Journaling has grown in popularity over the past few years. People have found its power as a method of getting their emotions down onto a page and helping them see their lives a little differently.
Harriet Hunter is a writer who used journaling in this exact way to help her recover from addiction.
Harriet grew up the oldest of five children in a strict Italian Catholic family. Her father was an alcoholic and rarely home and her mother was mentally abusive. She also experienced physical abuse from various people in her life. Because of all of that pain in her childhood, she resorted to marijuana and alcohol to numb the pain and take her away from it all.
This continued into her adulthood until her husband made her stop smoking. That only made her drink all the more though. She was a very high-functioning alcoholic at that time, performing as a housewife and hostess.
In 1999, Harriet finally decided to get sober. She had relapsed countless times in her 30 years of addiction and from this point on, never looked back. She fled to AA and dove deep into the fellowship there.
When she got sober, Harriet began to pour out her pain and other extreme feelings into writing. She wrote every day on countless topics, just writing out anything that she was feeling.
A big part of it was that writing helped her make things concrete. It helped her process what she is going through in a much more intentional way by forcing her to slow her brain down.
If you want to learn more about Harriet’s story and the losses she suffered, check out Episode 122: Miracles of Recovery with Harriet Hunter.