to conscious retrieval. For those with developmental or complex trauma, this somatic approach addresses the fundamental dysregulation that often precedes cognitive integration.

The Empirical Case for Journaling as Intervention

Expressive writing as a therapeutic intervention has been extensively studied since James Pennebaker's pioneering research in the 1980s. Meta-analyses document multiple physiological and psychological benefits of expressive writing paired with other treatments, including improved healthcare utilization, better physical health, and lower stress levels.

Journaling is a remarkably accessible intervention. While specialized trauma therapies require significant resources and trained professionals, writing requires minimal equipment and can be self-directed. This accessibility makes journaling a powerful tool for democratizing access to evidence-based healing approaches, creating what public health researchers would call a high-impact, low-barrier intervention.

I'm particularly drawn to this aspect of journaling. During periods when I couldn't access therapy due to financial constraints (or when I wasn’t yet aware of the wide range of therapies and techniques I now use regularly), my journal remained a constant companion, a therapeutic tool available regardless of circumstances. This accessibility matters profoundly in a healthcare landscape where trauma treatment remains a privilege not universally available.

Integration: Tending the Garden of Recovery

Journaling, whether through narrative prose, poetry, fragmentary reflection, future visioning, or structured prompts, has served as a consistent anchor in my healing journey. Its value is validated not only by subjective experience but by converging evidence from neuroscience and psychology.

The practice doesn't erase traumatic experiences, but it creates conditions under which the brain and body can process, integrate, and adapt in response to them. It cultivates a self-regulatory capacity and provides a scaffold for meaning-making: all essential components of post-traumatic growth.

In the landscape of trauma recovery, journaling represents a gentle yet powerful tool for tending what I call the "soft soil" of our internal world, creating the conditions where healing becomes possible, one word at a time.

1   Here’s a reading at a Quiet Lightening journal release that I paired with movement, a poem in Cathexis Northwest Press, and another featured in Cobra Milk.