JournalSpeak

My world changed the day I learned about the work of Nicole Sachs and the process she’d developed called JournalSpeak. After listening to a couple of her podcasts with people who’d used JournalSpeak to recover from Long Covid, and after watching her four videos explaining JournalSpeak (1, 2, 3, 4), I gave it a try myself. I ranted and raged into my computer about how mad I was to have gotten Long Covid. That night, I felt a smidgen better, and from then on, I just kept getting better — not as quickly as I wanted, and recovery was not linear, but it was clear that JournalSpeak was the technique that reversed the trajectory of my illness.

I believe I would still be sick today if I hadn’t come across her work. I’m also fully convinced that the world would be a better place if everyone had a JournalSpeak practice, regardless of how healthy they are or how regulated their nervous systems are.

A lot of people are skeptical that journaling can help cure illness, and I get it. If I hadn’t been as desperate as I was when I came across Sachs’s work, I wouldn’t have “wasted my time.”

I’d previously tried keeping journals, and the only impact journaling had on me was a sense of guilt for not being able to keep up with the journal, or it made me feel insignificant because my life wasn’t interesting enough. More importantly, everyone I’d ever come across who espoused journaling still had a ton of issues. I’d never come across anyone who said that they’d had x, y, or z problem, and that those problems fully went away after journaling. Maybe they felt a bit better, but they still had issues.

Sachs’s work was different. She had countless of examples of people with real physical problems, some similar to mine and some not, who had fully recovered. And the style of journaling was vastly different from anything I’d ever encountered before.

JournalSpeak is a form of free writing and stream of consciousness that you do nonstop for about 20 minutes (or longer, if you want), but what makes it especially unique is that you’re intentionally trying to tap into the most repressed, socially unacceptable thoughts and emotions you have. You hold nothing back during these sessions. I like to think of it as allowing myself to throw a temper tantrum on the keyboard.

By doing this continuously for at least 20 minutes, you’re able to tap into the issues that your nervous system and subconscious have previously repressed. In the process, you release the thought, you feel the emotion, and it all goes away.

If this sounds like a combination of easy and terrifying, that’s because it is. Below I share some guidance on how to start a JournalSpeak practice and some general tips from my own experience. I also recommend reviewing Sachs’s resources, and this page by Dani Fagan, which I found to be the most helpful for figuring out how to JournalSpeak.

Plan on a 28-day trial: I got lucky with how quickly my body started to respond to JournalSpeak. Not everyone will respond that quickly, so don’t put that expectation on yourself. Sachs recommended a 28-day trial of one session a day, and at the end of the 28 days, see how you feel. I did this myself, and then I just kept going, and I think it’s a good thing for everyone to try.

Make at least three lists: One of upsetting childhood events, one of things upsetting you today, and one of your personality traits. Then you pick a topic from one of the lists each day, and you journal about that. I ended up adding a couple of lists: upsetting things that happened as an adult, expectations I had about life that had not worked out, and, while this isn’t a list, I would sometimes just ask myself what I was feeling at that moment and journal about that. Having so many lists meant that I could go to whichever topic drew me most at that moment, and I didn’t have to tackle events or emotions that I found scary until I was ready.

The JournalSpeak session should take at least 20 minutes: It can take 10-18 minutes to start getting into deeper, repressed “stuff.” So you want to at least JournalSpeak for 20 minutes to make sure you get to something juicy. Sarno recommended doing a 30 minute session twice a day. When I first started, I was bedridden and not doing much anyway, so I started with twice a day. I would set an alarm for 20 minutes so that I knew I would at least journal for that long, but, since I had nothing else to do, I often ended up journaling for 30-40 minutes. Once I tapped into something that had been repressed, I didn’t want to leave until I’d gotten as far with it as I could. I seem to be unique with that though, most people don’t seem to like journaling, so 20 minutes a day seems sufficient if you’re not as weirdly eager to get to all of the negative stuff like I was.

But plan for at least 30 minutes per day: Even if you just journal for 20 minutes, you’ll likely need some time to decompress after. Sachs suggests journaling for 20 minutes and then doing a 10 minute loving-kindness meditation. Some people like to do this when they get up to start the day fresh, and to get it out of the way. If I was only doing it once a day, I preferred right before bed because it helped me sleep.

