Try this quick writing exercise from Specialized Services for Youth

Many people find writing or journaling to be a valuable therapeutic tool. Writing can help you organize your thoughts, reflect on your experiences and come to terms with your emotions.

The best part about writing? Anyone can do it! If you’re not sure how to get started, try this quick exercise that Oakland Family Services’ Specialized Services for Youth (SSY) team recently did together. This exercise can be done alone, with a loved one or with children.

1. Start out with five words. Any five words will work — perhaps choose with words that are particularly meaningful to you or that describe emotions you are experiencing. When the SSY staff did this exercise, they started with the words hope, love, fear, strength and understand.

2. Write a poem, a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs that incorporates all five words.

Here are some examples that our SSY staff came up with:

I will always have hope, it is what sustains me. It gives me the strength to carry on and be free. Fear is what shuts me down. It is your love and understanding that has helped me to have grown.

Can only hope to understand
why we fear our own strength
why we fear what we should love
fear what we do not understand
And love that which depletes our strength

We do not understand ourselves
enough to understand
the rest.

The basis of hate is fear. Fear of the unknown, what we don't understand. We must seek to understand one another, embrace differences, recognize one another's strength, and love each other as they are. It is then we can have hope for a better, brighter future.

Fear places barriers on love that understanding has the strength to remove.

It takes strength to hope, to understand how to love without fear.

Understand when fear appears, strength and love is near. Know that it works, and that it's already done.

How do you understand the world around you, my dear child? Does fear ever get in the way of your ability to truly live in the moment? It is my greatest hope for you that you will learn again to be brave and feel comfortable showing your strength one day.  Although it may not be tomorrow, this day will come soon, for this I can promise you, my love.

Hope, love and understand — Fear and strength may wane
Hope, love and understand — That you'll once again be sane

If fear tries to overtake me, could I let it win? I hope to use the love inside me to fight away the sin. My fear does not define me, understand that my strength is here to win. My strength is where I find my comfort and find my peace within.

Fear flows in the streams of souls
stuck
in a place of
pain that grows
without the light of love.

When love is a way of being
seen and seeing
hope overcomes,
strength empowers,
and understanding cleanses the soul.