Personal Widow’s Journal

A personal widow’s journal is used to document her thoughts, images and the world around her.  That is why the very first thing I want you to do is get yourself a journal or notebook. Make sure that you love its size, color and design so that you will feel comfortable putting your most precious thoughts in it. Pick one that gives you lots of space to write and that is easy to carry around.

Keeping a personal widow’s journal will start you on a journey of self-reflection. You will write out your feelings – angry, lonely, and unhappy with the way things turned out. You will find comfort in putting your thoughts in writing and please don’t be a critic of your writing skills.

Don’t listen to your inner critic telling you what you should or shouldn’t write. Just start writing and don’t stop. Put all your focus on filling out the page and before you know it you will be on the second and third page. Lose yourself in the experience and you will soon uncover thoughts and feelings that you were not even aware of.

Don’t worry about writing long passages every day, if you are really busy just write a paragraph or two about your day. The important thing is that you develop the habit of extreme self-care by taking the time to journal every day.

Later on your personal widow’s journal will give you a chance to look back over this period of your life and see how you have healed. Your journal will become filled with your life – the pain, the laughter, the significant events , the searching questions of why life is the way it is and most importantly how it all came together to make you the person you are today.

Ok – Now it gets a little bit harder. I want you to take your widow’s personal journal and write your life story. This is a very powerful exercise of learning who you are as a person and where you came from.  Writing the details of your life will help you understand that the choices you’ve made have brought you to this point in your life.

Don’t let this idea overwhelm you because you can just do it in bullet-list form if you want. Start by breaking down the events that most affected you and then go back and fill in between these events.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What were your most vibrate memories – good and bad?

• When did you feel the most loved, angry, betrayed etc?  
• When did your choices change the path of your life?

• Are there certain people that affected your life and how?   

Take your time doing this in as much detail as possible because the actual process will deepen the connection you have with yourself. You will start to have compassion for all that you have been through and you will appreciate your inner strength.

The events and details are different for each of us but we all have the underlying need for more self-care. When you are finished, step back and ask yourself – What did I discover while writing the story of my life in my personal widow’s journal?

To Our Shared Journey,                                                                                      

Mary Francis is a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist®,  Certified Law of Attraction Facilitator,  Early Intervention Field Traumatology (EIFT) and Author/Founder of “The Sisterhood of Widows”