It’s 9pm; the drive is an hour and half. I'm heading home from one of my gyms. Driving has always allowed me to think, and reflect.

On my drive, I got to thinking, I’m 24 years old, making $250k/year as a gym owner. I grew from 1 to 5 locations in 3 years, why do I not feel good enough? Why is it that what I have accomplished is not enough?

I told myself that when I make a certain amount of money, I would feel happy. That threshold kept going up yet happiness was nowhere in sight.

It was not just my professional life, my personal life was a mess as well. I kept jumping from one toxic relationship to another. Trying to fix people and help them out, which later I realized was because (1) I have always been a caretaker, and (2) I thrive in chaos & turmoil and when there is none I find it or create it.

On top of that I had no sense of emotional regulation, reacting to everything around me and letting my emotions run the show. To say I was in a dark place emotionally was an understatement.

This state was not new to me, I had been in this place before, 4 years ago. Where the internal pressure and noise was so much that I used adrenaline as an escape. Which caused me to flip a car off the side of the canyon.

Want to know the scariest part? Part of me secretly wished I had not lived after that. This time I had no adrenaline escape. This time I had to face all the angst that was inside of me, no escaping this time.

I had 2 choices at this point:

1. I could face what was going on internally head on & control it

2. Let it control me and let me spiral down into a dark abyss

By some miracle I chose the first option, how I don’t know to be honest, could be from blind luck. I found a therapist and started doing weekly sessions.

I had never been to a therapist before. I had never opened up to anyone. Not even myself. Talk Therapy uncovered the deep dark thoughts, limiting beliefs, and epigenetic scars that existed.

The first step in this journey for me was awareness, you can only solve a problem when you’re aware it exists. Traditional therapy (talk therapy) helped me become aware but didn’t give me practical tools to resolve or heal from the internal turmoil I was feeling.

I learned things like “sitting with your emotions” or dealing with certain memories, but not a tactical way to deal with what was going on in my head on a daily basis.

Fast forward to a year later, March 2020, pandemic hit. Forced to shut my gyms down and transition online, this transition made me lose a big part of my identity.

My self worth was tied into the gyms, and not knowing what was next I was lost. I didn’t have the business or work dragging me along life. I had space to be alone with my thoughts, my insecurities, and take a very deep look at myself. I made a commitment to myself, I can’t keep running from myself. I started this journey by going to therapy. I had to continue this journey on my own.

If I didn’t I could see the trajectory of my life:

Being stressed & unhappy. Not able to have meaningful relationships. Living a miserable life and dying a miserable death.

That is not the outcome I wanted for my life, one of my great fears is looking back at my life when I’m 90 years old and having zero regrets for the things I did not try to do in my lifetime.

This started the era of developing the skill of happiness. I believe happiness is a skill anyone can learn, just like riding a bike, selling, or making money are all skills we can all learn with enough reps. I knew how to make money, I knew how to be healthy, happiness & inner peace was the one area left.

Now the tough part is, working on yourself is a massive project, that’s working on 25 years of sh*t you have to go through. But I am a big believer in Niyyah, which is the Arabic word meaning purpose or intention. I truly believe that when you set the right intention, and you take massive action, then things fall into place.

That’s the caveat: take massive action. I did not know where to start, but I had the full intention of improving.

This started my journey down the path of Self Therapy, where I did the work on my own to heal the stories, patterns, and understand myself truly so I could have a happier existence.

Through self therapy I learned how to regulate my emotions, become more mindful, and learn to love who I was & who I was becoming.

That is exactly what I want to talk to you about today:

1. What is Self Therapy

2. Importance of Self Therapy

2. Writing As a Tool for Self Therapy

3. How to Use Writing For Self Therapy

What Is Self Therapy

For the longest time I thought I was a genius because when I started documenting my process of self therapy for my family & friends, I called it self therapy not knowing that, Self Therapy already exists. It’s just not very common.

Self Therapy is the practice where an individual addresses and manages their own psychological & emotional challenges without the help of a therapist.

This is where people can use various tools and techniques to understand & work though the internal state and their mental health by themselves. The aim with Self Therapy is to establish self awareness, so you can be in control of your emotional and mental state.

I discovered this while I was going through Carl Jung’s Individuation Process. The Individuation Process is a path to optimal personal development for an individual. The Individuation Process has 4 steps, which we will go deep on in another article.

