Hey guys, I just wanted to share this about finding my brother’s journals yesterday while I was moving house. So, my brother died 10 years ago. He was an alcoholic but also a loving, funny, sensitive, creative man. He was my closest brother, I spent all of my childhood with him. I loved him more than anything and I tried to help him be free from his addictions, for years and years. I learnt that you can’t help anyone from these things they have to want it themselves. You can’t help people to save themselves, they need a higher power and their own will.
But yesterday, I found these journals and I read these painful, painful writings he had done over the years. It was very difficult to read them as they expressed his deepest thoughts. I stopped reading them after a bit as it seemed wrong.
But I realised that my brother had discovered writing therapy and I am so grateful that he had that, that he could express his inner most thoughts and feelings and he didn’t hold back.
So many men need to do this. It is completely safe and it can help men to get rid of negative emotions.
I am so sick of people saying men are not emotional or as prone to feeling things like women. It is simply not true. This is possibly why men die by suicide three times more than women, they are told that men keep their emotion in and men don’t feel things. That is crap. So, the men (which is all men) who have normal emotions and feelings of isolation, loneliness, or depression they think they are not normal. They are.
One of my students, Josh Bontje died by suicide some years back. He was such a lovely person, and I could tell kind and sensitive. This has to stop. We have to encourage men and boys and teenager boys to open up and also I am hear to say, guys use writing therapy as well! My brother did and it got him through many years of feeling quite desperate. He could have chosen a better path but that is his story, and his life separate to this, but please, please, please use writing therapy, write down your deepest feelings, and what is happening. You can get rid of it. But if you write it down we know that it will be released from your unconscious.
I am sending a lot of love out to the young and older men who suffer from depression and anxiety, my brother did. And you know what, not even having a chronic condition but just the normal feelings of sadness and worry as well. My brother did not always express his feelings, sometimes he did with me but not all the time. I know he did with other people sometimes as well. But he used writing therapy and it is a wonderful, free tool you can use to be free from negative emotions whatever they are. š
My book Freedom Writing talks about this, so if you are interested it is available on amazon and many other outlets.
But have a look on here as well, I have information about writing therapy.
Go well, stay well and remember we all have feelings and there’s nothing wrong with emotion! Kind regards, Suz
Suzanne Strong 