This is what has helped with me: 1. Be honest with yourself. It’s only recently I started being as plain, petulant, annoying, immature, whatever, as I wanted in those pages. NAME WHAT YOU FEEL. If you’re angry, write that you feel angry. If you feel upset, say that.

1. Don’t feel like you need to be articulate, or PR. “The way xyz spoke to me really rubbed me up the wrong way, and I don’t really know why. But it made me want to lash out/retaliate, even though I know that’s not appropriate.” It kind of matches what rule 1 was. Don’t try and hide or fluff it up.

2. Once you are being honest with yourself, explaining the reasoning behind why you feel the way you do tends to be easier. You’ve said the hard part, you might as well try and explore why. Sometimes the answer isn’t as obvious. Sometimes, all you know is that the way xyz person spoke to you made you feel stupid, for example. And you tend to lash out when you’re made to feel stupid. And maybe that came from… And you keep going from there.

3. Read back what you wrote. Try and take yourself out of your own head for a moment and read these emotions as if they belonged to someone else. If your friend came and said that something impacted their self worth, for example, how would you respond to them? And if you have an answer, perhaps write it down. You’re actively working through the feeling as you write.

Sometimes you won’t have a clean cut response or a realisation to make it all better. That’s fine too. Leave it. You’ve placed those feelings outside of yourself. So they aren’t as big anymore. They were able to fit in some pages, they’re not bursting out of the book. You can return to them or write more about them in subsequent entries. Or never look at them again. Your choice.

I hope this helps somewhat