Using journal prompts for relationships to think about people in our lives can bring a profound amount of clarity and understanding. It is important to recognize how our response to others can impact so many aspects of our life. In what follows, we’ll crack open some of the toughest interpersonal scenarios. Whether you are having a disagreement, facing a difficult decision, entering a new relationship, or letting go of one, you can learn how to bring benefit to your life through writing.
The Benefits of Letter Writing
Addressing a letter to someone sets the tone for your writing, even if you don’t mean to send it. Just remember to wait until your blood pressure is steady before you begin. When you are at rest, you can use the letter to express YOUR feelings, taking full ownership of your actions and reactions.
In your letter, you can ask the person what they are feeling and what their hopes and expectations are. You may think you know, but ask anyway, openly and without judgment. Finally, write about what you are and are not committed to in the relationship. If you’re writing to a boss, be clear and specific about how you want to receive assignments, critique, and assistance. Offer solutions to problems you are having, or ask for advice when you need it.
When we empathize with one another, and when we are open to discovering the root cause of our problems, then it is possible to remedy anything. At the very least, in your writing you can remedy your part in the story. You do not require the cooperation of the other person. In my experience, we don’t always receive the same openness we are willing to offer others.
If you cannot bring yourself to start a letter, sometimes it’s best to write in short form. You can make a list about all the things they’ve done for you, or all the ways they make you laugh, or all the things they’ve taught you.
Journal to Manage Disagreements
If it seems we are at polar ends with people, it’s important that we don’t hole up in our journal. That is, don’t use your writing for escapism, where you tell your true feelings to the page, but never to the other person. Instead, these journal prompts for relationships are an opportunity to brainstorm solutions, find the pros and cons of those solutions, and ultimately choosing the next step.
Solution-orientation is our means of neutralizing disagreements. Focus on what you can do and what you can be responsible for. Otherwise, there is always going to be the subtle blame game. Both parties in the argument want the other person to take ownership, or to make amends, or to “just see things my way”.
Like I mentioned: sometimes the other person is simply not able to compromise. That has nothing to do with you. You can only come to terms with things in your own experience, in your own time. Writing is your tool to do so because you can lay it all out. You can process how things got so bad, what your response was, and what the outcome was (or may be). Most importantly, you can see what you’re willing to learn from the situation.
Journal Prompts for Managing Disagreements:
1. What might influence the other person’s beliefs and how does that impact their behavior?
2. What challenges do you foresee for this relationship and what tools do you have to overcome them?
3. When we label a person as “bad”, how do we treat them? What effect does this have for them, for people like them, and for ourselves?
15 Journal Prompts to Enhance Your Relationships
- What are the most important qualities I look for in a friend/partner/family member?
- How can I communicate more effectively with the people in my life?
- What are some of the negative patterns in my relationships, and how can I work to break them?
- What are my biggest fears when it comes to relationships, and how can I work to overcome them?
- How have my past experiences with relationships shaped my current patterns and behaviors?
- What boundaries do I need to establish in my relationships to feel safe and respected?
- What are the things that bring me joy in my relationships, and how can I prioritize those things?
- How can I be a better listener and show more empathy to the people in my life?
- What are the things that make me feel vulnerable in my relationships, and how can I work to be more open and honest about them?
- What are some of the ways I can show appreciation for the people in my life?
- What are some of the common misunderstandings or miscommunications that happen in my relationships, and how can I work to prevent them?
- How can I be more patient and forgiving in my relationships?
- What are some of the ways I can support and encourage the people in my life?
- What are the things that trigger conflict or tension in my relationships, and how can I work to address them?
- How can I show more vulnerability and authenticity in my relationships?
Journaling to Make Decisions Involving Others
If you are a parent, an employer, a doctor, a politician etc., you are going to be responsible for the well-being of others. It can be stressful to be a leader. You want to know that your choice is the best one. You cannot always know this.
The first thing you want to consider when you sit down to your journal is: What is the person telling you? Have you asked them about their concerns? Have you adjusted your decision to account for the problems they foresee? Write about their wishes, their pursuits, their fears, and their hardships as best as you can. Ask them for their input. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know what the best option is. By using these journal prompts for relationships you can slow down the thought process and consider as many angles as possible.
Journal Prompts for Relationships Decision-Making:
1. What am I hearing from the people involved?
2. What do I believe will be beneficial and why?
3. What do I believe will be detrimental and why?
4. Who can I call on for advice in this situation and what are they telling me?
Journal When Entering New Relationships
The butterflies taking flight in your stomach are giving you all sorts of mixed messages. You might feel drunk on love, or you might just feel nauseated. Let your pen carry you on the inky milk of the muses. Write poems. Or, write about the beauty of an earthworm., about destiny, about ice cream or about the smell of autumn. Write to fill your sails and travel the open seas.
When you write this way, know this truth: love does not exist within another person. Love is not a feeling. Love is the electric pulse of the universe. It is available to you always. When you find new love, you automatically remember this truth. If that love should fade, you must return to those pages that you wrote, so you can remind yourself what love is truly made of.
