Appropriate & Effective "Narrative Therapy" vs. Potentially Dangerous or Unproductive, Unguided Journaling

Suggestions and reports of experiences with journaling are a regular occurrence on Reddit's trauma recovery subs. And there's no question that appropriate journaling is very often one of a combination of effective paths to recovery from the Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that recycles Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity, ... Reactive Rage, ... Reciprocal Reactivity, and/or Repetition Compulsion (in not-moses's reply to the OP on that Reddit thread) so often leading to such as life-crushing depression, anxiety and dysfunctional IFSM "Protector" schemes like Compensatory Narcissism and The Dark Diagnosis.

BUT... without professional guidance -- or at least accurate instruction from research-grounded workbooks like those in the last section of A CPTSD Library -- journaling can lead to very unfortunate outcomes, including severe self-harm, hope-to-die substance abuse and other risky behaviors, and even suicide. 

(Alice Miller's The Body Never Lies recounts several stories of famous authors and poets who basically wrote themselves into such awful depression and anxiety that they sometimes took their own lives. They included such famous names as Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Kafka, Nietzsche, Joyce, Proust and Virginia Woolf.) 

That is because journaling without such preparation as "emotional grounding" (see these examples) can trigger sudden fits of depression, rage, anxiety and panic attacks.  

IME (which is plenty; see my post and reply history), a lot of -- though far from "all" -- survivors do benefit from Narrative Therapy under the weekly, bi-weekly or monthly guidance of licensed psychotherapists and clinical psychologists (NOT psychiatrists; psychiatrists are largely medication specialists nowadays). Some ask to read all material their patients / clients write; others do not, seeing that as rightfully private (as I do) and likely to be far more forthright -- especially in the early stages -- if patients know they do not need to reveal what they are still too frightened or ashamed or guilty to reveal.

Qualified, trauma-trained psychotherapists and CPs understand the five stages of therapeutic recovery and how to tell exactly where their pts are on that sliding scale at any given time. And that is crucial, because failure to understand that can lead to very unfortunate consequences and -- if repeated enough -- termination of therapy by a pt whose subconscious "not okay inner child" can see, hear, feel and sense that it is dealing with someone who cannot really see, hear, feel or sense them.

Appropriate journaling is a well-understood means of Memory Retrieval, "Resociation" & Reprocessing for Dissociated Memories when it is combined with mindfulness strategies like those discussed in Mindfulness + Narrative Therapy for Childhood Trauma based on Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing or the many other systems listed in sections 7b and 7c in this earlier post.

All of the resources and references standing back of what I wrote here can be seen in A CPTSD Library.