To mature women: Regardless of your age, size, shape, color, mental or physical health or political situation, the glorious free and visionary you is always alive within you.

A mature woman, decades after eating disorder recovery, may live a life fraught with relationship, career and self-esteem difficulties. You are no longer starving, binging or purging, but you still suffer from painful issues in your life, particularly self-doubt.

If you went through effective psychotherapy you found your way to ending your eating disorder behaviors. As a mature woman today, maybe you rarely think of those starving, binging, food-obsessed days and nights.

Yet underlying psychic structures of the eating disorder can still be present, ready to spring into action when you are threatened by more than you can bear or allow yourself to see or know.

                                                                                       Secret to success journal

What’s your journal for? Do you know the secret to making your journal a guide to success?

• You miss the value of using the secret to a success journal if your journal is just a dumping ground where you throw your thoughts, feelings, dreams, things you said or wish you had said, to-do lists, and ideas into a trash bin. You get only minimum value from this process.  It’s like the trash bin in your kitchen. You are not littering your home or the counters. You’ve stopped any smell from developing. You prevented any vermin from being attracted. You send the contents to a larger trash bin and then the city dump.
• A better way is to use your success journal as a clearing house. You review the contents regularly to ensure you haven’t lost anything valuable. Most of the contents may not be worth saving. But some of it reminds you of something you forgot. Some of it brings up feelings that surprise you. You may want to reconsider some of it.
• But the secret to a success journal is to make it a conversation. Creating an honest dialogue with it is the secret to getting total value from your journal. 

Ask questions about what your journal now contains after you’ve written something.

How does this relate to my life now?

• What value does this have for me?
• What purpose does this serve?
• Why does this keep coming up?
• Why do I keep tossing this away?
• Why do I feel optimistic, angry, melancholy, or anxious with this entry?
• Write your questions and responses in your journal. Keep going with the Q&A between yourself and your deeper self.
• Keeping up this dialogue is the secret to gaining the wisdom and power of your journal.

What follows are the basics for keeping a journal. It’s what most journal keepers do. To unleash the secret power of your journal, ask and answer your questions. Be brave. Be honest. See what happens.

Journal for Success, Resilience, and Renewed Purpose

• Enhancing Self-Awareness and Clarifying Goals: Journaling allows for the unfiltered expression of thoughts and emotions, helping you identify recurring themes and authentic goals that daily responsibilities and societal expectations might obscure.

• Identifying and Overcoming Mental Blocks: Journaling uncovers negative thought patterns and limiting beliefs that hinder personal growth. By recognizing and reframing these thoughts, you can develop a more resilient and positive mindset.

• Building Resilience and Facilitating Recovery: Journaling provides a reflective space to process difficult emotions, gain perspective on challenges, and create a roadmap for a fulfilling life. This practice enhances coping with adversity and supports personal and professional growth.

The secret to a success journal is overlooked in our fast-paced world, where we often find ourselves juggling numerous responsibilities and battling various stressors, it’s easy to lose sight of our true goals and desires. The sheer volume of tasks and expectations can overwhelm us, leading to burnout and disconnection from our inner selves.We may not take the time to ask ourselves important questions.

When you journal for success, you unleash a powerful solution to these challenges, providing a private and unfiltered space to explore your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The secret to making your journal a powerhouse for your growth is to honestly engage with what comes up, no matter how uncomfortable or disturbing. Your dialogue allows you to build resilience and discover a renewed sense of purpose.

Success and the Power of Pouring It All Out

After over 30 years of doing eating disorder recovery work with adults, I see examples of how the disorder developed as a way of coping with otherwise insurmountable emotional distress.

The cause may be a natural developmental weakness or a healthy developmental process that is thwarted by subtle or blatant trauma. Causes vary with the individual. Either way, recovery has to do with rebooting and nurturing the natural and healthy developmental process in the person.

It takes many steps and blunders before we reach the first step to deep healing and real recovery.

We can be in pain because we’ve lost a person or an object dear to us. We can be frightened or humiliated because our longed-for plans and expectations have crashed around us. We cry, blame others and blame ourselves. We rail at the injustice around us.

But mostly, we are bewildered and thrashing blindly. Hopefully, we are not reaching for food, drugs, alcohol, dangerous relationships, and risk-taking to escape our bewilderment.

Eventually, our bewilderment is so thorough that we feel forced to ask for help. Even then, we ask for help to get our world in order, to stop pain, and to regain or recreate what we have lost.