Brilliant post, Phoenix - well written and thought out.
I agree that journaling is an immense tool.
My own experience...
I always wrote and kept loose journals, but at sixteen a shrink told me to keep a two week journal every day and take it to her. I never went back to her. I had that one session, started writing and my journal ended up lasting five years and documenting my entire heroin addiction from the first time to the last. My journal became my only stability, my only real outlet, the only pursuit I didn't give up for gear in the end. It saved me writing it and it has saved me since re-reading it.
I often find writing it painful, difficult, confusing, tiresome etc, but having written, having got it all out, purged myself and then having it to look back on has been invaluable to me.
On top of that, though I wrote entirely for myself, I have since become involved in a charity which hosts open mic events to raise funds to helps addicts and have read entries on stage / published parts of my journals etc and the feedback and people I’ve met, heard and engaged with through and because of that has been detrimental to my own and sometimes their ‘recovery’ and wellbeing.
Poem I figure might be use to some here, on this subject, and which reflects my own feelings / thoughts and why and how writing has helped me is this one...
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.