Jennifer Convissor: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient
An Interview With Heidi Sander
Journaling helps us to clarify our vision: It can be hard to know what we really want, because we get stuck in habitual ways of thinking, or living out others’ expectations for our lives. Also, what we want changes and evolves as we grow and develop, have new experiences and meet new people. Exploring our deepest, fondest, most honest desires in the safety of our journal allows us to play out different scenarios in a no-risk environment. As we explore and try on these different lives, we are walking through and seeing how they feel. Clarifying your vision in your journal is like trying on new shoes before you buy them.
Journaling is a powerful tool to gain clarity and insight especially during challenging times of loss and uncertainty. Writing can cultivate a deeper connection with yourself and provide an outlet for calm, resilience and mindfulness. When my mom passed on, I found writing to be cathartic. When I read through my journal years later, there were thoughts that I developed into poems, and others just provided a deeper insight into myself. In this series I’m speaking with other leaders who use journaling to become more mindful and resilient.
As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Jennifer Convissor, the author of “Journaling for Non-Journalers: Your expert guide to creating a journaling practice that works for you” and creator of The Transformative Journal school on Teachable.
Jennifer is a licensed clinical social worker, with psychotherapy practices in New York and Connecticut. She studied writing and psychology from Sarah Lawrence College and Fordham Graduate School of Social Service and currently specializes in teaching mental health providers how to incorporate journaling into their practices. She is also a Reiki master, “rabid crafter” and singer songwriter in her spare time. She lives with her family in Sleepy Hollow, NY (I recommend checking out her beautiful site www.liveworksolutions.com to learn more about her holistic approach to wellness).
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story of healing. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?
Sure! Thank you so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure connecting with you and contributing to Authority Magazine.
I’m the product of a long line of New Yorkers, all 4 of my grandparents were born in Brooklyn, but my family moved us to the suburbs. I moved out West as soon as I graduated high school and loved being part of the creative spirit of Portland, OR in the 90’s. I soon missed the frenetic hum of NY, but made sure to stow some of that Pacific NW spirit in my carry-ons.
I was always drawn to service. My mother had been a caseworker and inner city school teacher and raised me on Free to Be You & Me and the idea of social responsibility. After college, I was introduced to Reiki when a Buddhist friend introduced me to this ancient healing art, which instantaneously cured my chronic stress headaches.
In the early 2000’s, Reiki wasn’t as much on the pop culture radar as it is now (*laughs*) and though I was incorporating journal therapy into my sessions, I longed for a way to ground my energy healing and began my graduate studies in Social Work and Psychotherapy.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about journaling. Have you been writing in your journal for a long time or was there a challenging situation that prompted you to start journal writing? If you feel comfortable sharing the situation with us, it could help other readers.
I grew up in a small town outside of New York City and when my parents divorced in the early 80’s, I was one of two kids in my grade that didn’t have a that typical nuclear family that President Reagan waxed fondly about. Pre-internet, if you didn’t know anyone going through what you were going through in your immediate circle, you didn’t know anyone. As I mentioned, my mom was a teacher, she was also a writer and still has a penchant for school supplies. In 7th grade, my elementary school bubble burst and I was engulfed in “friend drama” and was really bursting with no one to turn to. I grabbed an empty spiral notebook from my mom’s office and the rest is history. That was 1987 and I’ve been journaling ever since.
How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?
This is such a big question for me. Journaling has helped define and refine my inner voice, the Self remains beyond all the selves constantly chattering on with their myriad perspectives. Over time, I began to notice something steady, someone consistent. Writing in my journal is my meditation and the true basis for any mindfulness I’ve cultivated along the way.
Even if I don’t write everyday, knowing my journal is always there helps me know that I have an outlet, when I’m ready to use it. When I finally get my concerns down on paper, I always feel better. I think when I’m not writing, there’s this belief that penning my fears will amplify them somehow, or make them “more real”. This is never the case. It’s always a relief to record the subconscious worry, as if part of the tension was due to the avoidance itself.
Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?
Yes! In terms of self-compassion, all the time. When I was a teenager, I would totally talk to my journal like it was a friend. I began every entry with “Dear Diary” and as I got into my 20’s, there was a real visceral understanding that this was like the public me confessing, addressing, processing with my higher self. My friend, Diary, listened to all with a quiet acceptance, in those blank pages, I found that nothing was out of bounds, nothing off-topic. My journal didn’t mind if I didn’t write for weeks and then came back and made it all about me (*laughs*). I projected unconditional love onto my journal and eventually it started feeling fraudulent to not embody that persona in my 3D life. I wanted to make my journal proud, or I guess live up to the example I set for myself.
As for gratitude, I feel such relief after writing, that I always want to write something like, “thank you for listening,” but instead always close the way I would in a letter to a dear friend, or family, because that’s what my journal has become. During the pandemic, I found a small decorative book I received as a gift and wrote “Gratitude Journal” on a label and stuck it on the front. It stays on my dining room table and during family dinners, I’ll often ask my family to reflect on three things that they were grateful for that day. It helps transform our meal from “now it’s time to tell Mom everything that annoyed me today”, into a space where we can share in each other’s good feelings and triumphs.
What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?
Over the years, I’ve kept every kind of journal. Here’s a sample list from the top of my head; travel journal with pictures and event tickets, etc; dating/relationship journal where I’d catalogue and process all the blind dates I was going on back in the day; dream journal, parent-child shared journal, long-distance friend journal; daily journal; morning pages; song-writing book…These days, my current journals are free writing about work and family; insights from the weekly Tarot reading I give myself; and bullet lists of what’s currently clogging my mind.