Embrace your inner toddler: Much of the journaling, especially early on was about allowing myself to have the temper tantrums on page that I repressed in real life. I allowed myself to “scream” (type forcefully in all-caps) that I hated people and wished they would die, much as a four- or five-year-old might. I didn’t actually think those things—but the thoughts had arisen at some point, and rather than just acknowledging them and letting them pass, I’d repressed them. This was my time to let all the awful things out.

Don’t keep it: I deleted almost every session. No one else ever needs to see the awful things that came out of me. I needed to acknowledge them, and once I did, they went away. There was rarely a need for me to go back and see what came up, and I’ve never regretted not having copies. To make sure no one ever saw what I wrote, I kept a single document that I would type into. I would write what I needed to write, then I would delete it, and then I would save the blank document. This was something Sachs recommended somewhere, and I think it’s a brilliant idea.

The negativity goes away: As I mentioned above, the negativity would often just disappear completely once I’d allowed it to be voiced. However, some issues did require multiple journaling sessions over many months, and other issues took me over a year to even be able to access. This was a really weird aspect of journaling: Something would be so stressful and painful, and it might take me a really long time to finally access the thoughts and emotions. Then, when I finally did access and release everything, it would be so completely gone that by the next day, I’d have a hard time remembering what the issue had been. That’s one of the things that’s made writing about JournalSpeak so difficult: I genuinely can’t remember most of the issues that came up. But that’s also been one of the things that enabled me to keep coming back to journaling. I knew that if I could get to the issue, it really would be completely released and I would feel better.

Allow everything: I cannot stress enough that JournalSpeak, for me, is about allowing the voices I’d been repressing to finally be heard. These can be really vicious, crude, critical, angry, sad, vulnerable, terrified, grief-stricken, childlike voices that said any number of awful things about me or people/events in my life (even my pets and plants!). They’re the voices that have been repressed because, for any number of reasons, what they’re saying isn’t acceptable. My only objective now is to hear them fully, in all their awfulness—it was the only way to get to the deeper truths that were always full of love and compassion.

My precursor to Parts Work: My journaling experience was that I would flow between using “I,” “you,” and “we” a lot. In fact, I had countless voices within me. Some of them I identified with, some just seemed to be random voices within me that needed to be heard, and some of them even seemed like a couple of sibling bickering. I’ve since learned about Parts Work, which explains why this happens, and you can read more about that here.

The negative voices are not “you”: I was fortunate in that I *never* identified with my negative voices. I don’t know why I didn’t because this is something that a lot of people can struggle with, but I recommend doing anything you can, in advance and during a session, to remind yourself that the voices are nothing more than voices, and they are not you. I had negative voices in me that were screaming such awful, hurtful, negative, and sometimes even violent things, but they were just voices — they were *not* me, and if you have them, they’re not you either. I found it helpful to think of them as voices that happened to be in me and that wanted to get out. Giving them permission to say the awful things they wanted to say was the only way to get rid of them, and once they’d had their say, they disappeared completely, while I remained the peaceful, hopefully friendly, person that I am. The voices are simply something passing through you that need to be acknowledged, but should not be identified with.

Processing repressed stuff can be awful while you’re doing it, but you’ll feel better once it’s done: Every time I allowed a new gripe to be fully expressed, I would get physically better and more energetic, and the negative thoughts or emotions would completely disappear. Some gripes were easily expressed in 20 minutes, and some gripes took over a year to finally access. But it was always been worth the effort.

Writing or typing this out is key: Talking doesn’t work. Maybe it’s that by typing or holding a pen, we’re bring more of our body into this? Maybe it has something to do with the way the brain processes speech versus writing? Maybe it has to do with the fact that emotions may actually be more about interacting with the external world than keeping everything to ourselves? I don’t know. What I do know, is that I’d have to do free, expressive writing for 5-15 minutes on a topic before I would really start to get to the meat of whatever had been repressed.

Experiment with handwriting vs typing: For me, typing was better for accessing and releasing negative emotions, while writing with pen on paper was better for reinforcing positive emotions. It was almost like the negative thoughts/emotions came faster and more aggressively, while the positive thoughts/emotions were gentler and more peaceful, and so the method I chose to access them had to reflect the “character” of the thought/emotion. That was what worked for me though, and I know other people who need to write everything by hand. So I recommend trying them both.

It takes time: There was a lot of repressed stuff that I had to acknowledge and process, and just because I acknowledged something once did not mean that was sufficient for it to be fully expressed. It took a frustrating amount of time to get through the issues that were holding me back, and there were many things I had to allow the voices in me to repeat over and over until they finally felt better. Frustration about how long this takes is often part of the process.