Reflecting on a break-up through writing has been shown to assist people in coming to terms with the process. Writing a narrative story of the relationship can help you better understand why the relationship didn’t work out, and assist you in communicating that understanding to yourself and to others.  It can also help you make better sense of what you want out of future relationships. The key to effective break-up journaling is for you to evaluate the breakup experience in the process of retelling it. It is important for you to include a complete narrative structure by including a beginning, middle and ending. This helps you to organize the events into a conceptually manageable format, and then you can more easily see the breakup as an outcome of identifiable causes.  Journaling while using this structure may help you to achieve a sense of closure and moving on with life, increase your feelings of control over your own recovery from the breakup, enable emotional coping, and thus improve your self-esteem once you are able to make sense of the events that occurred. Now that you know the reason behind keeping a journal, it is time to start the journal itself.  You can journal on the computer if you are more comfortable typing or you can journal by hand if you prefer to hand-write personal information. Lay out everything that happened in your relationship in the order in which they happened. Be sure that your narrative is coherent.  In order for you to understand why the relationship didn’t work out, your story must have clarity and make enough sense that it could be understood by someone else reading it (not that you’ll necessarily want to share the journal). Order the events of your narrative so that the causes and consequences are apparent. Provide specific examples that illustrate the motivations behind your breakup. This will help you develop an understanding of the relationship ending. Establish your key characters as they relate to the causes and consequences of events that occurred during your relationship.  Try to make sense of each character’s feelings and attitudes in relation to the events and attempt to draw meaning from each relationship event. In a different part of your journal, write down what you consider to be a perfect relationship.  Be specific and think about both what you want to put in to a relationship and what you’d like to get in return. Was your relationship that ended healthy and fulfilling? Did you have regular disagreements about major areas of your relationship? How would you want your future relationships to be different? How might you want them to be the same? Journaling about your breakup can help you achieve a sense of control over the relationship events. This may provide you with a more complete sense of your own understanding of the breakup, a sense of ownership, and help boost your self-esteem with those abilities.
استخدم التدوين لفهم علاقتك ونهايتها. قيِّم ذاتك أثناء تدوينك. ابدأ تدوينك. رتِّب أحداث علاقتك حسب الترتيب الزمني. حدد السبب والنتيجة. فكِّر في نفسك وفي شريكك كشخصيات في حكاية. حدد ما تريده من أي علاقة. قارن حكايتك عن انفصالك بما تريده من علاقاتك العاطفية المستقبلية. فكِّر في انفصالك.