How did you gain a different perspective on life and your emotions while writing in your journal? Can you please share a story about what you mean?
I have been writing in my journal for most of my life. My emotional development is interconnected with journaling at this point. The fact that journaling provided an emotional outlet has always been crucial — like knowing the pressure valve is always within reach and I can reduce my stress in a proactive way at any time. Before journaling, I felt alone in my head, like there was a stilted one-sided conversation trying to push its way out, but finding the door. WIth journaling, that conversation flows out to the page and I “hear” the response. As I’m writing, another voice emerges. The psychological term for this is the observing ego. In spiritual circles, it’s referred to as the higher self. I’m not so concerned with the mechanics of what it is, or where it’s coming from, because I’m just so grateful for its perspective and guidance.
In my own journal writing, I ended up creating poems from some of the ideas and one of them won an award. Do you have plans with your journal content?
I actually finished the first draft of a journal based autobiography called 30 Novembers, where I feature one entry from November, over a 30 year span, inspired by Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes that documents the evolution of Charlie’s mental and emotional growth (& deterioration) via a series of journal entries. I thought maybe my own longitudinal study of my mind and spirit could best illuminate the debt I owe journaling.
Fantastic. Here is our main question. Can you please share with our readers “five ways that journaling can help you to be more calm, mindful and resilient”?
1. Develop a compassionate inner voice: People can be way harder on themselves than even people they’re not so fond of, let alone people that they love. Journaling can reveal the mean things we’re saying about ourselves in our head. Writing them down grants us opportunity to work on developing a compassionate inner voice. When you see yourself writing things like,“I’m a failure”, “I’m not good at anything,” you are bringing to light the unconscious soundtrack of your negative self-talk. Journaling allows us to examine that underground stream of self
maligning and clear the waters for greater self-compassion
2. Reduce anxiety by making amorphous thoughts concrete: When anxious, we tend to ruminate. Rumination is when thoughts circle around and around the mind, unable to land, or be completed. Journaling allows these amorphous thoughts to become concrete by plucking these unformed thoughts from the air and giving them voice, by writing them down. Once these thoughts are down on paper they can be examined. In this step, it’s really important to practice some self-compassion. See your words through the eyes of someone who loves you and soon, that person will be you. When you don’t record these thoughts, the cycle of anxiety continues. Anxiety is often our unformed thoughts, clamoring to be heard. We all seek to be heard and understood, at the very least by ourselves. Just the act of writing can immediately alleviate the intensity of the worry. Journaling imbues you with
the power to transform your perspective by the very act of bearing witness to it.
3. Vent and grow: When we’re mad, we tend to identify the locus, or origin of our anger, as that person, organization, or entity that made us angry. The truth is, no matter how powerful that source, it does not have the power to insert anger into you. Your anger came from you, generated in response to something that rubbed you the wrong way. This is what’s called a trigger. Your triggers are very important clues to what’s important to you, what makes you tick, and what ticks you off. But, how do you handle a hairpin trigger, without detonating a bomb? Venting in your journal guides you through the stages of human development, in the microcosm of the page. In explanation, in order to honor our feelings, we need to rant and rage like toddlers when we’re angry. It’s as important a stage, as being a child is to becoming a grown up. However, we’re not meant to stop there, just like you don’t see many 30 year old toddlers. Writing through our pain, we move through the stages of anger. Soon, the adolescent self comes online, allowing us to begin to question our beliefs and examine our responses. Finally, the adult self, with its higher reasoning emerges. This often comes with a physical release, like a sigh, or a release of tension in the hand, or shoulders. Embodying this level-headed self, we can examine our triggers and learn what they’re trying to tell us, about who we are and what we need.
4. Identify Patterns: When we document our experiences, we begin to identify patterns, which continue to present themselves, until they are mastered. These patterns may take the form of choices we make, or people who come into our lives. Seen from the surface, it’s unclear whether we create these patterns, perpetuate them by our habitual responses to them, or both. Recording them in our journal allows us to gather the clues, connect the dots and take control of our narrative. Some patterns may work for you and some may not. However, until we identify them, and determine what role we play in their existence, we remain in an unconscious loop of our own making.
5. Journaling helps us to clarify our vision: It can be hard to know what we really want, because we get stuck in habitual ways of thinking, or living out others’ expectations for our lives. Also, what we want changes and evolves as we grow and develop, have new experiences and meet new people. Exploring our deepest, fondest, most honest desires in the safety of our journal allows us to play out different scenarios in a no-risk environment. As we explore and try on these different lives, we are walking through and seeing how they feel. Clarifying your vision in your journal is like trying on new shoes before you buy them. How do you know if your dreams really fit if you don’t walk around in them for a while?
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?
Journaling for mental health! Journaling is inexpensive, portable and accessible to anyone who can write (or type, or dictate). Two great strides I can imagine would be journaling workshops offered through HR or employee assistance programs in companies and time made in schools to write about feelings and personal thoughts before a day of instruction.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)
There are so many! I’d like to start with Dr. Laurie Santos. I devour every episode of The Happiness Lab podcast and she’s met with so many of my heroes, like Adam Grant and Katy Milkman. I learn so much about the science of happiness and motivation from her and we’re both 80’s kids and I think we’d have a lot of fun chatting about work and how we find joy in our lives.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Yes! I regularly update my website www.liveworksolutions.com and post nearly daily on my instagram page @liveworkwellness.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfillment and success with your writing!