Importance Of Self Therapy

From my experience I have found that Self Therapy has 3 benefits:

1. Mastering the Survivor Self

2. Seeking Your Truth

3. Develop a Lifelong Skill

1. Mastering The Survivor Self

This is a complex subject to try to illuminate, but borrowing from different academic disciplines will help me explain the benefit of Self Therapy better. Our brains are 300,000 years old, and the programming is very old and outdated.

The basic fundamental programming of our brain is for survival. Until recently, resources were scarce on Earth, and all species on Earth were fighting for survival. This suggests that our natural instincts are simply to aid us in our survival so we may pass our genes to the next generation.

From a philosophical perspective, this survival or primal instinct is ingrained into us. According to Imam Al-Ghazali, who was a theologian and philosopher, coined this primal instinct as the Lower Self. The Lower Self is driven by basic desires such as hunger, sexual drive, anger, lust, greed. On the other hand there is the Higher Self which is the rational more spiritual self.

From a biological view, there are specific parts of the brain that correspond with the Higher & Lower Self, which are the Prefrontal Cortex & the Limbic System.

The Prefrontal Cortex is the part of the brain that is associated with higher cognitive thinking capacity, philosophically this is the Higher Self or our rational side. We use our Prefrontal Cortex for decision making, problem solving, complex thinking, & impulse control. It’s highly involved in our ability to judge, self-regulate, and make conscious decisions.

The Limbic System is the part of the brain that is associated with emotional responses & memory, philosophically this is the Lower Self or our emotional side. We use the Limbic System to process emotions, respond to fear, deal with pleasure, make memories, and drive basic human survival functions.

Things bring me back to a very crucial point, our fundamental programming of our brain does not serve us during this age and time. Personally I have coined my own term for the Lower Self which is the “Survivor Self”, which has evolved to help us survive not to think & be strategic. Many of us use the limbic system to live our lives by emotionally reactivating and reliving using the memories and prior experiences from the past because that is what the brain has been programmed to do. It’s easier to succumb to our primal programming because being conscious & rational takes up a lot of energy, and part of survival is energy conservation.

When we lack the tools & skills to use our Prefrontal Cortex or Higher Self, we navigate the world by reacting emotionally out of survival. And we all know reacting emotionally has its consequences.Or we’ll use past experiences from memory, which leads us to repeat patterns over and over again.

By living a life that is reactionary or reliant on memory, we will ruin new experiences because we’re living through biases and assumptions of the past. From my personal experience this happens in relationships all the time, this is where we will bring past assumptions into the new relationships. That is why I have a rule to never bring any past experiences or assumptions into new relationships.

Only way to break this cycle is by becoming conscious & deliberate with our thoughts and actions. We do that by relying on the Higher Self or the Prefrontal Cortex. Living a reactive life has consequences, and it’s not because we do it on purpose but rather we are slaves to our programming.

That is why Self Therapy’s greatest benefit is helping us rise above our primal instinct of just survival. It helped us when we were hunters and gatherers but now we live in an age of abundance where there is plenty of food, water, & shelter. Since our basic human needs are met, now more than ever we’ll be required to utilize our rational brain to live a conscious and deliberate life.

2. Seek Your Truth

All of us have had an internal state that has been fostered for years. This includes our thoughts, emotions, and the stories we tell ourselves.

For some it is conscious and deliberate where they have control over it. For the majority it is unconscious, where it has been fostered by others or the environment around them. I believe seeking the truth allows us to learn more about who we are, and our true desires. It allows us to be free of the thoughts, emotions, and stories that do not serve us. It allows us to get to the core of who we are. This goes back to creating awareness which is the first step in making a change. When you are able to be aware and understand who you are, all of you, the good, bad, and ugly, your understanding allows you to open the doors to improve, heal, & become the best version of yourself.

Seeking your truth is about becoming whole, there are parts of us that we have hidden, maybe out of embarrassment, maybe because that part of you was shunned or mocked. This process should allow you to take pride in who you are, and where you’re going.

“When we embrace our strong emotions, we’ll be able to see the root of these mental formations. We’ll know where the suffering has come from.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

Another part of seeking your truth is taking ownership of you, mentally, physically, spiritually.

