About Liz Verna

Hi, I’m Liz Verna, MA, LCAT. I’m a licensed creative arts therapist and a writer, and I’m so passionate about both of those things that I smooshed them together into the work of harnessing the transformative power of journaling. Curious about how I got here?

I’ve been journaling in one way or another since I was old enough to write, at first in a little red diary full of lies because my primary concern was what other people would think about me and my third-grade musings. This made my writing guarded and censored, and that’s no fun, so I didn’t do it very often.

I wrote to my subconscious that I couldn’t write and so it believed me

In college, I wrote for the school paper and yet hesitated to call myself a writer. I didn’t feel that just my creative expression or my love of writing was enough, I needed a book or something tangible to prove I was a writer so that the world could decide who I was for me. This need for external validation kept me distracted and frustrated, and by my 20’s it spilled over into my journaling. Why couldn’t I write a novel or a screenplay or a haiku about chocolate pudding? Instead, my book was filled with pages of insults and derision about what I couldn’t do and wouldn’t accomplish. My deep subconscious read those pages and dutifully switched my esteem and confidence switches to the “off” position. My old high school acquaintance Depression linked arms with my inner critic and spun in circles, sucking my energy and whispering “See? You’re no good and there’s no point anyway” when I was too tired to write. Those two are jerks.

I thought I was lazy, but it was judgment blocking my writing

Eventually, I ran into therapy carrying the pieces of my sad self-image in various zip-lock baggies and it changed my life. Once I could quiet the negative voices in my head that were standing between me and my impulse to journal there was a shift. For the first time, I could journal just for the writing of it, without worrying why or what for. This opened my creative floodgates, and I began to fill books with my writing. Giving myself permission to write anything without judgment kicked off a chain reaction, suddenly I had permission to feel feelings I had long repressed in favor of being a people pleaser, I had permission to find out who I wanted to be, and do what I wanted to do.

Therapy didn’t help…

Still, my self-worth was low, and my bar for relationships was even lower. I considered other people's feelings more important than mine and unsurprisingly found myself in an emotionally abusive ice-cold marriage. There was a parade of therapists and marriage counselors who blamed my depression for every problem and watched my mental and physical health deteriorate with detached apathy. There are compassionate, brilliant clinicians out there, but after striking gold with my first therapist my luck ran out.

I plodded on, alone in the tundra as we adopted a baby boy, purchased a house, and watched cancer pull my father from my arms. My journaling was filled with tales of abandonment, passive-aggressive warfare, and devastating grief, and when we moved three weeks after I lost my dad I was empty, depleted of the energy it took to rationalize my partner’s behavior and my reasons for staying. Looking for answers, I began to go back to my books and read what I had written. This was another crucial shift.

Reading the story of my life gave me the answers I was looking for…

When I read my writing like a story it was not a great beach read. It told a pitiful tale of a girl falling apart, and although I had never journaled encouragingly for myself, I wanted to root for her. It felt weird to reassure and boost her up, yet the dark mumblings that I usually wrote felt heavy and unhelpful by contrast, and I could not carry heavy and unhelpful. I plotted for her and soothed her, and I started to feel that I could find a way out. If the girl in my writing was worth more than misery, wasn’t I? When I left I congratulated and celebrated her, and something like pride began to unfurl in my chest. She and I could do this together.

I wanted to connect back to my own feelings, free of the burden of pleasing or rationalizing or any of the other things keeping them elusive and hidden. I felt that the stakes were too high to risk another bad experience, so journaling became my therapy. I wrote to wonder why I was stuck in these terrible relationship patterns in the first place and got angry at my masochistic stupidity. What was the matter with me? But then I wrote past the anger, journaling about self-compassion and forgiveness, and shed the judgment that sucked my energy and kept me stuck in self-recrimination. I wrote love letters to myself in the pages ahead of my book I knew I would come upon when I needed to, I journaled about my plans and how to make them real, and used my writing to hold myself accountable at each step.

…and connected me to my true self beneath dysfunction and defense mechanisms

I began to feel light, aerodynamic, and content. CONTENT. The hippy cousin of happiness! The one I never met at family barbecues because I was always in the basement getting drunk with Rationalization and Worthlessness. My depression, something I believed to be the product of wonky brain chemistry, began to slide off me and crumple to the floor like a discarded overcoat. I started to feel things, and only then did I realize how numb I had been for so long. Maybe I had gone dead inside out of protection, or maybe I had lost touch with my own feelings because they were always under someone else’s. I wrote about it, enthralled to be waking up, and wrote to steep myself in gratitude for it. It turned out my depression had been self-imposed, a prison of beliefs that tricked me into thinking I could not have more and then buried me under defense mechanisms, hidden behind judgment. Until journaling set me free. And now I’m here. With you.

Why I do this work

Journaling, reading my writing, and learning from my words taught me that there is liberation in loss, opportunity in destruction, and empowerment in surviving fear, although the nervous breakdown part is optional. I feel that so many of us believe that there are things that are unchangeable, like unhappiness, poor relationships, or damaging decisions. There is a tendency to say “Whelp, that’s just the way I am” or “That’s just the way it is” and I am here to tell you that is not the case, and you don’t need a million dollars or a team of mental health professionals to fix it. You need a pen, a book, and a willingness to journal to speak with yourself. My program is built to be brief and finite, our work together will show you how to be your own guide, advocate, and motivator.