Expose Your Inner Demons

You will hear a lot about how journaling can help you find clarity, learn more about 
yourself, and gain some perspective into your life.

This is all true, but there is something else it can do for you – help you to get rid of all 
that resistance you have been holding onto, the things you tell yourself to feel better 
temporarily, but really what you are doing is hiding all of your inner demons.

These demons aren’t necessarily bad, or as serious as they might seem. Sometimes, 
there are just certain aspects of your life or personality that are being held back by 
worries, fears, regrets, or other concerns. 

With journaling, you are going to learn a lot about yourself, your mind, and how you 
think and feel, to the point where you eventually are able to identify and overcome what 
has been holding you back for so long.

What You Will Learn in this Article

In the following pages, you are going to learn more about how journaling can help you 
understand more about yourself, gain clarity, and really embrace every part of you – not 
just the good. 

Are you having trouble understanding your own motivations?
Do you feel like your fears or anxiety keep you from succeeding?
Are you looking for another way to find joy and happiness?
You will get all of this and more just by writing in your journal every day.

Overcoming Resistance
The first part of journaling has to do with overcoming resistance. This is when you start 
by the simple act of writing in your journal every day, then through those fun little 
lightbulbs that go off, you learn a lot more about yourself.

Why is this important?
Because you aren’t just focusing on only the good or only the bad – but a wonderful 
combination of both. Journaling can help you figure out what is holding you back. And 
trust us, something is holding back most people in one way or another.

What do you mean by overcoming resistance?

Another common trait in many people is that they know what needs to be done to 
improve their life, whether personally or professionally, but they resist. The problem is 
that everyone resists for a different reason, so it is hard to get advice from others on 
exactly how to stop this bad habit.

What journaling does is provide you with more clarity, so that you can actually identify 
what those inner demons are, allowing you to overcome whatever is causing your 
resistance. 

Remember this can be any facet of your life, such as:

Asking for a promotion or moving up the ladder at work.
Changing career direction or starting a business.
Making adjustments to your personal life.
Finding what will truly bring you joy and contentment.

There are so many ways you can hold yourself back in life, including in relationships, as 
a parent or friend, personal life, home life, finances, and just about everything else you 
encounter on a daily basis.

Gaining More Clarity

You will hear this a lot when you begin reading about and learning about journaling. 
Clarity is so important to improve your life, but it is something that isn’t always easy to 
find.

People often get caught up in their day-to-day life activities, that they don’t take a step 
back, analyze their own mind and thoughts and feelings, and figure out where their 
motivations are coming from.

Do you want to understand yourself? Are you having trouble figuring out why you make 
certain decisions? Do you know that you hold yourself back, but no idea why?
This is the power of gaining clarity. You learn more about yourself in ways you never 
thought possible without seeing a mental health professional. You can actually look into 
your own thoughts and actions, and understand where you were coming from.

With a journal, you are writing down your thoughts and feelings regularly, and when you 
read it back, it often brings a lot of self-awareness. You begin seeing patterns in your 
behaviors, understand what causes your anxiety or depressive episodes, and have a 
better understanding at where your mind is at during different phases of your life.
Everyone can benefit from gaining more clarity through journaling.

Embrace the Good and Bad

Part of finding and exposing your inner demons in order to move forward with your life in 
a happy and productive way, you need to embrace both the good and the bad. This is 
true of everyone – you have strengths and weaknesses. Qualities that make you stand 
out, and qualities that might need some improving.

There is nothing wrong with things you might view as “faults”, however. There are some 
things that just make certain aspects of your life a little more challenging, maybe just a 
little different. Other “bad” things have more to do with your thought processes or 
feelings about situations, whether sparked by anxiety or regrets in the past that have 
you a little fearful for making the same mistakes in the future.

Working on Embracing Both

As you begin writing in your journal more often, you will gain that beautiful clarity, and 
start to see these patterns emerge. You learn in what ways you are making great strides 
to be a happier, more fulfilled person, but also some choices that you might keep 
making over and over again that are halting your progress.
Appreciate both!

Let the good enlighten you, and the bad challenge you. Become a better version of 
yourself. A happier person. 

Utilizing Your Journal Entries
Your journal is going to become your new best friend in so many ways. Before too long, 
it is no longer something you schedule in to your day or feel forced to do, but actually 
look forward to doing. This is partly habit, but mostly because of everything you gain.
Who knew just writing down your thoughts or your day on paper could make such a 
drastic difference in your life?!

The Next Steps
Once you have journaling down and you have started exploring who you are and what 
you want to do next, utilize your older journal entries. Don’t just write things down, put it 
away, and never look at it again. Use them!

You can keep looking back on older journal entries as often as you need to in order to 
understand where you were at a certain point in your life.
This comes up a lot more often than you might think.

Maybe you are struggling with something that happened about a year ago, and you 
want to see if you wrote anything about what you were going through.

Last week you might have ended up with severe panic attacks, and want to see if 
something triggered it.
Or maybe it is a little lighter than that, and you simply want to remember what your 
goals originally were, compared to what they are now. 
Save your journals and read through them often to refresh your mind.