It’s actually one of the most liberating and empowering things ever, because it’s hard to really look at yourself and say I am the problem. That takes a lot of guts to do. When you do that you’re admitting to your inadequacies, your vulnerabilities, and areas you have to improve. It forces your ego to take a back seat.

When you seek your truth, there is nowhere to hide from yourself, no one is coming to save you from you. When you take full ownership, then there is no one else to blame. This forces you to start working on everything you’ve been hiding from.

3.Establish a Lifelong Skill

As much as I would like to admit how awesome it would be if we were static beings.

Where once we faced all of our truths, there is nothing left. But my friends, life is not that way. Like I said earlier, there is years and years of stuff that makes up you. And sometimes things will rear its ugly head when you least expect it.

Taking ownership is dealing with things as they come up. That is why Self Therapy is a lifelong skill, the work never ends. By doing the work and not letting things get shoved under the rug, you get better at dealing with things as they come up.

You are the one constant project that you will always be working on till you die.

Is Self Therapy Better Than Talk Therapy?

I think each one has its importance, for me I would not have been able to start my self therapy journey if it wasn’t for talk therapy because that brought the pressing things I needed to work on to the surface. Self Therapy is a great alternative I think for those who are like me and want to have practical tools to manage their mental and emotional health.

The difference with Self Therapy from Talk Therapy is that you’re the guide on your self discovery journey vs when you work with a therapist you’ve got a tour guiding you along the way.

For me, I am the best guide that I will have because I understand myself better than anyone else and especially if you are someone who is a seeker of truth. You will be able to look at yourself from an unbiased perspective and hold yourself under a microscope with the same scrutiny as you would anyone else.

It does not matter how you start, it only matters that you start.

Pick either talk or self therapy and get to work.

Writing As A Tool for Self Therapy

When it comes to self therapy there are multiple tools that are out there.

The single tool in my opinion that is the most effective is writing. Some will argue that meditation is a better tool, my argument is that if done right writing can be a form of mediation. Meditation’s role is to help allow our focus to be in the present not in the past nor the future, so you can be more mindful. There is no better form of mindfulness practice than writing. [1]

Writing allows you to watch yourself as an observer, looking from the outside in.

It forces you to slow everything down around you, your emotions, your thoughts, your physiology.

At times when I have journaling I can feel the energy in my brain switch over to my prefrontal cortex because the act of writing is a conscious dexterous act.

From personal experience, I have found when you’re in the thick of something emotionally sometimes meditating becomes hard to do.

My thinking has led me to believe that emotions are as complex as if you’re doing differentials in calculus, you can't do them in your head.

When you try to process things in your head, it’s like a web you’re in the middle of, it’s hard to find your way out. It’s hard to work through sh*t when you’re in the middle of it.

By writing it out you’re able to see the problem in front of you switch allows you to see all of the moving parts. When you see all the moving parts that are causing you to feel a certain way, then you can deconstruct it one by one, & get to the root.

Lastly for me a lot of my emotions come from my inner child, which is the metaphorical representation of the part of a person’s psyche that still holds feelings, thoughts, and memories from their childhood. Writing allows me to speak with my inner child, as if I am having a dialogue with my inner child as the older wiser friend.

Writing I believe is the fundamental building block tool for self healing and self development.

“Not Good At Writing” Or “I’ve Never Been Good At Journaling”

No matter what it is there are folks who have an excuse for everything:

“I’m not good at English, I failed English class, I cannot write”

Or

“I tried journaling and I’m just not good at it”

To those I will say this, I don’t know how to fly a space shuttle, but give me a couple years and some practice I am pretty sure I can do it. All limitations we have, are in our minds. If a monkey can learn to write, I am pretty sure you can write as your self therapy practice, especially one you realize there are no rules.

How To Use Writing for Self Therapy:

My attempt in this is and always will be to give people practical tools to improve their health, wealth, and happiness.

When someone has ever recommended writing to me, they’ve just said to go out & do it. Unfortunately there are steps that people forget to mention that I think hold a lot of people back, that I wish to clarify.

Here are the 4 Step System on How to Use Writing for Self Therapy:

#1. Pick Your Modality

The emphasis here is to pick YOUR modality of choice. This can be a physical notebook, this can be the notes app on your phone, this can be crayons & a back of a brochure, it does not matter.

