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The Journal is structured in sessions, each beginning with a prompt or question. You can work through these at your own pace, once a day, once a week, whatever works best for you.
We’ve programmed the app so that your responses will appear in a handwriting font – there are several for you to choose from. The idea is to make the process feel ‘hands-on’ and personal to you, like a diary.
As you begin to journal, remember to be compassionate towards yourself. Shadow Journalling will bring up difficult issues and may be painful. If you have a counsellor, do talk to them, or find support in other ways.
Your first exercise
So much of what hinders or hurts us in adult life has its roots in pain and trauma suffered in childhood. This exercise will help you identify emotional damage from your childhood that may still impact you today.
Fill in the blanks as quickly as possible, without dwelling on the questions too much. It’s important to get your spontaneous response.
What were you not allowed to do as a child?Anything that would show my mother up. Behaving in any way that would make ‘Them’ think less of her, whoever the fuck ‘They’ were. Being anything other than the cleverest in my class, because that would impress Them and reflect well on her.
What scared you the most as a child?The idea that my parents actually were my fucking parents. That they were anything to do with me at all.
When did you hate yourself most as a child?When I was mean to Leo. Though that didn’t stop me doing it. Pretty much all the fucking time.
What were you punished for as a child?See above under ‘Showing my mother up’. Also, being ‘nasty and spiteful’. And ‘not showing proper respect’.
What made you cry as a child?When I thought this was all there was. All there would ever be.
What’s the one thing you would change about your childhood?The decisions I made. How I ended up here. That I didn’t find a better way.
When do you most resemble yourself as a child now?When I’m a vicious selfish cow. You said be totally honest, right?
If adults looked at you when you were growing up what would they have seen?A little angel. Just shows how wrong you can be.
How are you feeling now? Do you have doubts or apprehensions about the Journalling process? That’s totally normal and to be expected – in fact it’s a good thing. But it would be useful to draw those doubts out and explore them, before you move to the next exercise. Write down how you’re feeling below.
How am I feeling? Well, I have serious doubts about how useful this shit is, for a start. I mean, ‘value your growth’, ‘embrace your dark side’, what sort of candy arse crap is that? But my therapist says I need to see beyond that – be honest about who I am and ‘own up’. By which she means owning my own shit. Not that she’d phrase it that way. She says no one else can see what I put on here so I can say anything I like, things I’ve never told anyone, not even her, and there’s no one here to judge. Ha fucking ha, if only she knew. But what the hell.
So. My name is Sabrina. Only it isn’t. It’s Daisy. Daisy Mason. Eight years ago, I went missing from my parents’ garden in Oxford and everyone thought I was dead. Nine months later my mother, Sharon, was tried and convicted of killing me. And the owning-my-own-shit part is that I made that happen. Not on my own, obvs, but it was down to me.
As for the no-one-here-to-judge part, I guess if someone actually did read this the first thing they’d say was ‘WTF – what eight-year-old does that?’ Because they don’t. Not 99.9% of them, anyway. However bad their lives, whatever they’re going through – abuse, poverty, general crap – they just don’t have the brains or the imagination to get away. OK, maybe that’s a bit unfair, but the point is,I did. I worked out how to do it, and then I made it happen.
My family might have looked OK on the surface, but trust me, no one had any idea what was going on underneath. Good-looking parents, successful business, happy kids. What’s not to envy? Well, my mother did. Envy, I mean. She spent her whole life thinking other people had it better than her. And a lot of them did, but if that’s how you want to live you’ll always find something to go green-eyed over. I remember the first time I heard that phrase – the ‘green-eyed monster’. It was in school, that last term. How Shakespeare had used it in a play hundreds of years ago and people were still saying it. How it proved the power there was in words. I didn’t really understand that at the time. But I knew about monsters. Oh yes, I knew about them.
Even as a kid, I could never work out why my parents bought that house. They were always saying it was down to the ‘catchment area’ (which, unlike most kids of eight, I did actually understand) but it didn’t matter how they tried to spin it, it was a pokey badly built house in a really expensive area. Everyone at school had more than we did – money, cars, holidays, second homes. All of it bigger, better, smarter, newer. Even if Sharon hadn’t had ‘NV’ issues before we moved in she’d have developed a shitload of them pretty damn quick simply by living there.There was even a little tiny part of me that felt sorry for her – that she was letting her whole life be dictated by what other people thought. What ‘They’ would say, how ‘They’ would judge her. If anyone needed a fucking MyShadowJournal app it was her.
Anyway, turns out there were things in her life that made her that way that I didn’t know about then and a lot of them weren’t her fault. But it still meant living with her was like camping out over an unexploded bomb. We were all hyper-vigilant. A word I lived but didn’t know. Barry, my ‘Baz the Builder’ father, well, he had endless excuses to get out of the house, all those work-sites he could pretend he had to go to and clients to see, but all me and Leo had were our own rooms. And sometimes not even that. It was bad for Leo, but tbh there was only so much pity and kindness available and I had to keep most of it for myself. Because it wasn’t just other people Sharon was envious of. She kept her real fury, herrealbitterness, for the one person on earth she resented more than anyone else.
Me.
I used to creep down from my room at night and sit on the stairs, listening. I worked out, instinctively, like kids do, that the more I knew about what was really going on in that house, the easier it would be on me. If there was something new she was obsessing about, or someone who’d said something to piss her off, if I knew about it, I’d know where the landmine was and could manoeuvre round. Or get someone else to tread on it first. But as time went on and I heard more and more, I realised how powerful information could be. Like that thing about words, only much much better, because this was real and specific anduseful. Stuff about my friends’ parents no one wouldhave said in front of us kids. Stuff about my own parents. About Leo and who he really was. About me. And sometimes that was good, and sometimes it was bad. Really bad. Because when I wasn’t there Sharon would say what she really meant.
No kid should have to hear things like that about themselves. Especially not at eight years old. You can’t block out memories like that. I heard her once, talking about the IVF they did to have me, and for a few glorious weeks I thought IVF was ‘ivy thief’ and I really was like a princess in a fairy tale and they’d stolen me as a baby and weren’t my parents at all and I was so damnrelieved. And yes OK, I was dumb to think that. But I waseight. And then that smartarse little toerag Jamie told me the truth, and I felt humiliated and wretched for a while, but then stronger. Because that was when I realised that if I was really going to escape, I couldn’t wait for a prince in shining armour.
I had to find my own rescuer.
I had to write my own story.
***
Adam Fawley
25 July 2024
12.10