Therapeutic Journaling for Grief and Loss

In the first weeks after a death, write down memories before you write about feelings. Names, dates, one story a day, and nothing else. Feelings come later, in timed entries of 15 to 20 minutes, spaced out so that two heavy sessions never land on consecutive days. That order matters because the randomised trial that compared grief-writing instructions found that writing with a direction helped and undirected pouring-out did little, and because people usually make grief journaling worse by writing too much, too soon, about the hardest part.

This page gives you the three kinds of entry that trial used, a schedule for the first three weeks, the signals that mean stop for today, and the point at which a journal needs a person beside it.

Key Takeaways

• Cap every feelings entry at 20 minutes by a timer. The trial that showed an effect used 20-minute sessions, three in a week.
• For the first seven days write only memories: a name, a date, one story. No analysis.
• Never write two heavy entries on consecutive days. Put a memory entry or a blank day between them.
• Add a benefit-finding entry ("what has changed for the better") in week three at the earliest, and only one.
• Rereading the same entry more than twice in a sitting is the grief-specific stop signal. Close the book.
• Grief that still stops you functioning a year on meets the American Psychiatric Association's timeframe for prolonged grief disorder and needs a clinician.

What the grief-writing trial found

One trial has compared writing instructions in bereaved people directly. Wendy Lichtenthal and Dean Cruess, in the 2010 Death Studies paper, randomised 68 bereaved undergraduates (36 women, 32 men) to four writing conditions, each three sessions of 20 minutes within one week:

• Emotional disclosure: write your deepest thoughts and emotions about the loss.
• Sense-making: explore what caused the loss and how it fits into your life and your assumptions about how the world works.
• Benefit-finding: focus on any positive life changes that have come about as a result of the loss.
• Control: describe the room you are sitting in, with as little emotion as possible.

At the three-month follow-up the directed groups showed lower prolonged grief, depressive and post-traumatic stress symptoms, and the benefit-finding group "appeared particularly efficacious". Self-reported physical health improved in all the writing groups. The authors open by noting that earlier bereavement writing trials, which used only the deepest-feelings instruction, had generally found nothing. The instruction you give yourself before you start is what counts.

The sample was small and young, and the trial measured one week, so it says nothing about writing daily for months.

Three kinds of entry

The trial's conditions translate into three entry types. The time cap applies to all three.

The first three weeks

Week one: memories only. One entry a day, one story or one detail. Names, places, a phrase they used. No processing. If a feeling arrives while you write, let it, and stop when the story is told.

Week two: add one open entry. Pick a day with nothing to do afterwards. Set a timer for 15 minutes, write your deepest feelings about the loss, and stop when it rings. The next day is a memory entry or nothing. If the week goes well, a second open entry on another non-consecutive day.

Week three: add one benefit-finding entry. Once, in the week. "Since this happened, one thing that is different is ..." Some people find this too early. If the page stays blank, close it and try again the following week. The trial suggests this entry type carries the most weight, and it will keep.

The rule for a day you cannot write. Copy out one sentence the person used to say, date it, and close the book. That counts as the day's entry.

Stop signals

The mood journaling guide on this site lists three signals that mean stop and ground yourself. Grief adds a fourth.

• Your heart is racing. Put the pen down, stand up, and name five things you can see in the room. Leave the entry until tomorrow.
• You have gone numb. Stop. Numbness means the writing has gone past what you can hold. Switch tomorrow's entry to a memory.
• You feel flooded. Close the book mid-sentence. The unfinished thought can wait.
• You are rereading the same entry repeatedly. This is the grief-specific one. Rereading turns a record into a loop. Put the journal somewhere you have to walk to and leave it there until the next scheduled entry.

Two published grief journals

C. S. Lewis kept notebooks after his wife Joy Davidman died in 1960 and published them the next year, under a pseudonym, as A Grief Observed. The book is compiled from four notebooks and no more, arranged in four parts. It records the ordinary days without her and works through questions of faith. A grief journal with an end point is a tool.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking covers the year after her husband John Gregory Dunne died in December 2003. She writes with a reporter's detachment, replaying the same evening and noticing what shifts in each replay, and she catalogues her own magical thinking, such as being unable to give away his shoes because he would need them when he came back. Her method is the memory entry done with rigour: exact detail and no summary.

When this does not work

If journaling makes the day worse three times in a row, switch to memory entries only for a week and then reassess. Three consecutive bad days is a pattern; one is weather. If nothing comes when you sit down, copy one sentence the person used to say and stop. A blank page after ten minutes is information: the timing may be wrong, or the writing may have done what it can for now.

When to add professional support

A journal cannot assess you, and it cannot notice when you have stopped eating. The NHS guidance on grief and bereavement says to see a GP if you are struggling to cope, have had a low mood for more than two weeks, or find that the things you are trying yourself are not helping. The American Psychiatric Association defines prolonged grief disorder as intense grief that still interferes with daily life at least a year after the death in adults (six months in children and adolescents), with symptoms present nearly every day for the last month. If that description fits, the journal becomes a supplement to treatment.

Two signals from the writing itself: entries that have said the same thing for a month, and a growing dread of opening the book. Either is a reason to take the journal to a counsellor and read them a page.

Why Grief Journaling Matters

A death removes a person and, with them, the small things you knew and never wrote down. Memory entries in the first weeks catch those details while they are still sharp. Timed, directed feelings entries give the worst of it somewhere to go at 3am. The trial evidence is thin, but it points the same way as Lewis's notebooks and Didion's year: writing with a purpose and a limit helps, and writing without either can dig the hole deeper.

Related reading

• Thirty Healing Journal Prompts for Processing Trauma
• What Is Mood Journaling: A Complete Guide to Tracking Your Emotions
• Breaking Through Writer's Block in Therapeutic Journaling
• Therapeutic Journaling for Mental Health: What the Research Shows