What it means to work with yourself through writing

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Do you take the time to work with yourself?

Do you take enough time?

Well, I can be honest with you and say that I don’t. Few of us do. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the time. Or perhaps it’s because we don’t really know what it means to work with ourselves.

So that’s what I’m going to talk about here. And how writing can help us do it.

Let’s start with a keyword

If you take anything with you from this article, this should be it: Self-regulation is the keyword for working with ourselves. You can scribble that down right now.

I’ll wait.

But what does it mean? How does it relate to writing?

Let’s start with a quote that defines this strange concept:

Self-regulation refers to the capacity of a person to effectively pursue goals, to register feedback in that pursuit, and to adjust his or her behavior accordingly (Laura A. King, psychology professor)

This sounds pretty abstract. So let’s try to break things down a bit for us non-fluent in scientific speaking.

Self-regulation is controlling and adjusting our behavior and emotions to help us navigate through life and achieve stuff.

It involves realizing when to let your impulses rule and when to let them pass. It is pursuing something, registering the feedback from your surroundings, and making sure to adjust yourself accordingly.

Yeah. I pretty much just rephrased Laura King’s words above…

So let me give you an example instead. Let’s say your mom tells you that she doesn’t think your writing is that good. And it bums you out — a lot. So much that you find yourself ruminating about it for days, and it seriously affects your mood. It affects you to the degree that you are a bummer to be around for other people.

That sucks, right?

Self-regulation is exercising the degree of control you have over yourself.

So. In your pursuit of being a good writer, self-regulation would involve checking in on why you love writing, taking in the feedback from your mom, and deciding what to do next.

This could be dedicating more time to practice your writing or simply telling your mom that you disagree with her feedback. Or something completely different.

By doing something, you might also start feeling better.

And it works both ways: regulating how you feel also influences what you do.

But can you even regulate emotions?

Yes. The goal is to find a balance between suppressing your emotions and overreacting.

And this is where writing comes in.

Adjusting your emotions has three parts: attention, habituation, and cognitive restructuring. First, you pay attention to what’s going on. Then you explore it and get used to the feeling. And lastly, you try to understand the situation in a way that helps you move forward.

Let’s take your mom, critiquing your writing. You decide to make a healthy choice and write down what’s going on. You let your journal or Reflectly know that you are feeling sad, demotivated, and deflated because of the feedback. That’s paying attention.

As you are writing about this difficult feedback, you slowly get used to feeling those emotions. They’re still there, of course, but you’re no longer afraid or unaware of them. They are simply an experience. You accept that you are a person who has such feelings. That’s habituation.

You continue writing (perhaps over several days), and you slowly begin to understand what and why it happened.

Your mom probably meant well, but you are so passionate about writing; it’s like your heart is open, and any poke feels like it might kill you.

So feedback needs to come in a soft package, and your mom wasn’t aware of this. She thought she was helping, but she didn’t know how to actually help.

You realize that you need to make her aware of this. And you see that perhaps some of her feedback was actually relevant. That’s cognitive restructuring.

Through journaling, you have been able to self-regulate an emotionally difficult situation. You start feeling a bit better and dedicate more time to improving those aspects of your writing.

I hope I made it sort of clear how it works. But just in case, let me get a bit more specific.

How to work with and create yourself through writing

We now know that writing is a way to self-regulate. This regards your emotions as well as your behavior. Right. So how should you more specifically move on from here?

I think it is fair to create a 3-step process for self-regulatory writing. For the sake of simplicity:

1. Dive into your feelings. No matter how difficult or painful they are. Acknowledge them and acknowledge the fact that you are a person who feels them. Know that you can handle them.
2. Ask why you are feeling this way. The answer might simply be because you are human. There may not be a need for an in-depth analysis. But let yourself gain some understanding and acceptance.
3. Where do you want to go from here? Do you need to tell someone something? Perhaps you need to grow in certain areas, or simply put the whole situation to bed to move on. Reflecting on the future you want for yourself is also helpful in figuring out where to go next.

Before we part ways, I would like to leave you with one last note that I find especially exciting. Maybe it is something that you can find empowering if you do decide to sit down and write. But let me first give you the quote — which in large part speaks for itself:

From a self-regulatory perspective, writing is a process of self-exploration and understanding. From a narrative perspective, writing is also a process of self-construction. Writing about important life experiences means authoring the self (Laura A. King again — she’s great)

The purpose of the 3-step process is to help you self-regulate through exploring and understanding yourself. This is what we have covered in this article.

You know that.

But what Laura King also says in the quote is that writing is self-regulating, but not only that; writing is creating ourselves.

So when you sit down and write about the fact that you are hurt by your mom’s feedback and then decide to tell her, you are not just regulating your emotions.

You are constructing yourself.

You are creating a person who confronts difficult things, who dares speak their mind and knows why they do it. Who is honest. And who takes feedback seriously.

This person might not have come to be if you hadn’t decided to sit down and write. Then you might have just ignored your mom’s feedback and ended up bitter. Disappointed in yourself for being a coward, for lying to yourself, for feeling unresolved about something that so easily could be solved.

Of course, you can’t just write something and then it becomes real; writing “I’m a unicorn” does not turn you into one (although that would be awesome).

But what you can do is work on improving your character, bit by bit. And envision and create a version of yourself that continues becoming better — all through the words you put down.

I find that extremely exciting…