Pick a modality that you can access easily and on the go, you never know when you will need it. I have had to regulate my emotions at restaurants, at work, in the airplane.

My go to is just my phone, I use an app called TickTick, I have a list on there & my phone has a widget for it I can access easily. Before that I used to use Telegram and just have a chat with myself.

The right modality will allow you to utilize it more often, so pick the right one for you.

#2 Make It A Daily Practice

You can’t expect to go to the gym, workout once and expect results. This works the same way.

Best time to write is when you’re dealing with emotional distress, or when you choose to entertain a fleeting thought that you need to process through.

I made it a conscious habit when I was feeling any type of emotions that caused me distress, my immediate reaction was to start writing.

There will be times where you just can’t, that is alright give yourself some grace, the goal is not to be perfect the goal is effort.

#3. Aim to Understand

Folks that talk about journaling will use it to try to “fix” what they are feeling or what they are going through.

Personally I like to help people reframe that. Our goal is to understand just as an observer would, understand what you’re feeling, and why you’re feeling this way.

In my experience by understanding the emotion you’re able to be more in control and recognize its pattern to change them over time. Understanding brings clarity, which allows you to have multiple approaches if one does not work.

#4. There Are No Rules

I have seen this time and time again in the self development community where they give people their “perfect journaling formula”.

It's a bunch of BS.

There is no such thing, everyone’s brain works differently and different questions or prompts work for different people.

My goal has been to just ask myself questions, maybe this has to do with my career in sales where I am asking people questions to get to the bottom of their true desires.

For example, I’ll ask myself:

1. Who am I?

2. Where am I?

3. What am I doing?

4. What do I feel right now?

The first 3 questions get me to get grounded and present, the 4th question takes me for an adventure of self discovery.

If I can describe it any other way it’d be like this: the entire process is more about self discovery then it is about doing it right.

You will find the answers through the actions you take.

TL;DR:

For the majority of my life, my internal state has been one of emotional distress.

After almost dying in a car crash, wishing I never live. Struggling with inner peace, and subjecting myself to toxic relationships, I decided I needed to deal with it.

I started working with a therapist, which helped me create a lot of awareness but didn’t give me practical tools to resolve or heal. I believe happiness is a skill anyone can learn, just like riding a bike, selling, or making money are all skills we can all learn with enough reps.

This started my journey down the path of Self Therapy, where I did the work on my own to heal the stories, patterns, and understand myself truly so I could have a happier existence.

Through self therapy I learned how to regulate my emotions, become more mindful, & learn to love who I was and who I was becoming.

What is Self Therapy?

Self Therapy is the practice where an individual addresses and manages their own psychological & emotional challenges without the help of a therapist.

3 Benefits of Self Therapy:

1. Mastering the Survivor Self

2. Seeking Your Truth

3. Develop a Lifelong Skill

Writing as a Tool for Self Therapy

There are tons of tools for self therapy, the most effective is writing. Writing allows you to watch yourself as an observer, looking from the outside in. Writing allows you to see the whole problem rather than parts of it. It’s hard to work through sh*t when you’re in the middle of it.

How To Use Writing for Self Therapy:

#1. Pick Your Modality

#2 Make It A Daily Practice

#3. Aim to Understand

#4. There Are No Rules

Action Time:

I think about this statement a lot:

“If it was easy everyone would be doing it.”

This process will require you to peel back layers and work through stuff that you never knew existed or have been pushing away for years. By taking full ownership you’re committing yourself to doing the work, no longer how long it takes because it will be a lifelong journey.

The best time to start self therapy was yesterday, the second best time is now.

Don’t wait for the perfect moment, or after the holidays, or for the perfect journal…just start. Through the actions you will find the answers.

Good luck my friends.

I hope this process serves you as it has served me, and if it were not for self therapy I would not be the man I am today.

I hope you found this article valuable, if you did feel free to share it someone else using this link: https://mohammedmalik.com/newsletters/b/atgonselftherapy

Till next time,

[1] The reason why I keep referring to it as writing not journaling is because I believe that the word journaling has been muddied by the self help community as this fluffy thing. That is why I prefer personally to refer to it as writing because journaling implies you need a physical journal, when writing is more tactile and practical in nature.