Maybe you’ve been in a long-term relationship and the love feels stale. Imagine sitting in front of a campfire and watching how the new wood is burnt up and blackened so quickly. Yet, the vibrant embers beneath glow on, waiting for you to feed them again and again.
Journal Prompts to Keep Your Focus on Self-Love:
1. What is one activity that you always want to reserve for your alone time? Why does doing it alone make it so special to you?
2. What are three things about your personality that people are drawn to?
3. What ways do you support your community? (Recycling counts!)
Journal Prompts for Toxic Relationships
Abuse and neglect are unacceptable. We often justify staying with the abuser because of some happy memories, or we are afraid to leave, or we think we deserve the abuse.
It’s scary to leave. It’s scary to start a new life. The misery that surfaces in the wake of a toxic breakup is suffocating. In these extreme cases, please remember that nothing about you needs to change. You did nothing to deserve what happened to you and you owe nothing to the culprit.
If you suspect your relationship is tipping the Geiger counter, then use your journal to study it. Write pages and pages about your experience. If you want. write it like a story where the character is a different age and gender so that you’re not afraid it will be read by your abuser. Write like your life depends on it. When you are honest about your experience, then you have a greater chance of changing it because you can’t lie to yourself. It’s all there on the page.
The journal is our safest place to write about hurt and destruction. Instead of focusing your attention on the person who hurt you, remain steadfast on your own healing journey. Any forgiveness that you offer them is for you and you alone. When you forgive, you free up space in your heart for new love and new growth. Remember that you are so deserving of love and respect.
Journal Prompts to Move On From a Toxic Relationship:
1. Write about your daily interactions, good and bad, even just a few words or a shorthand code.
2. What do you think are the primary needs in a relationship?
3. What are some of the most harmful things people can do to their partners psychologically?
4. What message do you think your brain and your heart have been sending you over the weeks/months/or years and what message would you like to send your brain and your heart?
5. Who can help you take the steps to leave this relationship, who needs to be involved to keep you safe?
Journaling to Improve Your Relationship With Yourself
The most important relationship we ever establish is the one we have with ourselves. Take ownership of yourself, and use your journal as a tool for change. Take ownership of your emotions, your behavior, and your mistakes. Be kind to yourself and remember that you are still learning!
You can allow all those emotions that you feel to soak into the paper. Own your feelings and your experience, no matter how difficult. Too often relationships are shattered when no one is willing to hold up their end of the mirror.
Remind yourself daily about why you are beneficial. This is not a contrived practice of pumping ourselves up. No. Get real with what is innately good about you. Give yourself real compliments because they do matter. Where contrite positive affirmations feel limp and soggy, real compliments and true gratitude are like warm sunshine breaking through the clouds.
What to Avoid When Using Journal Prompts for Relationships
As I stated before, we should avoid blaming. We should also avoid hiding out in our journal, excessive negativity. or playing the victim in our writing.
Excessive negativity
Excessive negativity feels rich, like a creamy hot-fudge sundae. We feel fulfilled by churning our spoon in all the negative comments and assumptions. Think about someone you loathe and in your mind, just go over why they are such a horrible person. Feels nice, right? That’s why we do it. We get down on the “bad guys” because it makes us feel righteous.
They deserve everything bad that happens to them, right? Guess what. You have been under that kind of scrutiny, so has your mother, your grandmother, and every living being on the planet. No one has been spared the judgment of others. And it is precisely that delicious venom which makes excessive negativity so subversive in our relationships.
Next time you feel like being negative, ask yourself this: if you had to tattoo all the things you’ve written about others onto your skin, what would you change?
Playing the victim
Playing victim is possibly even more cathartic than excessive negativity. It feels so good to feel so bad about ourselves. To say, I am this way because they made me this way, it nicely sums up our decision not to change or grow from a situation. We no longer have to be responsible for our own lives moving forward.
It is okay to feel sad about something said or done to you. It is perfectly okay to feel angry, upset, fearful, uncertain, jealous, distraught, etc. These are all included within the normal range of human emotion. But as soon as you try to give up your ownership of those emotions, you give up your power to move through them.
If you want to play victim, it can be a cozy blanket to hide underneath. But you’ll find, as I’m sure you already have, this “cozy blanket” doubles as a straight-jacket. It keeps you strapped in and doesn’t allow you to stretch your wings. There is great freedom in owning up to the way we are. It allows us to be ourselves without having to ask for permission.
Can Journal Prompts for Relationships Help Me Harmonize My Connections?
By taking responsibility for our emotions, we can outgrow patterns of belief and behavior that not only cause ourselves harm, but damage our relationships forever. You are not a victim to other people, to your past, or to your own thoughts, emotions and sensations. Who you are does not change over time because you were always perfect and capable. Nothing about you can be lost or forgone, regardless of what you do or what you go through.
Live without fear of who you are and what you’ve experienced. We have to allow ourselves the space to grow. We are always learning and we are bound to make mistakes (or feel like we’ve made mistakes). If we want to become wise, we cannot keep beating ourselves up. We have to accept the lessons we’re bound to learn, and move on.
Use your journal to make peace with everything that is going on in your relationships and you will find a marvelous transformation in the way you respond to people and the way you receive the world.
